The disaster in Nepal and the need to build resilience: An ecosocialist energy transition perspective

By Partido Lakas ng Masa

Published 7 September, 2026

[Editor’s note: Filipino socialist activist Khyl Ramos, from the Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM, Party of the Labouring Masses), will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2026, September 11-13, Magan-djin/Brisbane, Australia. For more information visit ecosocialism.org.au.]

Nepal and the Philippines share a fundamental climate condition: both are low greenhouse-gas emitters yet highly exposed to climate risks and suffer from climate disasters created by the rich countries of the Global North. In 2024, Nepal and the Philippines emitted only 0.63 and 1.51 tons of greenhouse gases per person, respectively, compared with more than 14 tons per person in the United States and Australia.

Global warming is a major driver of increasing glacier retreat and ice loss, contributing to greater melting and floods risk in the Himalayas. Warming alters the glacier–lake–mountain system in ways that make certain catastrophic events more likely. This is now a demonstrable pattern.

The chain is roughly: Global warming → glacier retreat and ice loss → more and larger glacial lakes → unstable ice, rock and moraine slopes → sudden collapse or overtopping → glacier lake outburst flood (GLOF) and flash flood → downstream destruction.

The most immediately vulnerable Hindu-Kush Himalayan countries, apart from China and India, include Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan, all with very low levels of emissions. The scale of the disaster, which spread across borders, demonstrates the stark reality of the existential climate emergency.

The disaster in Nepal’s Rasuwa District and other affected areas exposed entire communities, hydropower and border-trade workers, security personnel and downstream populations to severe and rapidly cascading risks. Nepal’s government, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), security forces, medical teams and emergency services mobilised search, rescue and evacuation operations and worked to restore roads, bridges, electricity, telecommunications and water services.

But the speed of the event, the narrow Himalayan valleys and communications failures left little time for warning or evacuation. Timure and Rasuwagadhi were severely affected, while transport, power, communications and Nepal–China trade were disrupted. Beyond the immediate destruction, displacement and prolonged disruption to hydropower, tourism, transport and local livelihoods will produce wider social and economic consequences.

The growing danger of cascading high-mountain hazards

The disaster in Nepal’s Bhotekoshi–Trishuli corridor reveals the growing danger of cascading high-mountain hazards. Ice or rock failures can trigger landslides and debris flows, block rivers, generate sudden surges or outburst floods and devastate downstream communities within hours. Cryospheric, geological and hydrological hazards can combine rapidly and cross national borders.

This exposes a deeper problem: resilience cannot mean simply responding more effectively after infrastructure fails. We must ask why communities and critical infrastructure are increasingly concentrated in landscapes exposed to interconnected and difficult-to-predict hazards.

Beyond individual infrastructure projects

Official assessments show that this was not a collection of isolated hydropower failures. The Ministry of Energy initially placed about 754 MW of generation capacity within the affected or damage zone.

Subsequent assessments identified around 431 MW of generation as lost or disconnected. According to preliminary reports from the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA), 431 MW of operating generation across 12 projects was immediately affected, including 406.1 MW of hydropower and a 25 MW solar plant. Fifteen hydropower projects under construction, with a combined capacity of about 470 MW, also sustained damage.

The affected system included generation facilities, substations, transmission infrastructure, roads and construction sites across the Bhote Koshi–Trishuli corridor. These included Rasuwagadhi, Chilime, Upper Trishuli 3A, Trishuli, Devighat, Sanjen Khola, Sanjen, Mailung Khola, Salasungi Sanjen and Langtang Khola, as well as the 25 MW solar plant and strategically important 220 kV Nuwakot substation.

This challenges conventional project-by-project infrastructure planning. Projects are usually assessed by installed capacity, financial returns, construction costs and electricity output. But the real risk is systemic:

What happens when multiple power projects, transmission corridors, roads, settlements and communities are exposed to the same cascading hazard?

The cumulative impact of development

The Himalayas and their river systems are shared ecological and social systems, not simply collections of sites for competing infrastructure projects. The key question is therefore not only how many megawatts a river or valley can generate, but what cumulative risks development creates across an entire river basin.

