Steam

Meeting the boys at the railway station yesterday, we first had pizza at Vapiano before taking the ferry across the harbour to Eriksberg. With not one but two historic steamboats passing by, the smell of coal in the sunshine played a funny trick on my mind, transporting me to China, Ehrenfeld, and London all at once.

Luckily, we came ashore right next to the hotel where I would be staying for the night, and it felt good to spend some time together after so long apart. Fortunately, in just a couple of weeks, I will be back to being a “quantity dad”, as Måns Zelmerlöw dismissively called it, with the boys staying with me for most of the remainder of the autumn semester.

Waking up early to temperatures around freezing, I ran along the quays of Eriksberg in the dark this morning, with frost covering all the bridges, before picking up William’s friend Philip for the opening round of this year’s chess Allsvenskan. Playing White, William defeated a chess veteran born in 1951 after a little more than two hours of intense play. To celebrate, William and I headed down to Dawaat on the waterfront before taking the ferry across the harbour once more.

Now, aboard the train to Halmstad, I have an incredibly busy week of packing, marking and a TRAINS conference ahead of me before flying down to Dubrovnik with William on Saturday morning.

Night train 91

Ending the conference in high spirits at Pipes of Scotland, I left Umeå on the night train shortly after 9 p.m., settling in for the 725-kilometre journey south to Stockholm. As a night train aficionado, I find that there is something about travelling this way that goes beyond mere transportation. Being lulled to sleep by the train’s movement as we head out across the Ume River delta somehow connects so many years and places.

Then, nine hours later, I wake up in Stockholm, a city that even my newfound friend Mac, who has lived here his whole life, admits he sometimes finds overwhelming. Still, it keeps growing on me with every visit. Today, though, there will only be time for a short coffee before I take the train to Gothenburg and the kids.

Postericide

Over lunch, the conversation turned to the end of humanity as Catriona McKinnon presented her forthcoming book with MIT Press, introducing the concept of postericide and arguing that deliberately causing human extinction should be recognized as a new international crime.

As with many in the field, McKinnon seems fixated on “fossil capital” without recognizing the globally shared benefits of fossil fuels, from plastics to the natural gas used to produce the synthetic fertilizers that help feed billions of people. More importantly, however, she seems to miss the bigger picture of technological evolution. To return to one of my favourite examples, climate ethicists might condemn a nineteenth-century steam locomotive without recognizing that today's electric trains are themselves downstream of the same technological lineage. The problem is that we cannot know where technological evolution will take us, making precaution a deeply problematic guiding principle. After all, there is no safe baseline to which we can simply retreat. We cannot know what dangers technological development may unleash, but neither can we know what possibilities for human flourishing, or even survival, might be lost by holding it back. In a world of so many unmet needs, I would rather embrace a proactionary principle through which we democratically pursue the futures we want, recognizing that every technology comes with its downsides and that we must choose among different bundles of risks and benefits in ways that expand our capacity to collective shape the future.

As for the legal framing, I find it just as socially destructive as the use of climate attribution science to pursue litigation over losses of wealth and infrastructure that might never have existed without fossil-fuelled economic development in the first place. Rather than turning climate change into an endless source of legal conflict, it seems far more fruitful to accelerate technological innovation until fossil fuels become not only environmentally undesirable but economically obsolete.

And finally, if we are to play McKinnon's game of pointing fingers at ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, or Mohammed bin Salman, I would argue that Greenpeace deserves an equal share of scrutiny. After decades of spreading unscientific anti-nuclear propaganda, surely the organization must also bear some responsibility for delaying the transition away from fossil fuels. If we are to assign moral blame for putting humanity's future at risk, why should that blame extend only to those who promoted fossil fuels, and not to those who opposed the most promising alternative?

Morning in Umeå

Ground to cover

Now into the third and final day of the conference, it takes a moment to piece together everything that has happened since I touched down at Umeå Airport on Wednesday morning. But, yes, Elin and I went for a rainy river run, I attended the first programme board meeting of the semester on Teams, and had coffee with my former colleague Linnéa at Kulturbageriet before taking bus number 1 up to the Humanities Building for an evening of wine and a presentation of the research project “Forests of Emotions”. After the strong impression that Lisa Röstlund’s Skogslandet made on me, I found myself nodding in agreement with the basic premise that emotions are fundamental to how both forest owners and conservationists relate to forests, and that more “facts” alone are unlikely to make much of a difference.

Then, after waking up above the rooftops at Comfort Hotel Winn, it was my turn to present my paper An Ecomodernist Critique of Emissions Sufficientarianism. Without hiding behind any PowerPoint slides, and bringing nothing more than a few keywords, I took to the podium, knowing that the only way I could do this was by being fully present and speaking my mind, frightening as that might be. Rereading my paper a few days earlier, I had been struck by how much ground it covers, and how much each step builds on the previous one. In retrospect, I am not sure whether I managed to bring the argument full circle, from the geophysical realities of climate change to how degrowth risks foreclosing more emancipatory planetary futures. At times, I fear I may have been unnecessarily polemical, but clearly I was saying something that no one else was saying.

Afterwards, I sat down to listen to presentations on everything from the tragedy of wilderness appreciation to teleological contextualist perspectives on biodiversity offsetting, before it was time for Teea Kortetmäki’s fascinating keynote on “After wilderness: cohabitability in a humanized world”. With my mind both bubbling with thoughts and exhausted from the intensity of all the conversations, it felt good to take the bus downtown for some Indian food together.

