Cruise Ship Mein Schiff 7 Completes Methanol Bunkering Demonstration

In the demonstration, 25 cubic meters of methanol were loaded aboard Tui Cruises' Mein Schiff 7 (MB Energy)

Published Sep 1, 2026 7:48 PM by The Maritime Executive

A demonstration bunkering and trial of methanol was completed with the cruise ship Mein Schiff 7, which was also the first cruise ship to be built methanol-ready. According to TUI Cruises and the companies supplying and bunkering the methanol, it was a critical test to demonstrate that the systems exist to use the emerging fuel for the cruise sector.

Mein Schiff 7 (115,000 gross tons) was delivered in 2024 with designs to be the first cruise ship to be methanol-ready. The cruise line said at the time it was waiting for additional parts but anticipated it could proceed with tests by 2026. While it is using low-sulfur diesel for propulsion, it was now able to proceed with the demonstration bunkering.

The cruise ship was supplied with 25 cubic meters of methanol from renewable feedstocks. MB Energy provided the fuel, which was loaded from a truck operated by Johs. Martens. TUI Cruises reports the fuel will be used primarily for boil operations onboard.

“The operation shows that lower carbon fuels like methanol from renewable feedstocks can already be integrated into cruise operations in a safe and reliable way,” says Jonathan Perkins, CEO of MB Energy.

By safely and reliably supplying methanol to the large cruise ship with around 2,900 passengers on board, and while multiple simultaneous operations were happening at the pier, MB Energy and TUI Cruises said they have jointly demonstrated system readiness for this mode of delivery. This proof of concept, they said, provides valuable operational experience for the future. 

MB Energy highlights that it is working to support the maritime sector’s transition to more sustainable operations. The company says it is currently developing its storage infrastructure in Hamburg-Blumensand to be “methanol-ready,” enabling the supply of larger volumes of lower carbon ammonia and methanol to maritime customers in the future. Hamburg and Kiel will serve as the company’s primary operational hubs in northern Germany, with the flexibility and ambition to also supply other European ports. 

Jörg Umann, Director Strategic Planning, Treasury, IR and Fuel at TUI Cruises noted, “For TUI Cruises, this project provided valuable operational experience with the supply and handling of certified renewable methanol under real operating conditions. While the methanol from renewable feedstocks supplied during this operation is used for boiler operations rather than propulsion, projects like this help us better understand how alternative fuels can contribute to reducing emissions as part of a broader carbon reduction strategy.”

 

Mein Schiff Relax bunkers with bio-LNG (TUI Cruises)

 

It is also part of TUI Cruises’ broader effort to expand its sustainable operations and reduce emissions. The company built two LNG-fueled cruise ships in its new InTUItion-class (Mein Schiff Relax and Mein Schiff Flow, each 157,651 gross tons). They can use LNG or marine gas oil for propulsion, or they can also use renewable LNG (bio-LNG or e-LNG) without technical modifications.

The company ran tests twice bunkering Mein Schiff Relax with bio-LNG in 2025. This year it is using the renewable fuel for its entire summer season in Northern Europe. Her sister ship Mein Schiff Flow also began regularly bunkering with bio-LNG this year in Barcelona. It will continue to use the renewable fuel through its winter season during cruises from Hamburg.

 TUI was the first of several cruise lines to begin exploring methanol. Disney Cruise Line also prepared its new ship Disney Adventure to sail on methanol but, saying that green methanol was not expected to be readily available in its Singapore homeport, the ship would operate on a mix of sustainable and low-emission fuels, such as Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO). Celebrity Cruises built a ship in France for which Wartsila converted the engine to be tri-fuel, including the ability to handle methanol. Norwegian Cruise Line, working with Fincantieri, also announced that the fifth and sixth ships of its Prima class would be designed for methanol, while the cruise line was also working with Everllence (MAN) to explore methanol conversions for its existing cruise ships.

SeaDream Announces Plans for New Yacht Cruise Ship in 2029

SeaDream revealed plans for a new, much larger yacht cruise ship versus its two 4,300 GT pioneers that are now 43 years old (SeaDream)

Published Sep 2, 2026 4:46 PM by The Maritime Executive

SeaDream Yacht Club, an operator of two small yacht cruise ships, announced plans to add a third, larger cruise ship to its fleet in 2029. It comes as the market is undergoing rapid growth and with the company’s two ships now 42 years old.

Plans for SeaDream III were unveiled on September 1, with the company reporting it was opening reservations for the July 10, 2029, maiden voyage from Hong Kong. The company announced an elaborate inaugural year that will see the ship sail from the Orient to Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, India, Arabia, the Mediterranean, Northern Europe, and then across the Atlantic in the fall of 2030 to Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean. On January 5, 2031, it is scheduled to sail the line’s first-ever world cruise, 180 days ending in London.

SeaDream tells The Maritime Executive that the vessel is currently in the engineering phase. It will be built by China Merchants Cruise Shipbuilding in coordination with European engineering and technical suppliers. Plans call for the new ship to be 16,500 gross tons versus its current vessels, which are just 4,333 GT.

Many of the details were not revealed for the new ship, but it will have accommodations for 230 passengers versus the current ships, which each carry just 112 passengers. The new ship will be 151 meters (495 feet) in length and have a crew of approximately 200. SeaDream is emphasizing it will “remain rooted in the defining qualities” of its operation, including an intimate yachting style and personalized service.

The line says that open-air living will be at the center of the design of the new ship, with expansive upper decks, a dedicated pool deck, indoor and outdoor dining spaces and three dedicated watersports marinas. It will also feature an expanded spa and fitness and wellness offerings. SeaDream says every space on the new ship has been reconsidered rather than simply being enlarged. It calls the new ship the next evolution of its experience, building on the iconic design of its two current ships.