Hydropower depends on transmission networks, roads, bridges, communications and access routes; communities and economic activity depend on the same corridors. When one hazard strikes, these systems can fail together.

Damage to one component can disable others, while disrupted transport and communications can prevent emergency services and workers from reaching affected areas. The result is cascading infrastructure vulnerability — the overall failure can be far greater than the sum of individual project failures.

This changes the question of reconstruction. With preliminary national reconstruction requirements estimated at US$4–5 billion, and energy among the major infrastructure losses, resilience cannot mean simply rebuilding what existed before. Reconstruction must reconsider where, how and at what scale infrastructure is built.

From downstream response to source-to-downstream risk management

The disaster also exposes the limits of conventional rainfall-based flood warnings. Risk management must cover the entire hazard chain — from high-mountain sources to downstream settlements.

This requires transboundary monitoring and data sharing on glaciers, snow and ice, landslides, avalanches, seismic activity, river blockages and river conditions. Early-warning systems must integrate cryospheric, seismic, geomorphological and hydrological indicators rather than treating floods as isolated rainfall events.

It also requires anticipatory evacuation: clear triggers, safe areas, evacuation routes, community drills, sirens and redundant communications. Infrastructure and land-use planning must anticipate cascading hazards through alternative access routes, backup power and communications.

Community-based early-warning experience across the Hindu Kush Himalaya is crucial. Information alone does not save lives; communities must be able to interpret warnings and act on them. Real-time risk information must reach local decision-makers and communities in a form they can understand and use.

Observation by ICIMOD specialists after the Lhende Khola event reinforce this point: a cryosphere hazard can become a catastrophic settlement flood within hours. As the pace of cryospheric change accelerates, national institutions acting separately will struggle to keep up. Regional cooperation is therefore not optional but increasingly necessary.

Resilience requires regional planning

Nepal cannot address these risks alone. Himalayan river systems and hazards cross Nepal, Tibet/China, Bhutan, India and other states. Institutions such as SAARC and ICIMOD, together with other regional mechanisms, can provide foundations for cooperation — but their orientation must shift from fragmented development toward collective resilience and ecological sustainability.

This is not merely a technical question. It is political. Development is largely organised through competing national agendas, corporate investment and individual projects. Each project may appear rational in isolation while collectively increasing ecological risk and concentrating communities and critical infrastructure in vulnerable landscapes.

The alternative is democratic regional planning that meets social needs within ecological limits, directs public investment toward these goals, and ensures an equitable distribution of benefits and risks.

This principle has major implications for the energy transition. The objective cannot simply be to replace fossil-fuel electricity with more renewable megawatts. Renewable infrastructure can also reproduce concentrated vulnerability when built in exposed landscapes without basin-wide risk assessment.

Energy planning must therefore compare large projects with alternatives such as distributed solar, storage, microgrids and smaller-scale community energy. A resilient renewable-energy system should decentralise where appropriate, use robust interconnected networks, incorporate storage and microgrids, and be designed around community needs and participation.

Above all, it must reduce concentrated risk. If one valley, transmission corridor or substation carries a large share of regional generation, a single disaster can produce system-wide consequences.

The central question is not simply, “How much renewable energy can we build?” It is: What kind of energy system can meet social needs, remain within ecological limits and withstand cascading climate and geological hazards?

An ecosocialist approach to resilience

The lesson from Nepal extends across the Asia-Pacific. Climate disasters do not respect national borders, yet political responses remain overwhelmingly organised within them. Glacial instability, landslides, debris flows, river surges and flooding in the Himalayas illustrate a wider regional reality: typhoons, floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and sea-level rise increasingly affect interconnected communities and economies across borders.

Yet governments continue to compete for investment, energy resources, strategic infrastructure, supply chains and markets even when the ecological systems on which they depend are transboundary. Rivers, coastlines, fisheries, forests, glaciers, atmospheric systems and electricity networks cannot be governed effectively as isolated national assets. Infrastructure built upstream or in vulnerable coastal and mountain regions can transfer risks far beyond project and national boundaries.

The contradiction becomes sharper as governments expand military spending and prepare for geopolitical conflict. Enormous public resources are being directed toward weapons, military infrastructure and strategic competition precisely when societies urgently need investment in climate adaptation, disaster preparedness, resilient infrastructure, public health, food and water security, and just energy transitions.

