On August 26, ice and rock tore loose in the Himalayas and sent water and stone through the Trishuli valley. By week’s end, more than 800 people in Nepal and Tibet were dead and more than 3,000 remained missing, including workers trapped inside hydropower tunnels. In Chitwan, where the heat decomposed the dead faster than families could identify them, authorities dug trenches for the temporary burial of 250 bodies after the morgues ran out of room. DNA was taken so relatives might one day recover them and perform the rites the flood interrupted, an administrative courtesy from a world efficient at cataloguing the people it failed to keep alive.

No honest scientist would attribute the collapse to a single cause, although rising temperatures and melting glaciers probably helped make the mountain unstable. Nepal has lost nearly a third of its ice in a little more than thirty years, and its glaciers melted 65 percent faster in the past decade. The country produces around 0.05 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions, yet has spent decades asking the countries heating the planet to recognize that its mountains are becoming graveyards. Wealthy states offered conferences followed by communiqués promising another conference, until the mountain delivered its own report.

A year ago, while watching Gaza and the Palisades burn through the same screen, I wrote that what the world permitted in Gaza would eventually be permitted everywhere. I meant that powerful people were learning they could turn inhabited land into a target, call the destruction necessary, and leave others to live inside the result. The year since has made that warning feel timid. In Gaza, fire clears land for conquest. In Nepal, heat loosens ice above people who released almost none of the carbon causing it.

Colonialism has always needed an environmental story. Before land can be stolen, it is described as empty, wasted, or ruined by the people living on it. French authorities used claims of Arab deforestation and overgrazing to justify seizing forests and pastures across North Africa, even though the familiar story of Indigenous misuse rested on weak ecological evidence. Colonial conservation then enclosed land whose protection supposedly required the removal of its caretakers. The colonizer removes shepherds, criminalizes customary grazing, and rewrites water rights. When the land changes under those pressures, he calls the damage proof that its people never knew how to care for it.

Settler colonialism goes further because it must make the settler appear native to the place being taken. It remakes the landscape so occupation looks like inheritance. Groves marking Indigenous ownership are uprooted, while imported trees make recent settlement appear rooted. Zionism encountered a cultivated Palestine, then needed the country to become barren in the Western imagination so its farmers could be displaced as strangers to their own soil. The Jewish National Fund acquired land for Jewish settlement and later planted forests over the fields and ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages. Imported pines hid what lay underneath. A forest can conceal a village more politely than a wall, and donors who paid to plant a tree were rarely told whose home its roots would enter. Land is not the backdrop to colonial violence. It is one of its archives. An olive tree records care, while a pine forest planted over ruins records the labor of erasure.

The olive tree is harder to recruit into this fiction because some Palestinian trees are older than the state uprooting them. Since 1967, Israeli authorities and settlers have destroyed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian olive and fruit trees, severing income as well as inheritance. In June alone, the United Nations documented at least ten settler attacks involving arson or flammable materials across the occupied West Bank. Wheat fields and olive groves burned beside homes and mosques. Ecocide solves a political problem. People may return to ruins, but they cannot harvest an uprooted orchard or inherit poisoned soil.

The image of Israelis lighting fires beyond Palestine also appears in two cases of alleged negligence. In 2011, an Israeli tourist acknowledged a role in starting a wildfire in Torres del Paine National Park, leaving more than 11,000 hectares of Patagonia burned. This August, Greek authorities arrested another Israeli tourist after a barbecue was suspected of starting a wildfire near Sellia in Crete despite an outdoor fire ban. He was released on bail while awaiting trial.

In southern Lebanon, firefighters and residents say Israeli forces have used bombs and flares to ignite wooded areas and olive groves, then used drones or military restrictions to keep crews away. Near Kfarchouba, a drone struck close to firefighters and forced them to withdraw. Israel says Hezbollah uses forested terrain for military purposes, which is how an occupying army explains that the trees enlisted first.

The target changed from orchard to oil depot in Iran, where Israeli warplanes struck four sites around Tehran and left millions beneath burning fuel. Rain returned the pollution to earth in black drops that irritated skin and made breathing difficult. An early assessment found that the first fourteen days of the American and Israeli war produced more than five million tonnes of carbon dioxide, more than the annual emissions of eighty four low emitting countries combined. A war advertised as a defense of civilization poisoned the land of a civilization thousands of years older than the states bombing it.

The military target list and the data center meet in the cloud contract. The Israeli military’s use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology surged after October 2023 as artificial intelligence processed surveillance and helped identify targets in Gaza and Lebanon. Google and Amazon built cloud infrastructure for the Israeli government under Project Nimbus, while Microsoft servers stored intercepted Palestinian calls until reporting forced the company to disable some services used by an Israeli military unit. The word cloud turns a warehouse into weather, hiding the land it occupies, the electricity it consumes, and the military customer it serves.

Those warehouses are an extractive industry with an elegant interface. United Nations researchers estimate that by 2030 data centers could consume 945 terawatt hours of electricity and 9.3 trillion liters of water. The water would equal the basic annual domestic needs of 1.3 billion people in sub Saharan Africa, while the land used across the supply chain could exceed 14,500 square kilometers. An economy becomes colonial when one place bears the mine and depleted aquifer while another owns what they produce. The server farm updates the plantation’s accounting. Resources and value move in opposite directions.

In drought stricken Santiago, the city’s largest data centers already consume about 1.5 billion liters of water each year. Google obtained rights to as much as fifty liters a second, roughly the annual use of 8,500 households, while wetlands dried in nearby Quilicura. In Monterey Park, a largely Asian American community discovered through a city council agenda that a 50 megawatt center was planned near homes. Residents organized, passed a ban, and then defended it at the ballot box with more than 80 percent of the vote, one of the local revolts documented in the growing backlash against AI infrastructure. An industry calling itself weightless was asking them to surrender water and affordable electricity.

Oxfam estimates that the investments of each of the world’s fifty richest billionaires produce an average of roughly 1.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Elon Musk advertises Mars while Jeff Bezos imagines millions living in space. These are sold as civilizational visions, yet they preserve an old entitlement. The owner expects a new frontier after exhausting the old one. Once a place has been reduced to fuel, escape appears more reasonable than repair.

Nepal occupies the losing side of the carbon ledger, having emitted almost none of what loosened the ice above it and received little of the wealth produced by fossil fuels. Hydropower workers remain buried inside the mountain while artificial intelligence companies demand the electricity of cities. Families in Chitwan wait beside temporary graves while billionaires calculate which planet they might colonize next, since ruining one world is called entrepreneurship when you can afford a rocket out of it.

Colonialism survives wherever the power to decide is separated from the duty to endure the decision. A company in California acquires water during a Chilean drought. A military burns an orchard, then keeps its owners from fighting the fire. The instruments have changed, but the governing permission remains. Money moves toward owners while smoke and debt stay with the people whose land supplied the profit.

Last year I wrote that what we allow in Gaza, we allow everywhere. The world treated Gaza as though fire could be confined by a border, as though smoke carried a passport and the climate understood which deaths Western governments had decided were acceptable. Nepal has exposed the stupidity beneath that belief. The dead there did not light these fires, yet the water came for them, because empire has always arranged the world so that the hand holding the match remains dry.

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