Wendy Lynne Lee is Professor Emeritus at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania. Now living in Baltimore, she teaches as adjunct at Community College of Baltimore County and, as of Fall 2026, at Coppin State. Over the last tumultuous decade Lee has made the focus of her scholarly as well as civic work the climate crisis and its geopolitical implications, especially for food security, clean water access, climate migration, the disruptions of war over access to fossil fuels, and species extinction.

Lee is a longstanding critic of capitalism, treating it not merely as a system of economy, but as a reductionist system of value that replaces moral, civic and aesthetic value with that of exchange. She argues that the logic of commodification that defines capitalist enterprise is fundamentally nihilistic because it relies on a mythical conception of the planet and its atmosphere as inexhaustible with respect to their capacity to provide resources and repositories of waste. In other words, built into the very ontology of capital as “grow or die” is the assumption that nothing, including the capacity for sentience, is exempt from the logic of commodification. Hence, even those few privileged by capital–mostly white wealthy Western(sized) men–are unlikely to be spared the catastrophic impacts of climate collapse. As is clearly evident in the frequency of extreme weather events, deforestation, desertification, fishery collapse, the prospect of pandemic, and accelerated extinction, the anthropogenic impacts of climate change threaten the capacity of living organisms to recuperate. But, given the reduction of all value to exchange value, capital does not care and cannot care.

The aim of this blog is thus to provide a lens through which to see more clearly–understand more acutely–how the kleptocratic nature of capital accumulation now faced with the resource scarcity it has itself made possible plays the starring role in current events such as the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the American and Israeli war on Iran, the massive profiteering of weapons manufacturers and fossil fuel behemoths, the propaganda of “national security” offered as a cover to advance profit ventures, and the obscene assault on education in the interest of creating pliably ignorant citizens less likely to revolt against the authoritarian and kleptocratic aspirations of wanna-be dictators like Donald Trump.