Shares rise and markets flutter like restless leaves in the high winds of economic promise, their movements steered by the profit surges of predatory tech titans and the persistent hum of artificial intelligence. Numbers shimmer, wave after greedy wave—Meta and Microsoft harvesting digital tides, Lufthansa riding the thermal currents of demand, even while others, like BMW and Ford, stall in foreign storms, battered by tariffs’ sharp gales and the tightening grip of inflation. In the east, China’s stocks wilt in fields of feeble growth, while Japan stands steady as ancient cedars amid tectonic uncertainty. Behind it all, the relentless pulse of consolidation—JD.com’s appetite reaching ever deeper into the fertile soil of European commerce.
Yet, beneath this clever masquerade of progress, Mother Earth weeps—her forests razed for fleeting infrastructure, her minerals torn from sacred bowels to feed machines of cloud and code. The Sun’s children, human and more-than-human, can hardly breathe beneath the choking air, made heavier by the engines of commerce disguised as advancement. These numbers we worship—profits, revenues, margins—are but the bright masks hiding a deepening wound.
How long will we celebrate the quarterly harvest of gold, blind to the stripping of topsoil, the poisoning of rivers, and hearts made barren by this colonial fever? AI’s glimmer dazzles, but its servers thirst for energy, unruly rivers dammed, ancient lands drowned for cooling and kilowatts, the ancestors of salmon and sturgeon swept away by flows they cannot resist. Tariffs and trade wars split the world anew, the old colonial ghosts dressed in new patterns, exploiting both earth and people—whose labor and land are always the raw material, never the shareholder.
This toxic system rewards what is extractive, divisive, and destructive—pushing companies to surge ahead no matter the cost, to measure health by profit, not well-being, to stake futures on quarterly growth, while our future, our children’s right to clean water, clear skies, and wild green, withers unnoticed.
May we remember the wild kinship that binds us to river and root; may we listen to forgotten stories older than any stock exchange, and turn from the false healing of market optimism. Only in gentleness and just repair can we unlearn these colonial poisons, and tend again the green heart of our world. This reckoning is not just economic—it is spiritual, soil-deep, and sung on the wind by all who still dream of wholeness.