Two Men

One as great as America ever produced, and the other Elon Musk

Wendell Berry, who died yesterday 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 ten thousand 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 twenty years ago, at a protest against the Capitol Hill powerplant 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 forty 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 yesterday, 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 a hundred million dollars helping Republicans this fall. Or maybe two hundred 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 a hundred 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 rightwing 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 yesterday’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 ten thousand 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 Feburary 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.

In other energy and climate news:

+The Nepal disaster continues to yield important writing, and insights. Wen Stephenson, who has traveled widely in the region, has an interview with Nepali climate expert Manjeet Dhakal, who says, among other more important things:

Maybe this is a small thing, but there is also the electric vehicle exhibition going on in Kathmandu. [EV sales have surged in Nepal] and many of these new vehicles were there in the port of entry at the border and were completely washed away.

He does not sound optimistic about international support for recovery

What we have seen in the past is, even though the world responds when these events are in the headlines, it fades away after a few months. The 2022 flood in Pakistan, it was all over the news, and then we saw the fate in terms of the scale and the level of support they received.

Climate scientist Michael Mann also has an important account of the tragedy.

The glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And it was the exclamation point on a summer of extremes, illustrating with a sole unnatural disaster the apocalyptic future that lies in store if we fail to take dramatic climate action.

As the death toll continues to mount – the latest count showed more than 900 dead and more than 4,400 individuals missing – this event has crystalized the climate crisis for many.

One reason is undoubtedly the sheer horror of what unfolded here. Chilling surveillance and eyewitness footage captured the horrific moment a 40mph wall of “liquid concrete” violently overtook fleeing crowds, instantly swallowing entire families and burying them beneath feet of thick, red-soaked silt. Another reason, however, is that the connection with climate change was unassailable in this case.

The torrent was the direct result of warming-induced glacial collapse, which dumped millions of tons of rock, unleashing a high-velocity wave of mud and debris. The new reality in the era of human-caused climate change, a CNN headline put it, is that “living downstream from a glacier has become a deadly liability”.

+Sammy Roth has a typically fine account of energy policy making in Sacramento (short version: opaque) but it really cheered me up to read about my Third Act colleagues speaking truth to power

I’d been told that the Senate Local Government Committee would convene around noon to debate Assembly Bill 1156. But after 20 minutes waiting in a crowded hallway, word circulated that the hearing was delayed — nobody knew for how long. I started to understand why all the industry trade associations and lobbying firms have offices within walking distance of the Capitol. Good luck to any normal person who wants to watch government in action, let alone make their voice heard.

I decided to get lunch. As I left the building, though, I spotted a group of climate activists with Third Act Sacramento. They were marching and distributing flyers.

“We’re trying to let [lawmakers] know that they are part of the solution, and that they’ve got to take major action,” Third Act organizer Katherine Keeney told me. “Newsom wants to tout himself as an environmentalist, but he’s backpedaling on everything. So we’ve got to keep hitting him. We can’t give up.”

And they got much of what they came for—as Roth reports, a passel of clean energy legislation now sits on Gavin Newsom’s desk.

+Many thanks to Damian Carrington at the Guardian. After his reporting earlier this decade on the massive methane leaks from oil and gas wells in Turkmenistan, he now can report that they’re going to do something about them.

The Guardian revealed in 2023 that Turkmenistan was the worst country for methane mega-leaks. Sources in Turkmenistan said this scrutiny was the “critical step” in leading the secretive and authoritarian government to engage with foreign partners.

A “super-emitter” leak, the escape of tonnes of methane per hour from a single valve or pipeline, heats the planet more than the emissions from a million SUVs or an entire coal-fired power station.

Turkmenistan had now stopped eight leaks by repairing corroded pipes, faulty wells and failing flares. The work was an “incredible first step”, said the UN, but much remained to be done.

+David Helvarg, veteran ocean defender, with a reminder that the November election will have a lot to do with the fate of the earth’s oceans.

+Not just America. As Lori Guetre reports, the oil-soaked Canadian province of Alberta is about permit a giant data center that will

emit roughly 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) in greenhouse gas emissions over 30 years. From one project. That's about 15% of Canada's annual emissions, cumulatively, from a single facility - the equivalent of adding about 700,000 gasoline cars to Canadian roads for the next thirty years.

+Bolting solar panels over a couple of California irrigation canals didn’t just produce a bunch of electricity, it also—according to Hugo Rojas—came with other benefits

Evaporation beneath the arrays fell by 50 to 70 percent against those open reaches.

Growth of algae and aquatic weed dropped by about 85 percent, and that is the figure with an operating budget attached. Weed control is a bill an irrigation district pays every summer, in crews, in machinery, and in water a clogged channel never delivers.

Meanwhile, from Brendan Brown, a reminder of who you want in your solar farm and who you don’t. It would, I think, have cheered Wendell Berry, who wrote with his usual wisdom about lambing, to read this:

Goats, the more famous eaters, are a menace on a solar site. They climb, and a herd of goats will treat tilted panel rows as a playground, damaging the glass with their hooves. Worse, goats chew for entertainment, and a solar farm is thousands of acres of exposed cabling. As one Penn State extension guide puts it dryly, goats are not recommended for solar arrays, with reports of damage from both climbing and chewing.

Cattle fail the other direction. A cow is simply too tall and too heavy for standard panel rows, unable to graze the ground beneath the arrays and perfectly capable of bending mounts and equipment by leaning on them. Panels can be mounted high on pedestals for cattle, but that has to be designed in from the start, at extra cost.

Sheep pass every test. They fit under the lowest rows, they eat grass rather than infrastructure, they move calmly, and their appetite is relentless. As one North Carolina extension specialist summed it up: cows are too tall, goats climb, and sheep are the one domesticated grazer that can take care of business without damaging the goods.