The company says there will be a greater selection of passenger accommodations. But unlike others in the ultra-luxury category, which are emphasizing all suites with private balconies, 20 of the staterooms on the new ship will not have balconies.

“SeaDream III has been designed not only to travel farther, but to bring guests closer to the places she visits,” said Atle Brynestad, founder and owner of SeaDream Yacht Club. “Her size will allow her to reach distinctive harbors and sail globally while maintaining the highly personalized experience our guests expect. This deployment reflects the spirit of SeaDream: unhurried exploration, exceptional service and access to places best experienced by yacht.”

The two ships, SeaDream I and SeaDream II, were pioneers in the modern ultra-luxury category, introduced in 1984 and 1985 as the SeaGoddess I and SeaGoddess II. A small private company, it, however, faced severe financial challenges with the ships being chartered in 1986 and later sold to Cunard before shipbuilder Wärtsilä could foreclose and sell the ships to Kloster’s Royal Viking Line. The ships were transferred to Seabourn Cruise Line in 1999 after Carnival Corporation acquired the company, and in 2001 were acquired by Brynestad, who had also been the founder of Seabourn in 1987.

The two ships have built a loyal clientele and niche following, building on the yacht-style experience. They were last refurbished in 2023 and 2024.

SeaDream had announced plans in March 2019 to build its first new cruise ship. It entered into an agreement with Damen for a Polar 6 class ship that was to be 155 meters (508 feet) in length. The ship was to have entered service in September 2021, but the order was canceled after just a few months.

Fincantieri Floats First Next-Generation Cruise Ship for NCLH's Oceania

Oceania Sonata leaving the building dock as the first of a next-generation class of larger luxury cruise ships (Oceania Cruises)

Published Aug 27, 2026 4:19 PM by The Maritime Executive

Fincantieri and Oceania Cruises, a brand of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, marked the float-out of the first of a new generation of cruise ships as NCLH moves forward with a strategy to align the fleet with the enhanced luxury positioning of the brand. The launch came the same day as the first of the line’s oldest ships prepared to leave the fleet.

The new ship, named Oceania Sonata, was christened and floated out at the Fincantieri shipyard in Marghera, Italy. She was moved from the assembly dry dock to the fitting out berth for completion of her interior spaces. She is scheduled to enter service in 2027.

"The float out of Oceania Sonata is an incredibly exciting moment as we move one step closer to welcoming our first guests aboard next August," said Jason Montague, Chief Luxury Officer of Oceania Cruises. “As the first ship in our new Sonata Class, she represents the beginning of an exciting new chapter for the brand and a defining milestone in the continued evolution of Oceania Cruises."

The line highlights that the ship, at 86,000 gross tons, will be approximately 30 percent larger than the prior class, Allura and Vista (68,000 gross tons), and will increase passenger capacity by just 15 percent from 1,200 to 1,390 passengers with the addition of 90 staterooms. The line says the Sonata class is designed in keeping with the brand positioning to provide more space, elevate accommodations, and enhance the culinary experiences aboard. A third of the accommodations will be suites, including four Owner’s Suites and two new suite categories. Oceania Sonata will feature 13 dining venues.

 

Oceania Sonata is 30 percent larger than the lines' prior cruise ships (Oceania Cruises)

 

Construction began with the steel cutting in June 2025. NCLH has now expanded the order to a total of five ships, with a sistership, Oceania Arietta, starting construction for delivery in 2029. Three more sisters will deliver in 2032, 2035, and 2037. 

The recently appointed CEO of NCLH, John Chidsey, says this is part of a “deliberate portfolio action … that better supports the brand’s positioning and long-term return profile.”

One of the line’s smallest and original ships, Oceania Regatta (30,000 gross tons), completed its final cruise for the line on August 27 in Istanbul. The line ultimately acquired four of the 684-passenger ships, but they have been outclassed by newer and larger ships designed to emphasize greater luxury. Oceania introduced the sisters Riviera and Marina (66,000 gross tons) in 2011 and 2012 and Vista and Allura (68,000 gross tons) in 2023 and 2024, all also built by Fincantieri.

The Oceania Regatta is starting a two-year charter to Australia-based My Cruises, which will operate the cruise ship on 365-day world cruises. The first begins on September 1 from Italy. Under the terms of the charter, it can be extended, or the ship can be sold to a third-party cruise operator.

Two of the other sisters are also slated for changes. Oceania Sirena was sold and will be delivered to its new owners in the spring of 2028. Oceania Nautica will be “reimagined” as Oceania Aurelia in 2027 for the luxury long cruise market. The ship’s accommodations will be reworked with 179 of the ship’s 238 cabins designed as suites. The total number of cabins is being reduced from 340 to 238 as they enlarge rooms to create more suites.

The changes are part of a broader strategy to improve the financial performance of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings. The corporation is undertaking a fleet modernization across its three brands and reworking operations and costs after an activist shareholder demanded changes. 

Venezuela Under Siege: What Should Progressives Do?

Our first responsibility is not to prescribe Venezuela’s political course, but to challenge the coercive power our own government exercises over it.

(L-R) National Assembly president Jorge Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez, and Minister of Interior Diosdado Cabello (R) arrive to the delivery of the first year’s government report at Palacio Federal Legislativo on January 15, 2026 in Caracas, Venezuela.
(Photo by Jesus Vargas/Getty Images)


Roger D. Harris
Sep 02, 2026

Common Dreams

Ever since Hugo Chávez became Venezuela’s president in 1999 and initiated the Bolivarian Revolution, the country has been under siege by the US. The aggression escalated with the kidnapping of its lawful president, part of a larger and accelerating assertion of US imperial power worldwide. The Bolivarian Revolution survived but is in a forced tactical retreat.

