David James Duncan.
What work do you do?
I'm an author and essayist, a fly fisher and river guardian, a public speaker, and, compared to a lot of people, a contemplative.
How does it relate to the environment?
I've been breathing and drinking water and eating food and chasing fish all my life. I've tried to resist the industrial world's blights all my life. I have sensed the presence of benign forces, perhaps even invisible beings, all my life. The result has been a lot of gratitude that's found its way into my books. This, in turn, has earned a lot of money for NGOs, including the Sierra Club, Save Our Wild Salmon, the Triad Institute, and others.
What are you working on at the moment?
Two novels -- one about eros, one about reincarnation -- both set in the West. I'm also involved in the ongoing campaign to remove four Lower Snake River dams that are driving wild salmon from 5,500 miles of pristine Western streams forever. I write essays and memoir as the spirit and necessity move me. I'm raising a family. I'm enjoying a marriage.
How do you get to work?
I get up, trudge down to the kitchen, make a quadruple espresso, take it out the front door, walk 30 steps to the back side of the garage, scratch the nose of our horse, Rosie, and Rosie licks my hand in return. Then I trudge upstairs to my study on top of the garage, and set to work. My wife, Adrian, a sculptor, steps out the same door and walks 40 steps across the driveway to her studio. But it's a genuine commute. Once we're ensconced in our work, we hardly see each other all day, though we're not 50 feet apart. You've got to be darned focused to make a living in the arts.
What long and winding road led you to your current position?
In my teens, I became obsessed with finding a way to make a living that might serve others. I considered farming, various crafts, music, and being a fishing guide. As an 18-year-old hippie, I got strangely good at golf and thought about trying to be the first person to win the Masters wearing nothing but overalls, with a ponytail to my butt. I imagined I'd point out, as I donned the green jacket, that golf was invented in cow pastures by destitute Scots, and that a return to low-income golf would revolutionize the game. I would then begin to lead that revolution. It could've been a great life, that hippie golfing life! The makers of polyester would have wanted to assassinate me!
But in India, when I was 20, I had an intuition that my life's work would be storytelling, decided to try to write a novel, and at 28, finally did. That book, The River Why, let me start eking out a living doing work I loved. I've been pretty happy ever since.
Where were you born? Where do you live now?
I was born east of Portland, Ore., within view of the Columbia River near the mouth of the Columbia Gorge. I now live outside Missoula, Mont., in the highest headwaters of the same river, on a trout stream.
What's been the worst moment of your professional life to date?
It's a tie between two moments: the day I lost 12 short stories to the implosion of a computer and the day the Supreme Court appointed King George the Bush.
What's been the best?
To me, it's a great day every time I receive a letter from somebody who climbed inside one of my books, inhabited it for a while, learned a little something, and emerged grateful. In this sense, I have honestly had thousands of great days.
What environmental offense has infuriated you the most?
The U.S. destruction, at the end of the first Gulf War, of Iraq's 1,400 water-supply and sewage-treatment plants. Our Defense Intelligence Agency predicted, in 1991 studies declassified in 2001, that this destruction would lead to epidemic disease, especially among children. Knowing this, the [George H.W.] Bush administration destroyed Iraq's clean water anyway. Three hundred thousand tons of raw sewage began to flow daily into rivers. Sanctions on chlorine and medicine were then put in place, guaranteeing maximum casualties. DIA documents went on to describe epidemic outbreaks of diarrhea, dysentery, respiratory ailments, measles, diphtheria, meningitis, and hepatitis B. They describe a refugee camp in which four-fifths of the population came down with such diseases, killing them by the thousands. Eighty percent of the dead were children. A now-world-famous UNICEF study estimates that 500,000 Iraqi children aged five and under died as a result of the sanctions and fouled water between 1992 and 2000. That's one-twelfth of a Nazi Holocaust, unleashed mostly upon children, by us, our tax dollars. "Fury" is the wrong word. "Heartbroken for life" are the words.