This points to a different conception of security: human and ecological security rather than military security.

Regional cooperation should prioritise shared disaster-risk monitoring, early-warning systems, transboundary river-basin governance, climate-resilient infrastructure, regional energy cooperation, emergency response capacity and protection of vulnerable communities.

Resilience therefore requires democratic public planning at local, national and regional levels, linking the energy transition with ecological protection, disaster resilience, decent livelihoods and social ownership. It means placing social need before private returns, ecological limits before endless infrastructure expansion, regional cooperation before competitive development, and public investment before speculative finance.

A genuinely just energy transition is more than changing the technology used to generate electricity. It requires transforming how energy, infrastructure and natural resources are planned, financed, owned and governed. The goal is a socially just, ecologically sustainable and resilient energy system — and a regional model of sustainable and sovereign industrialisation.

The Nepal disaster makes the choice immediate. We must move from fragmented projects to interconnected systems; from downstream response to source-to-downstream risk management; from national competition to regional cooperation; from private accumulation to public investment; and from market-driven development to democratic planning based on social need and ecological limits.

The objective is not merely to protect infrastructure from disaster. It is to build societies that are less vulnerable to disaster in the first place.

Nepal Flood Disaster Exposes Cascading Threats In Himalayas – Analysis


Many homes and infrastructure near the Bhotekoshi River were damaged or destroyed during the devastating flash floods that left thousands of people missing. Copyright: Gautam/UNICEF

September 4, 2026

By Tauseef Ahmad and Sajid Raina

Key Takeaways:

A late-August cascade in the Nepal–China border highlands—ice, rock and debris, likely on the Lhende Khola—apparently dammed a Bhotekoshi tributary for ~18–19 hours, then burst on 26 August. UN figures cited: more than 1,000 dead, nearly 4,000 missing, ~11,800 rescued; roads, bridges, hydropower and the Tibet trade route were wrecked.

Analysts (Planet Labs, IRDR) point to mass failure, not a rain-only flash flood. Steep valleys turned the release into a debris surge. Experts say Hindu Kush Himalaya hazards now chain—glacier collapse, landslide, blockage, flood—so single-hazard warnings miss the start kilometres upstream. Glaciers there lost ~12% of area from 1990–2020; ice loss has doubled since 2000.

Planning should treat compound risk across borders (Chamoli 2021 is a parallel). Satellites reconstructed this event and watch new lakes, but cannot reliably time a collapse. Call is for mixed systems: imagery, gauges, seismic sensors, cameras, forecasts and community alerts—plus fewer unmonitored glaciers.



A catastrophic flood in Nepal that left thousands missing started with a collapse of ice and rock high in the mountains—a warning that disaster planning must prepare for chains of hazards, not isolated events, say experts.

The cascade of ice, rock and debris that tumbled through the Nepal-China border region last week probably blocked a tributary of the Bhotekoshi river, forming a dam, before bursting downstream with devastating force, according to disaster analysis.

The torrent arrived in Nepal’s Rasuwa district with little warning, ripping through settlements along the Bhotekoshi river system, destroying bridges, roads and hydropower infrastructure and cutting a vital trade route with Tibet.


More than 1,000 people have been confirmed dead, with almost 4,000 still missing and around 11,800 rescued, according to UN figures on Tuesday (1 September). Thousands are in need of humanitarian assistance, hindered by blocked roads and damaged bridges.

Experts say the disaster illustrates a growing problem across the Hindu Kush Himalaya: hazards that once might have been assessed separately—glacier collapse, landslides, avalanches, river blockages, floods and even earthquakes—can interact within minutes or hours, creating an event that is much larger than any one of them.

“Most people think of flash floods as being caused by heavy rainfall,” said Liz Stephens, professor of climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading, in the UK.

But in high mountain regions such floods can result from “complex chains of hazards, including landslides, avalanches and glacial lake outburst floods”, she added.

That complexity, says Stephens, makes early warning particularly difficult.
Tributary blocked

Analysis of satellite imagery from US aerospace and data analytics company Planet Labs suggests that a substantial section of glacier and surrounding rock collapsed at high altitude near the Nepal-China border, sending an enormous mass of ice, snow and debris towards the valley.