For progressives outside Venezuela, this presents a difficult question. How should we respond when a government resisting US domination makes compromises that we may oppose, but does so under conditions largely imposed by Washington?

This article argues that criticism has its place. But it also needs to be contextualized in the larger struggle over Venezuela’s sovereignty and the consequences of weakening a government confronting overwhelming US power.
Chávez: Founding of the Bolivarian Revolution

Tension between solidarity with an actually existing revolutionary process and criticism of its compromises has recurred throughout the Bolivarian Revolution. Among the first on the left to part company with the Chavista government were anarchists, who proclaimed that they were second to none in supporting revolutions against imperialism—until those projects succeeded in achieving state power.

We can all agree that the Rodríguez government faces demands backed by overwhelming US power and unite to oppose the continuing imperialist siege. Those of us living in the imperial core must aim the main blow at the conditions that have necessitated such retreats.

This tendency still affirmed their abstract solidarity with “the people” but not with their chosen representatives. They felt betrayed because the Bolivarian leadership failed to fulfill their expectations to build a workers’ state on a suitably expeditious timetable.

Riding a global commodities boom, the Bolivarian Revolution funded major social welfare programs, prioritizing poor and working people. To finance these measures, over half of Venezuela’s oil exports and 60% of its overall exports were sold to the US. Dependency on oil sales deepened, with oil accounting for over 95% of the country’s foreign earnings.

Chávez proclaimed the goal of a socialist future, although he pardoned the unsuccessful 2002 coup plotters in an effort—perhaps mistaken—to encourage a cooperative domestic business class. He pragmatically sought opportunities to negotiate with them.
Maduro: Intensification of the Imperialist Siege

When Chávez died in March 2013, his chosen successor Nicolás Maduro won the snap presidential election. Maduro carried the Bolivarian project forward but under geopolitical conditions markedly different from his predecessor. Venezuela scholar Steve Ellner argues that there were no substantive political differences between the two leaders.

During Chávez’s illness, economic problems had accumulated (e.g., a dysfunctional currency exchange system). Maduro was under intense pressure from the moment he entered office.

Immediately, the US-backed and funded opposition started the guarimbas, demonstrations intended to accomplish by violence what they had failed to achieve at the ballot box. Washington, meanwhile, stepped up its hybrid war. Soon oil prices crashed and the US, under President Barack Obama, initiated ever more punishing sanctions in 2015.

Under these coercive measures, the Venezuelan economy by 2019 was in free fall with inflation over 100,000%. Never had an economy contracted so much in modern peacetime.

At this time of maximum weakness, a faction of the Venezuelan Communist Party developed a strategic disagreement with the governing coalition. It argued that the revolution should confront its class enemies more aggressively and expropriate major corporations, rather than seek a temporary rapprochement.

The nearly overwhelming task of righting the economy was ultimately achieved under Maduro’s leadership. After precipitous economic contraction, Venezuela has experienced positive economic growth since 2021. Never had a petro-economy achieved such a turnaround, which included near food sovereignty. To do so, the government relied foremost on the strong Chavista base. It also had to appeal to nationalistic elements among the bourgeoisie and offer them economic incentives to secure their cooperation.

Venezuela was not unique in making such accommodations. During this period, Cuba and Nicaragua—the two other Latin American countries striving for socialism—also introduced market-oriented reforms. With all three countries, the measures were pragmatic adjustments to a world economy dominated by the US and hostile to socialism.
Kidnapping of Maduro

The events leading up to Maduro’s abduction on January 3 involved an ever-intensifying regime-change campaign by the US in concert with its allies: asphyxiating sanctions, stolen assets, diplomatic isolation, cyberattacks, assassination attempts, mercenary invasions, among other measures. The last two months saw a total naval blockade on Venezuelan oil shipments, cutting the country’s economic lifeline.

Regardless, Maduro repeatedly maintained his longstanding willingness to negotiate with Washington. Just two days before his abduction, Maduro outlined a program of accommodation in his annual New Year’s interview with Ignacio Ramonet. This is the program that his successor Delcy Rodríguez has followed, including the amnesty and hydrocarbons laws.

The Bolivarian Revolution persevered. Its accommodations may be understood as tactical responses to unfavorable conditions rather than as a full abandonment of the project.

The fact that Maduro did not waver and the Bolivarian Revolution did not break presented a dilemma for Washington. The US—especially as its aggression against oil-rich Iran was heating up—needed access to Venezuelan oil. Neither country benefited by keeping the oil in the ground.

Yet the US had painted itself into a corner. The Trump administration had demonized Maduro as a narco-trafficker. Even though Maduro was more than willing to negotiate, the US had precluded that option. The kidnapping followed.
Rodríguez: Negotiated Sovereignty

The US invasion of Venezuela on January 3 demonstrated to both the leadership and the Venezuelan grassroots that they were alone—no country came to their defense. Whatever guardrails had existed before on the hegemon were down.

Yet the Bolivarian Revolution did not collapse. The highly polarized nation did not fall into civil unrest between Chavistas and opposition—if anything, it unified. The far-right María Corina Machado did not make her triumphal return to Caracas. Instead, that part of the opposition found itself discredited and in disarray.

In a seamless constitutional transition, Maduro’s vice president was sworn in as president. The Chavista movement united behind Acting President Delcy Rodríguez. Venezuela’s national recovery continues under a negotiated sovereignty where the US now bargains—with the ever-present threat of an even more lethal military action—over matters that should be the sole purview of Venezuelans.