Who is your environmental hero?
The word "environmental," I'm sorry, is not big or lovely enough to describe my heroes. Say it aloud. Environment. Hear the technoid ring? If Genesis began, "In the beginning, God created the environment" instead of "the heavens and the earth," the Bible would be out of print. The word's lack of musicality prevents those who lack tin ears from rallying around "the environment" with sufficient love and passion. What we seek to defend is a holiness.
That said, a few of my Earth-is-holy heroes are Lao Tzu, St. Francis, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Rumi, Ikkyu, Meister Eckhart, Bach, Chief Joseph and a ton of other Indians, the Beguine saints, the Dalai Lama and exiled Tibetans in general, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, César Chávez, Rachel Carson, Mother Teresa, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Terry Tempest Williams, Bono, Kathy Kelly, Gerri Haynes, Wangari Maathai, Pattiann Rogers, and Jane Hirshfield. I like it that Wangari worships trees as I do, Jane loves border collies as I do, Pattiann loves Bazooka bubblegum as I do, and all three lead lives based on an abiding love for what is nurturing and real -- and holy.
Sorry to harp, but there is a soullessness to the word "environmental" that lets even crappy preachers run roughshod over it. I cherish men and women who live as if the statements "The kingdom of heaven is within you," and "Hate ceases by love," and "Worship God as though you see Him" are true. And are these words by Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad "environmental statements"? Not really. They're much more. Those of us engaged in the earth's battle for survival need deeper, higher, more lovable descriptions of our daily efforts. The "environmental movement" is a caterpillar in the process of being transformed into a much more beautiful butterfly. It's time to let the e-word go and find a butterfly of a word.
What's your environmental vice?
That word again! Shite! But there's a vice. I curse a lot. When your nation's "leadership" kills children as policy, when your Congress gives extra power to a buffoon like Bush, when the heads of the EPA suck canal water up their asses with a soda straw, cursing is venting and venting is a sound yogic practice. Prevents tumors. So I'm not apologizing.
How do you spend your free time if you have any? Read any good books lately?
I walk on and in rivers maybe 150 times a year, sometimes fly fishing, mostly just walking and looking. I play music more days than not -- piano, tin whistle, and dulcimer. I love to write letters -- not emails, but real ink-and-paper letters -- swapping yarns and insights with a wide array of souls. Letters, for me, are akin to but way better than church. I could, in a week, put together a 500-page book of gorgeous letters I've received that might start a paper-letter-writing renaissance. But I'm having too much fun reading and writing them to stop and make the book. After I'm dead, maybe.
Good books I've read lately? William Kittredge's The Willow Field. Jane Hirshfield's After. Camille Helminski's The Book of Nature. Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. Paul's book is about the largest social movement in human history, which is rising up right now, in opposition to the powers of the WTO, the neocons, the World Bank, and the "free-market fundamentalists." The resistance has taken the form of hundreds of thousands of NGOs dedicated to conservation, human rights, indigenous rights, life, and health before profit. Many books describe the world in ways that break our hearts. Paul's book invokes a heartbreak from which light is pouring. He's a great storyteller, poetic or hard-minded as the case requires. The book moves from a litany of "free market" abuses and WTO crimes against the earth and humanity to the countless life-saving actions of literally millions of altruists now enveloping the earth and uniting in response. It gave me chills. Read it and rejoice.
Which stereotype about environmentalists most fits you?
My knee-jerk protests run toward the stereotypical: "WTO, drop dead!" "Neocons, get your heads out!" "Love thine enemies, do good to those who hate you: vote Republican!"
What's your favorite place?
Melting into the Eternal Now on the Snake River.
