More on the difficulty of writing about climate.

# 4041

First, the problem with simple naming. Calling the core problem “climate change" is dealing with a symptom of an extractive economy. The economy causes climate problems climate problems do not cause economies. But we do not have a good word for the damage caused by economies. I don't want to make the idea of economies too negative. I have been going back to Aristotle's Economics. His description of an economy starts with the needs of the people in the household from which the word, Economic comes. I will give you a long excerpt in the next post, showing the depth of concern in that amazing book. The idea that economics describes a functioning arrangement of people, nature, and organization is a really good idea and we should go back to it not avoiding the richness and pragmatism of the idea.

The next problem in writing about climate change is that it is running in parallel with more than a handful of other unforgiving issues. Key among them is the momentum in the system toward rising prices, broken supply chains, and civil unrest on a massive scale. Along with these is the problem of corruption ( see the reference to Whitney Webb, herself a problem but raising the right issues around the military, police, surveillance, big tech, oligarchs, bureaucracies, food and water, and big data and AI put in each of us in controllable categories along with drought, fires, ice and oceans, floods, and wealth. We might be in a mafia-controlled world that is cascading toward indeed the collapse of civilization and the disappearance of its populations. The move toward escalation in the existing theaters of war tends to make me want to shut up. Because I worked for 40 years as a psychoanalyst (fortunately to study with Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson) \, I am comfortable posting this painting I did a few months ago. (Expressing what you feel in art is a great release, making the worst more tolerable.)

compare such fate to

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