Finding a way forward

The Bolivarian Revolution persevered. Its accommodations may be understood as tactical responses to unfavorable conditions rather than as a full abandonment of the project.

For international solidarity activists, the central question is how to forge a stance that advances the anti-imperialist struggle under these conditions. Those of us who support national sovereignty and self-determination should understand that what Venezuela is suffering relates to our failure to constrain our own imperialists.

Aiming the punch at the target. We can all agree that the Rodríguez government faces demands backed by overwhelming US power and unite to oppose the continuing imperialist siege. Those of us living in the imperial core must aim the main blow at the conditions that have necessitated such retreats.

We can all unite on actions to demand freeing President Maduro and “First Combatant” Cilia Flores from jail in New York City, ending sanctions, and returning stolen assets.

Differences among progressives. A useful distinction can be made between disagreements within the “left camp” and the fundamental conflict with imperialism. This does not mean suppressing differences or assuming that they are unimportant. Rather, it suggests approaching tensions among forces resisting imperialism in ways that seek common ground and avoid turning secondary differences into antagonistic ones.

Contextualizing criticism. Under pressure from Washington, the Rodríguez government deported former Venezuelan diplomat and minister Alex Saab and has established consular relations with Israel. These are among the bitter pills to swallow. Criticism of such actions may be entirely warranted, but should be assessed in light of the extraordinary constraints under which the Rodríguez government is operating.

A related example is Cuba, which is forced to tolerate a US military base and torture center in Guantánamo, has had the indignity of having the US secretary of war and the commander of the US Southern Command visit, and has introduced pro-capitalist economic reforms. Those reforms should be understood as “strategic adaptation” according to an article in Black Agenda Report. While not welcoming these accommodations to the US siege, international solidarity activists still unite with and defend Cuba.

Considering the alternatives. For example, the US and its allies waged wars of aggression and deposed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in 2024. There were left critiques of these leaders but, in all instances, there were no viable left alternatives to them; nor were conditions for their people improved by their removal. There is no “third way” in a war.

This suggests that the relevant question is not whether a preferable government can be imagined, but what forces actually stand to replace the existing government. For Venezuela, if not the Rodríguez government, what is the actual alternative?

After 26 years of siege and domestic polarization, the Venezuelan people yearn for peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction—more so than ever after the devastating twin earthquakes on June 24. For those of us abroad, we can only imagine the difficulties of life under sanctions from the US and its allies.

Regional trends. Developments in Venezuela reflect a broader shift in Latin America under the “Donroe Doctrine,” where Trump’s reactionary wave has flooded the former Pink Tide. Venezuela should therefore be understood in the context of this region-wide sea change.

Not since Maduro’s election in 2024 has a leftist won in the region. We have witnessed a succession of far-rightists replace center-left presidents in Latin America. Last year, Nasry Asfura replaced Xiomara Castro in Honduras, José Antonio Kast replaced Gabriel Boric in Chile, and Rodrigo Paz replaced Luis Arce in Bolivia. This year, Abelardo de la Espriella replaced Gustavo Petro in Colombia. Coming up in October is the Brazilian presidential election pitting Flávio Bolsonaro against incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with Trump actively interfering as he did in the other contests.

In all cases, the incumbents faced considerable criticism from the left. Yet whatever their shortcomings, the alternatives have been, or would be, less desirable.
Conclusion

Venezuela is not an isolated case. How progressives weigh criticism against solidarity, assess governments operating under US pressure, and consider the actual alternatives is increasingly relevant throughout the region.

Remarkably, given the intense pressure from the imperialists, the core Chavista leadership, the Socialist Party (PSUV), the civil-military union, the high courts and legislature, and the communes and grassroots organizations have all remained unified. Preserving that unity is particularly important; Bolivia’s experience of left fragmentation offers a cautionary example.

Our tasks are to educate the broader public about what is happening in Venezuela under extreme duress and to take collective action against the imperialist siege.

Between the Rubio State Department and corporate media, on one hand, and rejection of the Rodríguez government by some on the left, on the other, there is a vast intermediate terrain that needs to have a voice.

Whatever disagreements progressives may have with decisions made in Caracas, those decisions belong ultimately to Venezuelans. Our first responsibility is not to prescribe Venezuela’s political course, but to challenge the coercive power our own government exercises over it. The Venezuelans have not told us how to make our revolution; we should do the same for them.

Our tasks are to educate the broader public about what is happening in Venezuela under extreme duress and to take collective action against the imperialist siege. The Bolivarian Revolution has not failed. But the project urgently requires relief.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Roger D. Harris
Roger D. Harris is with the Task Force on the Americas and the US Peace Council.
Full Bio >

Trump Accused of Using Iran War Energy Crisis as ‘Cover for a Resource Grab’ in Venezuela

“Oil reserves in Venezuela will do nothing to lower families’ bills today,” said one campaigner.


President Donald Trump watches the US military’s assault on Venezuela unfold on January 3, 2026.
(Photo by Donald Trump’s Truth Social Account/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Aug 31, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump was accused over the weekend of exploiting an energy crisis of his own creation to make the case for what he dubiously characterized as “the biggest oil deal in world history” with Venezuela, a country that the US illegally attacked earlier this year in an operation to abduct its then-president, Nicolás Maduro.

“Trump drove up gas prices by launching a devastating war with Iran. Now he is using the energy crisis he created as cover for a resource grab of Venezuela’s oil,” Allie Rosenbluth, US program manager at Oil Change International, said in a statement on Sunday. “The announcement confirms his aggression against Venezuela was about securing power, profits, and fossil fuels.”

The newly announced agreement—which Trump and Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, said involved the development of fields with potentially 65 billion barrels of oil—came as gas prices in the US remained above $4 per gallon. According to AAA, this month is “poised to set a new record as the most expensive August at the pump,” as the national average price for a gallon of gas has been above $4 every day of the month for the first time.

