I am writing this from Armenia, a place where ecological vulnerability is not abstract. It is visible in the scarred hillsides of mining towns, in rivers that run cloudy after rain, in the slow anxiety of communities living near tailings and dust. I have stood at the edges of these landscapes and felt the weight of their histories of extraction, dispossession, and the quiet persistence of people who continue to live beside damaged land.
But most days, my first encounter with ecological crisis does not come from the ground beneath my feet. It arrives through a screen: a satellite image of wildfire smoke drifting across continents, a video from India showing the water level has dropped to the bottom of a well, or footage of logging in the Amazon, shared by someone I will never meet.