Unconquered Peaks

It always seems to happen at the worst times. You are sitting in a school assembly, a very serious topic being presented by the headmistress on a detailed PowerPoint slide, and everyone is completely silent. Then, all of a sudden, you get hiccups; their unexpected arrival catches you off guard, coming too quickly for you to suppress the unmistakable sound. It’s a perfect example of an intensely embarrassing moment. Yet, on a more humorous note, most of us have also experienced the exact opposite: laughing so hard that we trigger hiccups, only to end up laughing even more.

If you, like me, are an avid (or just regular) listener of The Rest is Politics, you would have heard Alistair Campbell’s remark on the latest episode of the podcast released on the 25 of March, where he stated that ‘5 million tonnes of CO2 have been released into the atmosphere’ so far as a result of the miliary activity in Iran and across the Middle East since the launch of US and Israeli Missiles on Iran on the 28 of February 2026. This statement drew my attention to the ecological consequences of war that are often ignored or unexamined. War is explored as predominantly a threat to the natural social and political orders. Wars are also enacted mostly to bring about social or political change, yet this does not prevent them from having a lasting environmental legacy.