Rosenbluth, like other analysts, questioned the impact of Trump’s deal with Venezuela on the US energy crisis, which has become a major political problem for the president and his Republican Party heading into the midterms.

Trump, who has significant fossil fuel company holdings, claimed the deal would “substantially lower gas prices” and help replenish the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is at its lowest level in decades after the president ordered the release of 172 million barrels following Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to US aggression.

Trump announced the deal with Venezuela on Friday, which marked six months since the US and Israel started bombing Iran.

“Oil reserves in Venezuela will do nothing to lower families’ bills today,” said Rosenbluth. “Increasing production of this extremely heavy and dirty crude would take years and billions of dollars. A bet on new Venezuelan oil production that may take a decade or more to materialize is a bet against solving the climate crisis already destroying lives and livelihoods every day. The immediate winners are the oil companies and private investors given access to Venezuela’s resources, while Venezuelans lose sovereignty, and communities in Venezuela and along the US Gulf Coast face more pollution and harm.”

“Trump’s attacks on Iran and Venezuela expose the vicious cycle of fossil fuel dependence: Wars secure access to oil, oil fuels violence and militarization, prices become more volatile, and fossil fuel companies profit while ordinary people pay,” Rosenbluth added. “Real energy security comes from phasing out fossil fuels and investing in affordable, renewable energy.”

Gerald Kepes, president of the consultancy firm Competitive Energy Strategies, noted in an interview with NPR that the US has no “government-owned operational capability per se in the oil and gas sector,” raising the question of “who’s going to operate on the ground?”

Chevron is currently the only US oil company actively producing in Venezuela. NPR reported that “there’s a private Venezuelan company involved in the deal,” but the details remain murky.

The Blessings of Wendell Berry in a World Cursed by Men Like Elon Musk

Musk indulges in the kind of fantasy that drove Berry to distraction (and to work)—all about control and domination, all done by the few to the many, utterly ignorant of context. Immodest in every way.

Wendell Berry stands in front of solar panels on his farm in Henry County, Kentucky in 2011.
(Photo by Guy Mendes / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Bill Mckibben
Sep 01, 2026

The Crucial Years

Wendell Berry, who died Monday at the age of 92, was such a great man that I hardly know where to start. He was on the very short list of the best writers of our time: His essays on rural America were the words that launched 10,000 farmers markets; his poems, the staple of many happy weddings (and I’ve peed in a dozen different bathrooms where the Manifesto of the Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front was framed above the toilet). If you’ve never read his short stories of the Port William Membership, or his finest novel, Jayber Crow, you can count yourself lucky that you’ll get to encounter them for the first time.

Berry was also, of course, politically engaged. I remember standing with him 20 years ago, at a protest against the Capitol Hill power plant that I’d asked him to attend. It was a bitterly cold day, and at one point he turned to me and smiled and said, “Do you think maybe they’ll arrest us soon?” He didn’t particularly like movements, but he understood the power of moral witness; he occupied the Kentucky governor’s office, in a protest against mountaintop removal coal mining, with a toothbrush and volume of Shakespeare in his pocket.

And, perhaps above all, his life was a work of both art and politics—his decision to give up a New York lit’ry career and to return instead to the Kentucky of his boyhood, settling along the Ohio River where he and his wife Tanya farmed and he wrote, embodying the commitment to place and community that animated his writing. (His family is asking that in lieu of flowers people might send a donation to the Berry Center that is carrying on his agrarian work).

I was very lucky that my wife handed me a copy of his essay collection Home Economics about 40 years ago, when we were still courting. If I hadn’t fallen under his spell I’m not sure I would have spent my life in rural America, red state and blue; I know that he taught me how to see my town and my county, and my country and my species, in new-old ways that have undergirded all my work. And I’m very glad that we became friends, visiting and writing back and forth. His droll good humor rarely faltered, in my experience. I did not agree with him at all times, nor he with me—though he had solar panels behind his house, for instance, he didn’t think they belonged on farmland, while I think they’re a boon to both farmer and planet. But we agreed on most things of real dimension, and I was always delighted to see in the mailbox a letter with the return address of Port Royal Kentucky. He was one of the last people with whom I had a true written, as opposed to electronic, correspondence. Sometimes he’d tap things out on a manual typewriter, but more often it would be in pencil, on lined yellow paper.

The most recent arrived in July, and after news about grandsons and granddaughters it contained his newest discovery, a 1940 volume titled Stops, A Handbook for Those Who Know Their Punctuation and Those Who Aren’t Quite Sure. He was recommending it to me on the grounds that it is the “only book of my acquaintance that makes grammar delightful,” but also because he’d noted that it was published by the press (now defunct) at Middlebury College, where I teach. So while the rest of us were figuring out how to enlist Claude to help with our composition, one of the best writers of our age was still enjoying sharpening his prose, just as he enjoyed sharpening the tools of his work in field and forest. “I’m writing this on the porch of the ‘camp house,’ still unwired, built, I think, in 1964, in the woods between the river and the road.” He died on that farm on Monday, surrounded by family.

I got the news about his passing even as I was trying to grapple with the latest from a man who will attract more notice when he dies, but less affection. Elon Musk is always advancing his own vision of the world, of course—in fact, he’s just pledged to spend $100 million helping Republicans this fall. Or maybe $200 million—neither would be a noticeable sum to a trillionaire, of course. Whatever good he did with his early advocacy for electric vehicles has now been undone 100 times over with his advocacy for the people who hate EVs and all the other things we need. (He’s, as of last week, building gas turbines to make more electricity for his right-wing Grok AI project, already polluting the air of Black neighborhoods in Memphis).