The collapse appears to have affected the Lhende Khola, a tributary that becomes part of the Bhotekoshi river system.


A rapid-analysis report released by the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) on Friday (28 August) said the event was likely caused by an “ice, rock and soil mass failure” rather than intense rainfall.

The material probably blocked the river for about 18 or 19 hours, forming a natural dam which then gave way on the morning of 26 August, unleashing masses of water, ice, rocks and sediment, the report said.

Funnelled by the steep Himalayan terrain, the surge became a fast-moving mixture of water and debris capable of carrying huge boulders, destroying bridges and erasing riverbanks.

The rapid-analysis report said the steep gradient and narrow valley accelerated and concentrated the flow, while the heavy debris load increased its destructive power.

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said the flood was “caused by glacier instability under the long-term effects of global warming” and described this as a “new and prominent feature of cryosphere disasters” on the Tibetan plateau.

A view of the Himalayas in Nepal

‘Bigger than the atom bomb’

Experts say these findings highlight the need for change in disaster monitoring.

A conventional flood warning system may detect rising rainfall or river levels. But a cascading cryospheric event can begin kilometres away, and at much higher elevation, with no obvious warning for communities downstream.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) argues that disaster planning in the region needs to move away from treating hazards independently.

“With the nature of disaster risks rapidly mutating in the region, disaster risk reduction strategies can no longer evaluate hazards in isolation,” Saswata Sanyal, a disaster-risk reduction specialist at ICIMOD, told SciDev.Net.

“The era of preparing for a single, predictable hazard is over.”

The disaster comes just over a year after another major flood affected the same Lhende Khola-Bhotekoshi system.

In July 2025, flooding in the area was linked by Nepalese authorities to a glacial lake outburst. The recurrence is raising questions about whether the river corridor is becoming a particularly exposed pathway for cryosphere-related hazards.

A 2026 ICIMOD assessment found that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya lost about 12 per cent of their area between 1990 and 2020, and the rate of ice loss has doubled since 2000.

As glaciers retreat, new lakes can form, slopes can lose the support provided by ice, and frozen ground can become unstable. A glacier collapse can then entrain rock and soil, turning an initial ice avalanche into a debris flow capable of travelling tens of kilometres.

Research published in April on Himalayan hanging glaciers found that rising temperatures and shifting regional precipitation patterns are reducing glacier stability and increasing the risk of ice avalanches. The authors identified more than 219 hanging glaciers in northern India’s Alaknanda basin and warned that break-offs can cause physical damage and trigger secondary hazards, including glacial lake outburst floods.

A separate study on ice-rock avalanches in the Himalayas similarly concluded that such failures can rapidly transform into high-velocity debris flows, while stressing the difficulty of identifying precursors, or warning signs.

Geohazard expert Basanta Raj Adhikari, director of Tribhuvan University’s Centre for Disaster Studies, in Nepal, described the 26 August flood as an unprecedented event in the region.

“In my research career, I haven’t seen a bigger flood event than this in the Himalayan landscape,” Adhikari said, attributing its extraordinary force to the enormous volume of ice and debris that descended from the mountains.


“I calculated the amount of energy, which is bigger than the atom bomb that happened in Hiroshima,” he added.

He said the scale of the event demonstrates the immense destructive potential of cascading ice, rock and water hazards in the Himalayas.
Neighbours at risk

The disaster also raises questions about disaster preparedness in the wider region.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya stretches across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, as well as Nepal and the Tibetan plateau, connecting communities through river systems that cross political boundaries.

This infographic was designed using AI.

In India, the 2021 Chamoli disaster demonstrated the destructive potential of a similar ice-rock cascade. A massive collapse in Uttarakhand sent water, ice and debris through the Rishiganga valley, killing more than 200 people and destroying hydropower facilities.

Scientists are increasingly treating such events as compound hazards rather than isolated disasters.

Across Bhutan and Nepal, glacial lakes are being monitored for possible outburst floods. In Pakistan, rapidly changing glaciers and high-mountain valleys create a complex combination of flood, landslide and avalanche risks.


