Aside from the poles, climate change hits hardest first in the Himalayas. Cloudbursts, once a rare occurrences, have become annual catastrophic summer experiences. Ladakh is a mountain desert, and the soils cannot hold up against torrential rains. This is a prayer wheel, knocked down and washed along the flow of mud from a flash flood ripping down the canyon above Skyu village (Aug. 2018); this same flow also buried buildings nearly up to their roofs in mud. As these climatic shifts continue at ever increasing intervals, communities that have existed in locations for centuries, now face growing insecurities about what the future will bring. Every time it rained hard in Ladakh this summer, I would see older people light an extra candle or make an extra round with their prayer beads in hopes that their home would still be standing in the morning. Unsustainable oil-based economic consumption -> CO2 -> atmospheric changes -> the earth rebalances and societies (fixed infrastructure, fixed populations) feel the blunt of these drastic ecosystems shifts