He offers the Nazi salute; we are at his behest settling thousands of refugees from white South Africa (and no others) in our country; his rancid racism has destroyed Twitter. It would be a pleasure never to think of him again, but because he’s the richest man in the world, one has to monitor what he says. And here’s Monday’s installment, from of course his own social media site:
Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them.

Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.


The disingenuousness of this is remarkable. Extremely severe extinction events have indeed happened just five times in the last half-billion years, which means it would be extremely unlikely we’d spontaneously come across one any time soon: Human civilization is, after all, just 10,000 years old. And yet of course we face one, not because of anything nature has done, but because we’ve filled the air with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, which his allies wish to continue indefinitely. “Just switching to sustainable energy” is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that, but since he’s a part of the political movement against this idea, he is now backing an alternative: “space satellites to control temperature,” which he further explains will be accomplished by a “super-intelligent swarm” of “sentient satellites, launched into Earth-Sun Lagrange points by mass drivers on the Moon.”

This is the kind of fantasy that drove Berry to distraction (and to work)—all about control and domination, all done by the few to the many, utterly ignorant of context. Immodest in every way.

But in Musk’s case it was accompanied by another revelation that began to emerge over the weekend. It turns out that the human toll of the horrific rampaging floods on the Nepal-Tibet border may well have been exacerbated by Musk’s decision to destroy the US Agency for International Development early in the DOGE assault on our government. USAID, in collaboration with NASA, helped maintain a network of monitors high in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Musk, in February 2025, “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” One casualty was apparently this network. As Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw America’s response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake, wrote this weekend on (ironically) X:
DOGE famously used keyword searches for terms like “climate” to terminate federal grants. Among the victims: a collab between USAID and NASA for flood prediction, early warning, disaster readiness, glacier inventories, and mapping dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal.


As Konyndyk added:
Could these programs have helped foresee or mitigate this week’s glacial flooding catastrophe? Hard to say with an outlier event like this. But that was their purpose.

Sadly, it’s hard to anticipate or mitigate climate hazards which your ideology has decreed do not exist.


Musk’s victims already number in the millions—a Lancet study predicts 14 million by 2030 as the indirect results of shutting down America’s humanitarian work, which puts him up there in the Stalin-Mao category, and almost certainly the most deadly human of this millennium. So maybe a few thousand more people hardly matter.

But contrast what Musk did with the actions of a principal at a school along the river. When a friend upstream phoned one of his teachers a blurted warning, he immediately evacuated the entire student body, saving at least 900 lives. Given a warning, he acted (precisely what the world has not done with climate change). “I thought that even if the warning turned out to be wrong, the worst it would cost us was one day of study,” Rajendra Dawadi said. “But taking it lightly could mean the loss of hundreds of lives.”

Principal Dawadi will spend the rest of his life going to the weddings of the students whose lives he saved, and I imagine there will be no small number of babies named in his honor. Elon Musk’s name will be cursed—the richest man in human history, who used his wealth and power to kill the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Here is a recent poem of Wendell Berry’s, published in The New Yorker less than a year ago and titled “The Loved Ones”:
The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.


© 2022 Bill McKibben


Bill Mckibben
Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He also authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."
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Wendell Berry, Writer and Activist Who Fought Corporate Takeover of US Farming, Dies at 92

“I was taught that taking care of land was one of the primary human responsibilities,” Berry said in 2009.


Wendell Berry is seen in an undated photo.
(Photo by Guy Mendes/Poetry Foundation)

Julia Conley
Sep 01, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The death of poet, activist, and conservationist Wendell Berry on Monday was called by one labor organizer “a loss of morality and clarity and compassion,” as admirers of Berry’s lifelong crusade to defend the environment honored his memory by sharing favorite poems and other works.

Berry died at the age of 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he spent decades writing about his farming the land, teaching, and writing about the need to fight “the concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands,” as he wrote in one of his best-known works, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

“The true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land,” wrote Berry in the essay collection, published in 1977.

He stressed that the “increase in overhead, debt, and dependence on machines” in the agricultural sector “is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance.”

The Unsettling of America was one of more than 50 works published by Berry, whose commitment to interdependent community-building, small farms, and the protection of nature was woven into his fiction, poems, and essays alike.



In America magazine in 2021, Jon Sweeney wrote in a review of What I Stand On, a collection of Berry’s writing, that “he writes about what he has experienced, what he has learned, and always with humility for what he does not know.”

“The natural world is his primary teacher: its rhythms, its largesse, its mysteries,” Sweeney wrote. “And in the essays, the natural world often reflects how change in humans is also natural, inexplicable, and possible. I think this is what many who love his writing appreciate most about Berry, whether they realize it or not.”

Berry traveled and taught briefly at New York University as a young man before returning to his Kentucky roots, remaining there for six decades. He told The New York Times in 2018 that writing and working in rural Kentucky “made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape. The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them.”

In his 1969 essay “The Long-Legged House,” named for the two-room cabin his ancestors had lived in, to which Berry returned to write his books and other works, he offered an early warning about the harm humans and their industries—agribusiness and fossil fuels—were doing to the Earth.

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world,” wrote Berry. “We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”



The writer Joyce Carol Oates said on social media on Monday that “long before it became a more familiar subject, Wendell Berry was conscious of the endangered natural environment; indeed, Berry helped to raise this consciousness.”

In addition to making his views on the environment and corporate control over the natural world known through his writing, Berry took part in direct actions to protest mining, war, and capital punishment.