A recent UNDP assessment of human security in the Hindu Kush Himalaya warned that climate impacts can cascade across interconnected food, water and energy systems, creating compound threats that are greater than individual hazards considered separately.
Satellite warnings

Experts say the Rasuwa disaster also provides a powerful demonstration of the potential—and limits—of satellite technology.

Images shown above were captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission showing the Nepal glacier collapse and flood before and after (24/27 August 2026). Source: ESA (CC BY 4.0 INT)

Satellite images helped scientists reconstruct what happened in an otherwise extremely difficult-to-access area. High-resolution imagery can reveal changes in glacier geometry, newly formed lakes, landslide scars, blocked rivers and altered drainage channels.

In the aftermath of the flood, authorities have used satellite observations to monitor newly formed lakes upstream that could pose additional risks if their natural barriers fail.


But identifying a disaster after it happens is very different from predicting it beforehand.

Ishfaq Ahmad, a satellite scientist based in Nepal, told SciDev.Net that while scientists can identify and assess potentially dangerous glacial lakes using satellite imagery and visual observations, predicting the exact moment when a lake will burst remains a challenge.

“Glacial lakes can be seen with our eyes and through satellite data. We can assess whether the lakes are potentially dangerous or not,” Ishfaq said.

But he said sudden triggers, such as rockfalls or ice collapses, can occur too rapidly for orbiting satellites to detect them in advance.

Satellites do not continuously observe every Himalayan slope at the resolutions needed to reliably detect an imminent collapse. Clouds can obscure optical imagery, while revisit times can leave gaps between useful observations.

Ground sensors can provide continuous measurements but installing and maintaining them is challenging in remote, high-altitude terrain, where field observations remain sparse.

The answer, therefore, is unlikely to be a single technology.

Scientists increasingly argue for combining satellite imagery with seismic sensors, river gauges, automated cameras, weather forecasts, glacier monitoring and local community warning networks.

ICIMOD has noted that only a fraction of Himalayan glaciers are adequately monitored, leaving large areas as blind spots. It has called for better data and for scientific information to be translated into decisions that communities can act on.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Global desk.


About Tauseef Ahmad
Tauseef Ahmad is a freelance journalist based in South Asia. His work has appeared in Al Jazeera, TRT World, The Polis Project, The Guardian, and other publications.
View all posts by Tauseef Ahmad →



About Sajid Raina
Sajid Raina is a freelance journalist based in South Asia. His work has appeared in The Guardian, TRT World, Diplomat, News International and other publications.
View all posts by Sajid Raina →

 

'We have to contribute to nature': Meet the communities 'marrying glaciers' to bring new water to life

Copyright Evelyn Ann-Marie Dom

By Evelyn Ann-Marie Dom

Published on 03/09/2026 - EURONEWS

Local communities in Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan are turning to the Indigenous practice of glacier grafting as water shortages take hold.

The world's highest peaks are located in the Himalaya and Karakoram mountain ranges, part of a vast mountain belt stretching across Asia. But beneath their grandeur lie some of the planet's most fragile ecosystems.

As temperatures continue to rise, glaciers are melting faster, increasing the risk of glacial lake outburst floods and disrupting the natural flow of meltwater. As glaciers shrink, less water is released in spring and summer, when communities need it the most.

In the Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan - an autonomous territo

What is glacier grafting?

Glacier grafting is a traditional method in which local communities create new, artificial glaciers in high-altitude regions to create a reliable source of water for irrigation, livestock and daily life.\

The technique is often referred to as a glacier marriage, when ice is collected from so-called male and female glaciers and transported to a new grafting site, chosen by the community, to create a new glacier.

The male glacier is typically grey in colour and contains debris such as soil, sand and pebbles. The female glacier, by contrast, is lighter, almost transparent, clear from debris and impurities and produces more water.

Dozens of porters collect pieces of ice from both male and female glaciers. They then transport the ice to the newly-selected grafting site in wooden baskets on their backs, travelling by car as far as the terrain allows and then continuing on foot.

