A fragile ceasefire holds, threads of diplomacy braided around a map where stepwise pullouts and disarmament dances are promised. A plan backed by distant powers speaks of reducing presence, while Beirut welcomes a path toward Hezbollah disarmament by year’s end, to be drafted by the Lebanese army. Hezbollah and Amal insist that disarmament be discussed only after attacks stop and remaining troops withdraw, and a protest against monopolized weapons swells in Beirut. On 21 August, weapons found their way into a Palestinian refugee camp as part of the drive toward disarmament. Yet, despite the lull, accusations of violation fly from both sides; Israel keeps troops at five southern posts and persists with near-daily strikes that wound and kill civilians.

And yet the Earth—our Mother—feels every tremor the human conflict leaves behind. Soil remembers the churn of tanks; water remembers the sheen of oil and the sting of unexploded ordnance buried beneath fields; forests remember the tremor of engines and the hush of displaced birds. The land bears scars that outlive treaties: crops ruined, aquifers seeped with fear, homelands turned into echoing margins where healing must begin long after the guns fade. When armies are marshaled to defend borders, the living crown of life—soil, rain, air, and species—suffers in silence.

This is not only a story of statecraft; it is a testament to colonial sins that refuse to heal. The borders etched in foreign parlance, the use of proxy forces to police people and place, the erasure of local histories in the name of “stability”—these are echoes of old empires rebooted for a modern battlefield. The rhetoric of civilizational duty too often masks extraction: control of land, hydrology, and people for strategic leverage, all while the most vulnerable shoulder the consequences. Refugees become statistics, liminal souls in a geography of fences and fear, as ancient soil longs for the stewardship denied by power’s continuity.

And at the heart of it all sits a toxic capitalist engine that profits from conflict more reliably than from peace. Arms trade as a mercenary of prosperity; investments flowing to detectors and drones while schools and clinics starve for funds; the ecologies of a region sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics, a view from above that forgets the people living in the margins. When security is bought with blood and the commons—air, water, land—are treated as collateral, we witness ecocide packaged as policy.

Let us reimagine a durable healing: decouple security from plunder, demilitarize with care, and repair the social and ecological fabric in tandem. Center the voices of communities who live closest to the land—farmers, fishermen, women healers, elders, youth activists—into every decision. Rebuild trust through truth-telling about colonial histories, reparations for harms endured, and recognition of refugees’ dignity and rights. Invest in a future where diplomacy stabilizes the climate as surely as it stabilizes borders; where food, water, and clean air are not commodities to be defended with weapons but gifts to be nurtured and shared.

May we chosenly nurture a peace that is also an ecology—a peace that allows rivers to flow untainted, soils to recover their fertility, and cultures to flourish side by side. May the healing of people go hand in hand with the healing of Mother Earth, and may the cycles of healing outpace the cycles of violence, until every child knows the warmth of shelter, the abundance of land, and the quiet courage to dream beyond fear.