He rallied against the US war in Vietnam, saying, “Peace is more important than victory,” and was arrested in 1979 for protesting the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant in Madison, Indiana. Thirty years later he was one of thousands who marched on Washington against the Capitol Power Plant, and two years after that, in 2011, Berry spent the night at a sit-in in the Kentucky governor’s office to protest mountaintop removal mining.

In 2009 he also withdrew his writings from the collection of University of Kentucky, his alma mater, to express opposition to the university’s $7 million donation from a coal producer; the school then named a dormitory Wildcat Coal Lodge.

“I was taught that taking care of land was one of the primary human responsibilities,” Berry told the student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, at the time. “In the long run, the top soil, the forests, and the woodland of this state will be more valuable than the coal deposits.”

Silas House, another writer who hailed from Kentucky, said that with Berry’s death, “another great light” had gone out.

House described the writer as “complex. Brilliant. Revolutionary.”

One Eye Squinted

Wendell Berry’s radical lesson for Christians: Live what you believe

(RNS) — The farmer-poet's life was a model for all Christians.

Author Wendell Berry speaks at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File)

Karen Swallow Prior

September 3, 2026

(RNS) — I was graced just once in my life by the presence of Wendell Berry, the farmer-poet who died earlier this week at age 92. 

Over 20 years ago, I heard Berry speak at the annual conference of the largest professional association for my academic discipline. I was intrigued that someone known for his Christian faith would be invited to speak in a solo session by an organization not known for being terribly friendly to Christians. 

If you’ve ever been to an academic conference, you know that attendance at individual sessions varies wildly. I know of panels with one attendee in the room who was not on the panel. A handful in a room is also fairly common. One never knows what to expect, especially at a convention as large as this, with hundreds of sessions over several days. Berry was assigned a good-sized room for his presentation, but as it turns out, the planners should have given him a bigger one. It was a standing-room-only crowd, and when he finished speaking, those who were sitting joined the rest for a standing ovation.

It had been ingrained in me since my early adulthood that Christians were despised and rejected by the world—especially within academia. I had internalized and expected such treatment. And indeed, I had many experiences that confirmed the bias.

But here was a Christian who was being feted and applauded by the very world I had been taught hated us. And let’s be clear: Wendell Berry was not feted and applauded because he tickled ears. His was not a milquetoast faith. Berry fiercely held and advocated convictions aplenty, enough to offend or affirm just about everyone. As I recall, in the reading that gained him such applause that day, he included a line that proclaimed the sanctity of unborn human life — and this in a crowd that statistically would be overwhelmingly and militantly pro-choice. And still they listened.

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RELATED: Wendell Berry, writer and farmer, was extolled by many as a modern-day prophet

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In his 2011 book, “Another Turn of the Crank,” Berry wrote:

If abortion is wrong, as I believe, it is wrong because it excludes some of our fellow humans from our care. But to think that abortion is wrong is to risk dangerous oversimplification if we cannot follow our thought to its logical conclusion. If we cannot justify violence to unborn human beings, then how can we justify violence to those who are born, or to the world that they are born into?

This single quote encapsulates why Berry did not fit into current categories of “liberal” or “conservative.” Agree or disagree with him, he aimed to be consistent. It is that consistency that leads both progressives and conservatives, as The Nation notes, to admire his writing.

Berry’s consistency was spread not only through his many words, but more importantly, through the way he lived his life.

Berry was a “culture warrior” by any definition of the phrase. He spoke and wrote against the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, mountain-top removal, the rise of agri-business and factory farming, industrialization and nuclear power (being arrested in 1979 for protesting at a nuclear power plant in Indiana). Berry was most critical of the excesses of capitalism and technology over the years as well. All of these are positions that naturally appeal to more progressive folks.

But to look more closely at Berry’s words and his work is to see that his views are rooted in a fundamental conservatism, in the traditional sense of that term, despite the fact that he rejected that label. (That term, like so many others, has become almost meaningless in present-day politics.) Nevertheless, Berry’s essential conservatism can be seen in an interview published in 2012 in which he said, “To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits.”

To conserve requires limits. Even good things — perhaps, especially good things — must have limits. And limits are rooted in purpose. 

Indeed, at the heart of Berry’s various causes, all of his writing, and the lifestyle he chose — that of a farmer rooted in the land and in one place for over 60 years — is the essential question of purpose. In his essays, stories and poetry, Berry was always asking some version of the question, “What is this thing (this work, this practice, this action, this institution) for?” In the title of one of his most-known books, he even asks, “What Are People For?”

In this book, Berry talks about the false distinction between work and art. He says he once thought of art as “a refuge” from the troubles of work. But he came to see that the subject of art — for him, poetry, fiction and other writing — but for others of us, perhaps, other forms of making — is our lives. “My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place.”

It may seem obvious that we all live in our places, but Berry’s gift is in helping us to see what has been too obvious, to lift the veil of the familiar, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley famously describes the work of the poet. 

One crippling symptom of the disease of modernity is to be absent from the present by always looking toward some future hope, aspiration, goal, to always be working for the weekend or “quitting time,” as Berry observes in “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food.” This tendency to overlook the present leads also to less of a sense of place. Berry models a unified sense of the present, place, work and art. “I no longer ‘go to work,’” Berry continues in “What Are People For?” “If I live in my place, which is my subject, then I am ‘at’ my work even when I am not working.”

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RELATED: Poet Wendell Berry bequeaths farming legacy to small Catholic college

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It might seem that it’s easier to see life, work and art this way when you are a farmer who lives on the farm. Yet, Berry’s invitation to all of us isn’t that literal. We all live in a place. And being fully present in that place — while working, resting, enjoying family, cultivating community and worshipping God — is the purpose of our lives and its subject.