The ideal grafting site to create a new glacier needs to be at an altitude of at least 4,000 metres, have a high permafrost level, have maximum wind explosure and minimum explosure to sunlight, and ideally should be north-facing, Dr. Zakir Hussain Zakir, Director of Planning and Development at the University of Baltistan, explains to Euronews.

Two clay pots holding water from the river Indus separating "male" and "female" ice pieces at a grafting site. Baltistan Culture & Development Foundation (BCDF)

Once at the site, locals will have either dug a well or located an existing cave to place the ice in. The male and female ice pieces are placed inside, separated by clay pots holding water from the Indus river.

The ice is then covered with layers of sawdust, charcoal and apricot kernels. The process is repeated several times, creating multiple layers to protect and insulate the ice.

"It is a marathon activity," Dr. Zakir continues, explaining that the process can take up to 48 hours from ice collection to planting.

"From the collection of the ice pieces from the source to the destination, the ice has to be kept continuously moving," he adds, explaining that the ice is not allowed to touch the ground at any time during the journey.

While the site is surveyed and preparations are carried out during summer, the actual grafting takes place in October. By then, temperatures at altitudes of at least 4,000 metres will have dropped below zero, but there will be no snowfall yet.

Once the new glacier is exposed to several snow cycles, it will slowly start to expand. If successful, the glacier will start to root and produce water after about ten years. After roughly another decade, the glacier will have grown into a reliable water source.

Dr. Zakir highlighted two other techniques derived from glacier grafting: ice towering and avalanche harvesting.

Ice towers, also called ice stupas as their conical shape resembles a Buddhist sanctuary, act as ice reservoirs designed to melt slower as its surface area is not fully exposed to the sun. Developed in Ladakh, the technique involves passing glacier meltwater through underground pipes and spraying it into the freezing air.

Avalanche harvesting, a recent innovation, involves the installation of a mesh net in a narrow gorge to capture and store snow and ice from avalanches.

Relat

An ecological practice rooted in tradition

Although glacier grafting was only revived in the 1990s, the ecological practice goes back centuries and is deeply rooted in local tradition, knowledge and ancestry.

"The history of glacier grafting is largely oral, not written, although some books contain references [to the craft]," Nazir Ahmed, CEO of the Baltistan Culture & Development Foundation, explains to Euronews.

The history of glacier grafting is believed to date back to the 14th century. According to historical accounts, the Persian Sufi saint Mir Syed Ali Hamadani is said to have grafted the first glacier as a defence tactic to help deter invaders.

Porters travelling up to glacier grafting site, carrying ice pieces in wooden baskets on their backs. Baltistan Culture & Development Foundation (BCDF)

The unique craft is deeply intertwined with local traditions, including reciting verses from the Quran, singing a folk lullaby to the 'baby' glacier, and performing spiritual rituals.

"There are three myths," Ahmed explains. "One is that you need to carry the ice at night [...]. It is said that by carrying the ice during the day, God will not be happy, as you are bringing a new object in the territory."

"Secondly, when you're carrying the ice, you cannot talk to each other, otherwise you will become mute."

"And third, when the ice is buried at the top, you cannot see it for at least two years, otherwise, someone will die in your family," Ahmed concludes.

While these beliefs are rooted in mythology, the culture and heritage foundation CEO explains that they also serve a practical purpose.

Carrying the ice at night decreases the chance of disruptions and minimises melting because temperatures are at their lowest, while travelling in silence helps ice porters maintain a steady pace. Once buried, the newly planted ice must be left undisturbed for several years, allowing it to properly root while protecting it from being taken or disturbed by others.

The Baltistan Culture & Development Foundation (BCDF) is a local organisation formed by the people of Baltistan, dedicated to preserving and restoring heritage, promoting local culture and traditions, and protecting the region's environment.

In 2025, the BCDF received funding from the United Kingdom's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), allowing the foundation to expand its projects.

"Through the project, we grafted ten glaciers in different villages in Baltistan, six ice towers in different villages and one botanical garden in the University of Baltistan," Ahmed explains.

Prior to the funding, the foundation could only undertake smaller-scale projects, transporting up to 200 kilograms of ice. But it's now able to transport more than 1,000 kilograms of ice at a time.

