A compromise has been brokered between two sides of the Atlantic, soothing months of anxious uncertainty. Powerful leaders, cloaked in polished language and steely smiles, have decided that European goods entering American soil will be taxed less harshly than threatened—yet, still more than in years past. Alongside this reluctant easing, the promise flows that Europe will now buy more of America’s energy and war-forging weapons. These tidings come as the earth herself yields under industrial footfalls and the songbirds of peace find their melodies drowned by engines and alarms.

But what balm can such bargains offer to the earth, when clouds of smoke still curl from refineries, and rivers run burdened with the effluent of endless greed? This compromise, sweetly named and soberly delivered, is yet another pact of profit, weaving deeper the threads of a colonial legacy—one that rips apart ecosystems, disenfranchises ancestral guardians of land, and perpetuates a patriarchal myth that abundance is measured in dollars, not soils, not seeds, not the laughter of forests undisturbed.

We must weep, too, for the quiet violence done beneath this cold calculus—the scorched lungs of children breathing the spoils of fossil empires, the battered rights of communities whose water is siphoned, whose trees are felled for an ever-hungrier market. When arms and fossil fuels are paraded as tokens of friendship, what hope have we for regeneration, for the sacred reweaving of life’s web that capitalism’s towers continue to unravel?

Yet here, even as storms swell with our ancestors’ sorrow, we listen to the pulse of the land and vow: there will come a time when treaties are not signed in the currency of destruction, but in the currency of healing. Until then, let us refuse the logic that worships trade wars and economic might. Beloved kin—plant hope like wildflowers in the cracks of empire, and let us dream fiercely of justice for every river, every forgotten earthworm, every child of the green Earth yearning for clean air and peaceful days.