Photo: Steve Pettit
I like those moments -- wherever they happen to occur -- when I melt into the Eternal Now. Sometimes it happens in pristine wilds, but sometimes it happens in airports or city streets. And who cares which? Yeats said, "There is another world, but it is in this one." My experience exactly. There is horror in this world, cause for grief without end. But when we pay keen attention and live with compassion, we sometimes fall into a beautiful place inside the apparent place. You know when you've entered, because you suddenly feel loved -- intimately, totally, unconditionally -- though there is no one and nothing there to show it. That's it. That's my favorite place.
If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be?
Instituting by fiat is a neocon-type game. Screw that. I'm happy to be a pissant. Nature's power rises up from below, inexorable as karma. As Jim Dodge says, Nature bats last.
If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?
Keep trying. Keep serving. Worrying is praying for what you don't want. Keep trying to feel grateful for what is beautiful, even as you're trying to change what is deadly.
If you can't change what is deadly, bitch -- as eloquently and lovingly and effectively as you can. But then: listen! Then take the time to renew your peace, enjoy having five senses, watch the clouds move, until you feel your inner being return to gratitude -- the basic daily stance of all those who realize we did not create ourselves. You'll win some, you'll lose some, but above or beyond or within all of those efforts, you might now and then enter a mysterious clearing (if it hasn't happened already) and suddenly feel loved.
Duncan Shines
In my experience, environmentalists focus primarily on making their case with scientific information and hard-boiled facts, creating mountains of white papers, beige papers, fact sheets, talking points, and reports every year. How does your experience as a fiction writer inform your approach to environmental advocacy? What can the environmental movement learn from the world of fiction, narrative, and storytelling? -- Mary Anne Hitt, Blacksburg, Va.
David James Duncan.
Hi Mary Anne. (Note to Grist readers: Mary Anne used to live in Montana, and she and her husband Than and I used to plunk guitars and dulcimers together.)
I think we both know that people are, to this day, as moved by a good song or story as any other art form, and that almost no one has ever been moved by a heap of beige papers. I've read beige papers on mountaintop coal removal, for example, that left me feeling little more than lost in the ozone -- whereas some of the songs and stories on the same topic (including songs I've heard you sing) move me to tears.
The movement I belong to is not "environmental." It is a movement of those who want to tell and hear and sing and live the very best songs and stories that human beings are capable of producing and sharing -- and see where that leads us. Wherever that may be, it's gonna sound good when we get there and it ain't gonna be beige!
Can you talk a little bit more about your interest in the Snake River dam campaign and why people outside of the Northwest should care? -- T. Louise, Seattle, Wash.
The lower Snake River (LSR) contains four dams that bar the Pacific salmon's route to more than 5,500 miles of healthy salmon-spawning and -rearing habitat -- the most important salmon producing area in the Lower 48. In 35 years of operation, these dams have performed a new hysterectomy upon this great salmon womb. The dams do provide some low-cost barging that can be replaced by rail, but very little hydropower or irrigation -- because the Snake's a desert river with limited flow much of the year. The LSR dams have cost billions of dollars to maintain because they operate in violation of the Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts and several important treaties with the Northwest's Indian tribes.
The Pacific salmon is one of the most crucial foods on earth. They are the Eucharist of the tribes. They are holy. Many species are extinct, and the rest are 90 percent gone because of these dams. This issue is not crucial because of the 130 miles of river the dams turned into reservoirs; it's crucial because the dams block passage to an area nearly three times the size of New York State. In an era when the planet's fisheries have declined by 90 percent, the removal of these four ineffective dams is the largest workable salmon-recovery project available on Earth.
We want the four dams removed in a way that saves wild salmon, preserves farming communities, resurrects fishing communities, and honors tribal fishing rights in the Interior West. This solution is workable and potentially extremely profitable. We'll not stop working until it is accomplished. Next month a consortium of nearly 200 Northwest chefs are delivering a petition to Washington, D.C., decrying the loss of this superb and irreplaceable source of health and culinary delight. Some of the wheat farmers who used to oppose dam removal have joined cause with us salmon-lovers, realizing the harm that has already been done to our communities. The miracle meal after the Sermon on the Mount was loaves and fishes. Not one or the other. Both.
