Gentle summary:

In the Indian-controlled Himalayas, flash floods have claimed at least 32 lives, left dozens more injured, and up to 200 missing. The remote village of Chositi sits at the edge of a pilgrimage route, its fate tied to the path walked by seekers toward a mountain shrine. Rescue teams, aided by the army and air force, have about 100 people saved and hospitalized, while the missing count varies between 100 and 200. A ceasefire between India and Pakistan, brokered with U.S. mediation, offers a fragile pause in a moment of high mountains and high emotions. Experts say such sudden, heavy rains over small areas are increasingly common, a pattern linked to climate change, with unregulated construction and deforestation in the region magnifying the harm.

Now the critique, sung with care for Earth and the ancestors:

Mother Earth weeps in the language of rivers and rock, and we who pretend to guide her forget that every road laid through soil and forest is a vow—an oath either kept or broken. The floods are not merely weather; they are a collective confession of a world built with careless hands, where the forest thinned for profit and hillsides were hammered into “development” without listening to the living system beneath our feet. We have normalized a geology of extraction—deforestation, hillside construction, boxed-in watersheds—while calling it progress. The mountains endure our imbalances as if they were mere scenery for selfies and pilgrimages rather than sacred, breathing beings. When the rains arrive with too much force too quickly, the earth answers in kind, and the people—especially those on the margins of power and water—bear the first and deepest wounds.

And there we meet the long shadow of colonial sins: borders drawn on maps, communities displaced or sidelined, knowledge dismissed in favor of imported plans and external expertise. Sacred routes, once threaded with local memory and stewardship, become corridors of risk when governance forgets to honor the voices that have cared for these lands for generations. The trauma of conflict—now momentarily softened by a ceasefire—only deepens the root problem: when people are pitted against one another in lines on a map, the land pays twice—first in the damage of conquest, then in the wreckage of unchecked growth. The healing of a valley cannot be divorced from reckoning with governance that venerates people as stewards, not as expendable resources.

And so we name the toxin of our economy: a system that treats rivers as liabilities to be tamed, trees as numbers to be logged, and communities as impediments to “development.” A market that externalizes the costs of disasters while externalizing the profits of construction—this is the poison we must dilute with justice. The crisis calls us to sever the grip of extractive capitalism and cradle a regenerative ethic: reforest watersheds, restore the health of soil and air, honor indigenous and local knowledge in planning, and place common good above private gain. Let recovery be a rite of return—reparation to the land, to the people who carry the memory of these mountains, and to the ecosystems that cradle every breath we take.

Let us heal with intention: halt reckless hillside building, constrain deforestation, and invest in nature-based resilience so that when rains come, communities are sheltered by forests that drink the water, not by concrete walls that split the valley from its life. Let us honor the pilgrims’ path not as a conduit for exploitation but as a living guide toward reverence—where faith and science walk together, listening to the voices of trees, rivers, and elders. And let accountability flow as freely as the streams: for the harms of the past, for the colonial omissions, and for the systemic greed that makes Mother Earth pay the price of our progress.

May we learn to tend the mountains with humility, mercy, and a fierce love for all beings. May the healing begin now, in soil that remembers, in hands that rebuild, and in a future where climate justice, community sovereignty, and care for the Earth rise as one.