River lunch run

Before giving my annual guest lecture on green political theory for the graduate students, I was able to squeeze in a lunch run along the River Ume with Elin. With only four days left until Indonesia, I am having a bout of “resfeber” and, as always, a run helps to clear my mind.

In the morning, I was working on my new article project about climate change and the future of high-trust societies. My friend Leigh Phillips once came up with the term “collapse-porn addicts” to describe the obsessive fascination that degrowthers and others have with the end of liberalism. Instead of focusing on strengthening our collective institutions and restoring elite engagement in public life, their main message has been one of populist confrontation and deep distrust in our ability to find shared solutions. As such, I am thinking that “social trust” may be one of more promising avenues for articulating an optimistic alternative, a future in which we do not all become localists or preppers, but instead work to ensure that the open society doesn’t fail in the first place.