Amen to your critique of the off-putting word "environment"! If we need to use a word or a term for this movement, what do you suggest? -- Rev. Peter Sawtell, Denver, Colo.
I suggest people read Paul Hawken's earth-shaking new book Blessed Unrest and meditate on just how powerful our movement is before any of us attempt to name it. We're talking about something colossally heartening: a planetary spiritual awakening with countless biological and ethical and economic repercussions. It is my belief that humans, as a species, are collectively moving, in consciousness, from mere Reason to Intuition, and from hearts ruled by the head to heads ruled by the heart. I haven't thought of a name for that, but the "environmental movement" sure ain't it. So far I'm most comfortable with Hawken's term: "the movement without a name." Unnamed, we can't be co-opted.
It seems to me extraordinarily cruel to get pleasure from tricking a fish into biting into a hook and then "playing" with the poor creature until it's brought out of the water to die. I suppose it's less reprehensible if fishers actually eat these fish, but so many simply throw them back in the water after playing with them. How can one who feels so much love for nature get pleasure from this sport which seems to me to be so cruel? -- Bruce Rosove, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
I always thank those who hate fishing for leaving more water for me. My best answer to your question is in my new book, God Laughs & Plays, in an essay called "Agony & Hilarity."
Fishing is cruel indeed. Eating is cruel, often as not, for those of us who don't digest sand and gravel live off of other life-forms. It is also "extraordinarily cruel" that this interview is being powered by electricity that is wiping out migrating salmon and dumping mercury and sulfur on North America's waters and children and pregnant women. And it is extraordinarily naïve to think that anyone is going to want to protect ecosystems and natural processes about which they have no firsthand experience or knowledge. Read Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv or Gary Paul Nabhan and Steven Trimble's The Geography of Childhood on the separation of children from nature, and you might find it more reprehensible to sit here staring at a screen, or to drive a car, or to watch network TV, than to take a child fishing on a wild river. The fact is, those who have actually saved rivers and fish species have tended to be the fishermen and women who love them. Those who saved wetlands have most often been duck hunters. And so on. There is a mystery here that has to do with the words "love" and "sacrifice." This mystery has served the world well. Jesus caught, killed, cooked, and served fish to his disciples after the resurrection. I can't tell you how at peace this leaves me about my fishing.
Lord Byron felt as you do and condemned fisherfolk in his poetry. He also infected a large swath of Italy with gonorrhea. Fingerpointing is dangerous for all of us -- me most of all!
I am an avid reader of your work. What is your latest book? Can you tell us about it? -- Laurie Lane-Zucker, Great Barrington, Mass.
This letter writer is an imposter. He is my publisher, Laurie, trying to get me to plug our book, God Laughs & Plays. It's a terrible book about love and sacrifice, full of paradox and uneasy answers and yearning. No quotes from Lord Byron. I can't recommend it.
Is there a substitute for this ravaging consumerism sweeping the globe? -- Tom Brenner, Chicago, Ill.
Sure. Amory and Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken describe it beautifully in Natural Capitalism. Let's do it!
I read The River Why to my daughter just recently -- sure, she's only 10 weeks old, but I think she got most of it. The big river-conservation opportunity in California looks like agricultural water policy, which no one seems willing to take on. What do you see as the big opportunity when it comes to rivers and water? -- Bjorn Stromsness, Santa Clara, Calif.
I think your daughter just broke a record of some kind! I feel that rivers are inherently life-giving and lovable and are doing their jobs beautifully despite massive misunderstanding by a swath of humanity. The number of missed opportunities may be infinite and I'm just a pissant who likes to think small. But a lot of ants doing small good things can change their world.
I learned on Gratefulness.org of a sort of torpedo-shaped cylinder with fins, made in Australia, that manufactures hydropower in even very slow current, such as incoming and outgoing tides -- or desert rivers in summer -- without harming any life forms at all. I'd like to place a few billion of these around the U.S. and get rid of the worst of our 75,000 dams, mercury- and sulfur-spewing coal-fired power plants, and the earth-raping that accompanies the coal industry. Maybe a reader who knows these devices can write in and tell us more?