The foundation has not yet received funding from either the provincial or federal government, although efforts are underway to have glacier grafting recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Relate

'How can the life giver itself be lifeless?'

From start to finish, the community plays a key role in the practice. No glacier can be seeded without the community's consent first, and once the grafting is complete, locals take on the responsibility of caring for the 'baby' glacier. They monitor its progress, report on its development and add snow when necessary to help it grow.

The Passu Glacier south of Passu village in Upper Hunza, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. 13 June, 2026. Evelyn Ann-Marie Dom

"We have to contribute to nature, to the climate, to the environment," Dr. Zakir says. "Because we are consuming snowmelt water for our entire life, and if we don't contribute something, it would be unjust".

He explained that this responsibility is rooted in the region's ancient civilisation and its spiritual foundation.

"In Bonism, we consider that all forms of water are sentient beings," he said. "Water is a life giver, so how can the life giver itself be lifeless?"

Young people are needed to continue the glacier grafting tradition

With community at the heart of the practice, youth engagement is crucial to keeping the tradition alive, especially as the region faces the growing impacts of climate change.

But Nazir Ahmed points out a growing challenge: many young people leave their communities to move to urban cities.

"If we talk about Skardu district, almost over 90 per cent of people are in school. And then after graduation, they usually go to cities like Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad for further study," the BCDF CEO explains, adding that grafting is also a labour and time intensive practice.

"I don't see this as a decline in environmental concern," Zeeshan Abbas, team leader at the youth-led initiative Siachen Sherpa, points out to Euronews. He says that alongside climate change, young people are increasingly concerned about issues such as education, employment, economic security and migration.

"Many young people understand that glaciers are changing and that climate change is affecting the region, but few have the resources, opportunities or institutional support to participate in field projects".

Abbas also believes the way climate action is presented needs to change.

"If we tell young people that climate change is a crisis, they can become overwhelmed," he said. Instead, he argues, younger generations should be empowered to see themselves as capable of developing solutions.

According to the 19-year-old, his generation holds a powerful and unique position in society.

"We inherit Indigenous knowledge from our communities, but we also have access to modern science, digital tools and technology, and global networks," Abbas says, highlighting how Siachen Sherpa aims to bridge these two forms of knowledge.

"Local communities understand the landscape through generations of experience - where water flows, how the terrain behaves, where freezing occurs and how seasonal conditions change. Technology helps us complement that knowledge through satellite information, GPS, terrain and altitude data and field observations," he added.

"Young people should not be treated as only victims of climate change, they should be given the opportunity to become researchers, innovators, field practitioners and decision-makers," Abbas conclude

Related

Countries contributing less to global emissions often suffer more

Pakistan's Third Pole glaciers irrigate 90 per cent of agricultural land and sustain more than 220 million people, according to the World Economic Forum.

The Third Pole, or the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalaya mountain range contains the world’s largest volume of frozen freshwater outside the Arctic and Antarctic polar regions.

Experts warn that human-caused global warming is placing unprecedented pressure on these regions, with floods, landslides, avalanches and droughts increasing in frequency and intensity.

"In Northern Pakistan, the melting of the Hindu Kush, Karakoram, and Himalayan glaciers due to rising temperatures have created 3,044 glacial lakes in the federally-administered territory of Gilgit-Baltistan and province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa," the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the leading UN organisation fighting to end the injustice of poverty, inequality and climate change, wrote in a statement.

People walking through the village of Sost, with a vast mountain range as backdrop in Upper Hunza, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. 12 June, 2026. Evelyn Ann-Marie Dom

"It is estimated that 33 of these glacial lakes are hazardous and likely to result in glacial lake outburst floods," the statement further read, adding that such flooding can release millions of cubic metres of water and debris in just a few hours.

Last week, a glacial collapse sent large amounts of rock, ice and meltwater into valleys below, triggering a tsunami-like flood in Nepal and Tibet.

There are several causes of glacier collapses. On the one hand they can be normal, cyclical processes. Increasingly, though, they are being driven by human-induced climate change.

Despite contributing less than 1 per cent of global emissions annually, Pakistan is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Meanwhile, a 2025 study revealed that the world's wealthiest 10 per cent are responsible for two-thirds of global warming since 1990.

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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