What our words hide about the climate crisis

Polycrisis. It’s the monster under the bed — terrifying, and strangely hard to see clearly. We sense it everywhere but struggle to describe it, which may be part of the problem. When something remains indistinct, it is easier to fear than to examine.

What if this tangle of crises is less a moral emergency than a riddle? Riddles do not demand panic; they demand attention. They reward patience and sustained curiosity. Even the bleakest topics can become energising when we approach them as problems to understand rather than verdicts to deliver.

What follows is an attempt to think through how to make that shift.

TNRT is partly about sharing information, but more importantly about learning to move deliberately between levels of abstraction. When we remain high up the ladder, we end up with sweeping moral narratives. When we move down, we encounter mechanisms — specific processes that can be examined and understood.

Consider the phrase “global warming.” It compresses an extraordinary range of chemical and biological dynamics into a single, deceptively gentle image of gradual temperature rise. “Warming” suggests comfort. It obscures the fact that roughly a quarter of atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, where it alters seawater chemistry and increases acidity. As pH levels shift, the largest habitat on Earth becomes less hospitable to calcifying organisms such as corals, shellfish and certain forms of plankton.

None of this is visible to the naked eye, which makes abstraction all the easier.

I learned this habit of moving down the ladder of abstraction from Nate Hagens’ work in ecological economics and systems thinking, which I began drawing on in my teaching several years ago. Hagens does not use the term itself — it comes from the linguist S.I. Hayakawa — but he practises it consistently, grounding large narratives in physical processes and material constraints.

Ocean acidification is one example of this move from abstraction toward material reality. Renewable energy offers another: solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines are built from plastics, copper, concrete and steel. These materials are finite, energy-intensive to extract, and typically depend on fossil fuels somewhere along the supply chain.

This does not invalidate the case for renewable energy, but it does complicate it. When we pay close attention to the material inputs of a solar panel — the mined ores, the smelted metals, the global logistics — the abstraction begins to wear thin. We are no longer dealing with an ethereal adjective but with a material reality.

Abstraction casts a spell over us. It lulls us into believing that we live in a world of infinite raw materials. We don’t. 

Recognising limits is not the same as admitting defeat. It means paying attention to the ecological reality on which our economic and political systems depend. This shift in perspective is less daunting than it sounds. It begins by translating our systems from the abstract into the tangible.

Take inequality. At a high level it appears as a moral category — a statistic about the top one percent, a headline about widening gaps. It encourages outrage or resignation.

But move down a level and it begins to take on structure. Who owns the land in a given city? Who rents and who collects rent? What are the terms of tenancy law? How easy is it to raise rents, to evict, to convert housing into assets? What tax rules govern inherited property?

Inequality is not only a number; it is a pattern of ownership, a set of contracts, a web of incentives. Once you see that, the phenomenon shifts. It is no longer an abstract moral failure hovering above society. It is a system — built over time, maintained through policy, and therefore open, at least in principle, to revision.

When people make this move — from abstraction to structure — the questions change. I have seen this most clearly in my own teaching.

Nate Hagens’ work as an ecological economist has reshaped how I work with business and law students, who are trained to think in terms of interest rates, inflation, stock markets and other abstractions. Many of them have never been encouraged to consider that these financial systems rest on something more fundamental: the biosphere — what Hagens sometimes calls the real stock market. Watching them descend the ladder of abstraction and begin to see those foundations has been one of the most rewarding parts of my teaching career.

Not all of them end up sharing my enthusiasm for understanding our biophysical reality. (And yes, I intentionally didn’t use the word “environment”.) But a significant proportion of them do start asking different sorts of questions. Some start pointing out that if we take Hagens’ ideas to heart we’ll have to rethink entire areas of the economy.

In one class we ran a simulation and concluded that with sufficient global cooperation the world might function with roughly 150 million private vehicles — about a tenth of today’s total. Then a student raised her hand: what happens to the car manufacturers?

That question led to a realisation. We are not simply limited by political caution or incremental reform. We are working within a system that quietly rewards waste. What we celebrate as profit often depends on materials being used quickly, replaced frequently and discarded without much thought. Efficiency, in the ecological sense, can look like stagnation on a balance sheet. From this angle, profit and waste begin to look less like opposites and more like two sides of the same coin.

Once profit and waste are seen as structurally entwined, the conversation changes. The less we approach the climate crisis primarily as a moral indictment, the more seriously we are able to engage it as a systemic problem.

This is not because the ethical stakes are small — they are immense. It is because moral language can narrow our attention. We treat climate change as an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise sound system, rather than as one expression of deeper stresses within the very life-support structures on which that system depends.

We have become accustomed to speaking about the world through percentages, charts and growth curves. There is value in those abstractions. But when we stare only at the map, we risk forgetting the terrain.

The green transition, on paper, looks elegant — almost frictionless. Only when we look up do we see the copper, the silver and the other finite materials on which it depends. And then we are confronted with a simpler question: what does it mean to live well in a finite world?