Maybe in the year 2100, when large parts of the earth are inhabitable (D. Wallace-Wells, New Yorker, annotated version) future generations will ask: Why didn't you prevent this from happening? One possible answer would be: Some did do something, but they were not successful in the end. Why? Of course ignorance and
greed are also part of the picture, but it is not that simple. Like the Covid-19 crisis, climate change needs systemic thinking, that is observing and describing complex structures of relations. Zeynep Tufeci is pointing out in her excellent analysis, the problems of systemic thinking ("The Atlantic"), which is goes beyond "simple reductionism". Covid-19 cases accumulate exponentially and not additionally. These growth rates are difficult to imagine, as also Kate Raworth (2017) illustrate in her book (see References), especially in her chapters 4 (Systems) and 7 (growth). But there is a big difference between the climate crisis and the Covid-19 crisis. A failure in dealing with the Covid-19 Pandemic show immediate results: people are dying. Of course there are also strong indicators for a climate crisis: the earth temperature is rising (global warming, Wp) and the CO2-concentration is also gonig up (NOOA climate gov. has this good graph with backgrounds). But what does it mean, that there are now more than 400ppt CO2 in the atmosphere? This is an abstract figure in the first place. Probably not for the organization 350.org, which rational was (and is more than ever) to point out, what you could do even in country like China (Story telling, thank you Liangyi Chang).
But back to systemics: the new Cornoa-Virus and Global warming have the same cause as Laura Spinney (in the Guardian) explains. The systemic background is older, as Barnes (2005, see References) shows in her monograph: The development of agriculture (sendentariness) and the spread of diseases have been closely linked, this is historically evident. And also another aspect of this monograph is interesting: Although published 2005, after the first SARS-crisis, the author states that another SARS related outbreak seems to be likely. But then it could be argued: Marx was right, it is the economy that is deciding about the human world, because we are part of the material world (as George Monbiot, Guardian writes in his concluding sentence). Thought the economical explantions are quite decisive it is not the economy alone, it is rather several factors or related to society several functions, which have to been interdependly in an analysis of a complex society. Here in this blogpost I tried to convince the readers, that two functional systems are related to each other: the economy and the medical functional system. But of course without language these functional systems can't be described or as Niklas Luhmann puts it, they can't be observed. The difference between observation and description has be explained at length in another post. Only one concluding hint here: Luhmann did describe several functional systems among them the Medical (Luhmann 1990) and the economical (Luhmann 1988), but this part of his (large) work. His main theory (theory of society, Luhmann 2012/2013), however is translated (and has been referenced several times in this blog). The German references are also to be find in the reference-list at the end. For some readers they might be difficult to read.
References
Barnes, Ethne (2006), Diseases and Human Evolution, University of New Mexico Press
Luhmann, Niklas (2012/2013), Theory of Society, 2 Volumes, Translated by Rhodes Berrett, Stanford University Press
idem (1990), Der medizinische Code, in: Soziologische Auklärung, Band 5, Westdeutscher Verlag, Seite 183ff
idem (1988), Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp
Raworth, Kate (2017), Doughnut economics : seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. Vermont: White River Junction
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