Yet, reflecting on those conversations, I was again struck by how rarely some people on the political Left seem to consider their own role in the worsening affective polarization of society. I guess a little perspective-taking would go a long way here. Imagine how a committed vegan would feel if suddenly forced to eat steak, and perhaps it becomes easier to understand why people resist having their deeply held values challenged, even when those challenges are morally justified.

Early departure

Taking off ten minutes early from Halmstad Airport, our ATR 72-600 climbed through windy skies before making its way up towards Stockholm and Arlanda Airport.

The other week, I watched a YouTube documentary about a guy flying on such turboprops across the Atlantic, stopping in the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland before working his way south towards New York through the Canadian High Arctic. While I have long dreamt of taking a repositioning cruise along a similar great circle route, with lots of undisturbed time to read and write, his journey certainly put my own Arctic adventures into perspective.

After a short stop for breakfast at Pontus, my immediate plans once I get to Umeå are to go for a rainy river run with Elin, followed by a couple of Teams meetings. With the conference dinner starting at 7 pm, it is going to be a long day considering that I had my alarm set at 4:15 am.

L'Oreille Cassée

As Linnéa tells her kids that she is going to French Guiana over Christmas, the obvious question is: why? It is in situations like these that one wishes to be Tintin, with an artefact having gone missing from the Museum of Ethnography in Brussels or Professor Calculus having been kidnapped, either of which would immediately provide a perfectly good reason to set off on an adventure.

But in our case, I guess it was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing, something about rockets launching into space, French cheese, and rivers winding through the jungle. A blank spot on my mental map, somewhere without templates or fixed expectations. And, of course, the fact that Linnéa speaks French (and I aspire to one day).

Against certainty

With the taxi booked for 04:45 tomorrow morning, I am happy to have packed everything I need for Umeå, except perhaps the faintest idea of how I am going to make it back alive. Looking through the conference programme, it is once again obvious that I am the only one on “Team Abundance”, and I seriously wonder why I keep putting myself through these kinds of situations. While a psychologist might suspect a tendency towards self-harm, I guess it is because, deep down, I still believe in something resembling Habermasian communicative rationality: that we are not forever prisoners of our identities and worldviews.

Yet my own faith in those bright planetary futures has faltered considerably in recent years. As our digital overlords themselves were quick to point out, technological progress may not be as easily tamed as we once imagined:

“If you argue that environmental sufficientarianism is unrealistic because it assumes an implausible degree of moral discipline and international cooperation, someone might respond that safely managing transformative AI requires even more extraordinary coordination, institutional competence and restraint.”

This is a powerful objection, pointing directly towards the paradoxical implications of human fallibility in the Anthropocene, a topic that I hope to explore in some detail at WPSA in March (assuming my paper gets accepted).

Still, taking the long view of human history, I simply cannot believe in a future of ethical homogenization where everyone is forced to act and think the same way. If we have learnt anything, surely it is that value change happens gradually by inspiring each other to be our better selves, not by forcing either “democracy” or “sustainability” down each other's throats, especially when we ourselves struggle to live up to our proclaimed ideals.

Bottlenecks

Having worked in academia for more than twenty years, I have come to the conclusion that few people complain as much as academics, which is particularly perplexing given that we remain among the most privileged groups in society.

While there are always individual stories that are genuinely horrifying, I find it incredibly frustrating how little attention is paid to the simple fact that when demand exceeds supply, as it clearly does for permanent academic positions, some mechanism of selection must exist. We can limit the number of doctoral students, postdocs, assistant professorships, or senior lectureships, but no matter how we arrange things, there will inevitably be a point at which not everyone can advance to the next level.

Over the last decade, Sweden has increasingly invested in assistant professorships (biträdande lektorat) as a pathway for relatively junior scholars to secure permanent positions as senior lecturers. Often restricted to applicants who earned their PhDs within the preceding five or seven years, these positions effectively exclude more experienced scholars (like me), creating a situation in which academic mobility becomes increasingly difficult, as noted in a recent article in Universitetsläraren.

What the article largely overlooks, however, is why universities have become so reluctant to advertise traditional senior lectureships in the first place. One important reason, I suspect, is that competition for such positions has become so intense that successful applicants would often already have been promoted to full professor elsewhere. From the university's perspective, there is little incentive to recruit someone at the senior lecturer level who is already qualified for a professorship, particularly when the latter comes with considerably greater financial commitments.

The result is something of a paradox. By creating a more predictable career path for younger academics, universities have simultaneously made it increasingly difficult for established scholars to move between institutions. And as everyone holds on to the positions they already have, fewer vacancies become available, further reinforcing the problem.

I am not sure there is any easy solution to this. Certainly, I would welcome greater opportunities for academic mobility, including for people like myself. But increasing the number of permanent academic positions comes at a cost, and I am far from convinced that this should be a priority given the many other pressing needs in society. In the end, moving the bottleneck from one career stage to another is unlikely to make it disappear.

Ostbewusst

Today, Svenska Dagbladet had a long-read article on the cultural legacy of East Germany, telling the story of how young Germans, born long after the fall of the Wall, have come to build their identities around a country that ceased to exist more than thirty years ago. As someone who travelled extensively to the GDR as a child, and whose imagination has never quite left the sand dunes of Rügen, I find this phenomenon of Ostdeutschwerdung fascinating on so many levels.

In part, I think it speaks to the poles of my own identity, to how I can appreciate both Spreewaldgurken and the modest pleasures of Good Bye, Lenin!, while also enjoying business class aboard Lufthansa across the Atlantic. As an outsider, it is of course easier not to take sides, but similar tensions play out in Sweden too, if less visibly, as the rural periphery finds itself at odds with Stockholm’s metropolitan centre. Here, too, I find myself belonging to both worlds and neither.