No mention of Edward Abbey in your list of favorites? Too destructive? -- Steve Young-Burns, Minneapolis, Minn.
I love Cactus Ed in many ways but am uncomfortable with his racism and his sexism. No worries, though. Al-Khizr recently told me that Ed has incarnated as a Chicano girl named Juanita who is 16 now, living in East L.A., raising women's- and Chicano-rights issues with ferocity and owning a pair of breasts Ed would once have drooled over. In short, Ed's immortal soul has modified its views on Mexicans and females radically!
Awareness is important -- so is really finding a spiritual connection to that awareness. Thinking, griping, and talking are important; compassion is important. Doing what you can, that's certainly important. But why is it so hard to successfully take all that to the next step and produce actions that are stronger than the destructive forces working against humanity and the planet -- especially when there may very well be more of us who care than those who don't? -- Val, Pittsford, N.Y.
I feel that too many of us spend too much time learning too much about destruction. The result is inertia and compassion fatigue. All the time we spend monitoring destruction is time that could be spent doing small, effective acts of compassion. I feel best, work best, and love most when I shrink the realm of possibility down to something that I myself can actually do, with my limited knowledge, limited scope, my whole heart, my small thin voice, my own two hands. Maybe try thinking small, instead of big, for a change. I'd rather find a june bug dying of thirst on my living room floor and take it outside than watch the BBC news.
You speak about a passion for love and harmony, but practically in the same breath you denounce politicians with an anger that seems to verge on hate. How do you reconcile this apparent paradox? -- Name not provided
The policies of the current administration are despicable and damaging. Yet I am to love my neighbor. That is a paradox indeed. I can resolve this paradox by not hating.
I really struggled with this for a while. What helped most was realizing that George Bush is a piteous pawn. Read Tolstoy's War and Peace, where he holds forth on Napoleon, and try to grasp his argument that "kings are the slaves of history." Bush is a total captive inside his own cruel carnival. He spouts ideology that isn't even his own. The symbol of this slavery is the teleprompter. Another amazing moment was when he was asked to state the most moving moment of his first four years in office. He replied that the best moment in four years of leading the free world was catching a seven-pound perch in his pond in Crawford. Why? Because he himself did it! No teleprompter. No Rove, Pearl, Wolfowitz. Just poor ol' George.
I can and do pity such a man and I love catching an occasional big fish, too. But for the damage his policies do to our world, it is not my place to forgive him. Forgiving those who do vast harm is God's job. I pay taxes. I have to support viciousness through taxes. I can't reconcile that at all except through protest "with an anger that seems to verge on hate." I hope you agree that anger and hatred are not the same thing. And I'm always grateful for this kind of warning. Thank you.
If we embrace the tenet that doing small things with love is the Way toward planetary healing, what is your vision or hope for drawing a largely disconnected urban/suburban culture into this process? -- Michael Miltner, Franklin, N.C.
I don't have any hope of drawing the disconnected into doing anything. The connected are the hope. I can occasionally turn a blank face in an audience into an enlivened one by telling a good story. I can singlehandedly clean all the trash off a couple of miles of the trout stream behind my house in just a few hours, while the disconnected sit indoors watching the tube with no idea the trash is disappearing. I don't resent them for work that gives me pleasure, or even for their contributions to the trash. But those lost in torpor are to be pitied, not joined in a torpor of our own.
Bless you for this wonderful piece, especially the last advice. It was very nourishing and healing. I have no questions and certainly no answers -- just gratitude for the space in the mysterious clearing where I am loved. Namaste. -- Karen Cairns, Blacksburg, Va.
Namaste. You remind me of the Rumi lines:
Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing
There is a field:
I'll meet you there.
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