Berry was present at that academic conference decades ago because, before becoming a farmer, he studied and taught English. When he became a farmer, he integrated that learning and way of being into his vocation. His work became the subject of his art, and that art filled volumes.

It is that sort of integrity — that wholeness — that made the man and his work so beloved. As Paul Kingsnorth put it in his recent memorial essay, Berry “actually practiced what he preached.” What he preached and what he practiced was hard. But it was good. We don’t need to be farmers or poets to strive to do the same. 

Indeed, the opening lines from Berry’s poem, “How to Be a Poet,” apply to whatever kind of work we might do, wherever we might do it:

Make a place to sit down.   

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon   

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have …

In the making, in the sitting down, in the quietness and in the dependence comes the humility that marked Berry’s life and character most.

Berry’s legacy from both his life and his many works lives on as many, many words on his passing show. But you don’t have to agree with Berry’s views or like his fiction, poetry or essays to recognize that his life was a model for all Christians: We are called to bear witness to what we believe is true with all of our life, for all of our life.

Wendell Berry: ‘Stay Away From Anything That Obscures the Place It Is In’

We lost a writer and poet this week who talked about how modern life is not only ecologically destructive but also traps us in a manufactured world, cut off from other living things. He suggested we slow down and learn to be quiet—to observe.


(Photo: Guy Mendes/via Counterpoint Press)

Robert Jensen
Sep 03, 2026

Common Dreams

I think of Wendell Berry every time I use my chainsaw.

Berry, the novelist, essayist, and unofficial poet laureate of the sustainable agriculture movement, died this week at 92. I met him several times through my association with The Land Institute and visited their Kentucky home to write a profile of his wife, Tanya. But my main connection to Berry is through his writing.



Wendell Berry, Writer and Activist Who Fought Corporate Takeover of US Farming, Dies at 92



Back to my chainsaw. I lived in cities most of my life, including when I was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. No matter what the subject of a course, I always found ways to bring Berry’s words into my lectures, both to give students examples of elegant writing and to prod them to think about what we take for granted in high-energy and high-technology societies.

Any hope for a decent future requires us to understand we don’t face discrete problems to be solved but rather a predicament to be confronted.

Berry called out the cruelty of the masters of the modern world, especially the ways they denigrated his neighbors and devalued the land in rural America. But he understood that we all are implicated in the degradation of the ecosystems on which our own lives depend. He connected the real costs of our many labor-saving and pleasure-seeking devices to that degradation. Yes, there are corrupt individuals and corrupting social systems to hold accountable, but part of the problem is our species’ acquisitiveness—what Berry’s mentor Wallace Stegner called “the things that once possessed could not be done without.”

In a 1989 essay, Berry didn’t exempt himself from this critique of the destructive habits that draw down the ecological capital of the planet.

“I still fly on airplanes, which have nothing to recommend them but speed; they are inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky, and scary,” he wrote. “I still cut my wood with a chainsaw, which has nothing to recommend it but speed, and has all the faults of an airplane, except it does not fly.”

We need to live with less, which is surprisingly hard.

“We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to ‘need,’” Berry wrote. “I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.”

But Berry doesn’t counsel despair: “I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.”

I live in a rural area today and cut firewood with a battery-powered chainsaw to help heat our home. I don’t kid myself that I’m environmentally friendly because my machine doesn’t run on gasoline; the mining and manufacturing that created that chainsaw are ecologically expensive. I am part of the problem, like almost everyone else.

I’ve learned that even with a chainsaw, cutting a winter’s worth of wood is hard work. (OK, full disclosure: I also have an electric log-splitter that a friend gave me and now feels essential.) But as I cut and split and stack, I think about the extra effort required by the handsaw and axe of Berry’s acquaintance. And I also think about something else I regularly read to students, his poem “How to Be a Poet,” which I told students could be titled “How to Be a Human Being.” Berry wrote about how modern life is not only ecologically destructive but also traps us in a manufactured world, cut off from other living things. He suggested we slow down and learn to be quiet, to observe: “Stay away from anything/that obscures the place it is in.”

Every time I read the next lines from that poem, I felt myself on the edge of tears: “There are no unsacred places;/there are only sacred places/and desecrated places.”

No one knows how to get there, including Wendell Berry. But his words help me face reality and live in some kind of equanimity.

We have desecrated most of the world to make possible all the things we imagine that we need, including my chainsaw and log-splitter. We’ve built a world in which our material comfort obscures the cost of that comfort. I agree with Berry: Either every part of Earth is sacred or none of it is, and the modern world treats the entire planet as either a mine or a dump.

Back to bad people and bad systems. Yes, we can point to the actions of greedy corporate executives and self-serving politicians, and to capitalism’s perverse practices that glorify consumption. Yes, the affluent do the most damage. But most of the people around the world now embrace and chase that affluence, and we shouldn’t turn away from our own role in Earth-destruction. We won’t solve the problem by pointing fingers at others. In fact, any hope for a decent future requires us to understand we don’t face discrete problems to be solved but rather a predicament to be confronted. We’ve created ways of living that can’t be sustained unless we embrace what my coauthor Wes Jackson (cofounder of The Land Institute and a longtime friend of Berry) and I call the policy of “fewer and less”: fewer people consuming less energy and stuff.

No one knows how to get there, including Wendell Berry. But his words help me face reality and live in some kind of equanimity.

One of my fondest memories from 26 years of college teaching is standing in front of students, encouraging them to appreciate the elegance of Berry’s writing and face the fear it can bring up. I will let that memory trouble my thoughts and comfort me.



Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Robert Jensen
Robert Jensen is an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin and collaborates with the New Perennials Project at Middlebury College. He is the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, coming this spring from Olive Branch Press. This essay is adapted from his book An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, co-authored with Wes Jackson.
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