headwaters summit

David James Duncan and Reciprocal Restoration

By Matthew Frank, 9-16-08

	David James Duncan speaking at the University of Montana Monday night. Photo by Matthew Frank.

There is of course no better person to commence (and, it seemed, consecrate) a conference on the confluence of water resources and climate change than David James Duncan, the Lolo-based author of The River Why, River Teeth, and My Story as Told by Water, a self-described small-scale activist who, as he wrote in My Stories, “has waded the flow of hundreds of wild streams, held thousands of trout and salmon in (his) hands, watched a million silver rises.”

Keynoting the Headwaters Summit that’s continuing over the next two days in Missoula, near the largest river restoration project in the world, Duncan said, “True restoration is a slow, careful, reciprocal conversation with nature.”

His hour-long reading Monday evening at the University of Montana was titled, Being Cool: The new key to a compassionate daily life. Duncan spoke of stories that empower instead of paralyze, “catch and release” as a philosophy of life, the Buddhist origins of the word “cool,” the scapegoating of global warming, corporate soullessness, and the natural compassion engrained in humans and animals.

Quoting the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Duncan said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” For eight years the Bush Administration has shirked this idea, Duncan said, but during that time some of the best conservation and river and stream restoration have occurred thanks to “hard-nosed and practical positions” taken by all sorts of people (including “the reddest of the rednecks") to get things done.

He cited the Montana Legacy Project, and also the O’Dell Creek Headwaters Restoration Project led by landowner Jeff Laszlo, through which a wetland drained more than 50 years ago for cattle fodder is being brought back to life. Deer, antelope, shorebirds, and moose have returned, Duncan said. There’s now a healthy trout every three feet of the creek’s flow, on which he witnessed a pale morning dun hatch. “Trout, like Buddhists, love cool,” he said.

In talking about climate change Duncan said he’s seen two things happen: we’ve become blind to the countless reasons to be encouraged, and the apocalyptic implications of climate change have become an excuse for further greed and stupidity, the issue itself a scapegoat. He described “the largest adult salmon kill in U.S. history” on the Klamath River that was blamed on global warming through the work of “hired scientific prostitutes.”

Duncan read the words of a handful of other writers and thinkers, including this passage by Carl Safina (in this month’s Orion), during which Duncan’s dry voice cracked and paused:

Nearly every just cause is a struggle between the good of the many and the greed of a few. But because greed has the advertising dollars to make selfishness fashionable, it sustains itself by turning enough people against their own self-interest. Foremost, our interest in hanging on to our money. Second, our health. Third, the options of our unborn.

Of all the psychopathology in the climate issue, the most counterproductive thought is that solving the problem will require sacrifice. As though our wastefulness of energy and money is not sacrifice. As though war built around oil is not sacrifice. As though losing polar bears, ice-dependent penguins, coral reefs, and thousands of other living companions is not sacrifice. As though withered cropland is not a sacrifice, or letting the fresh water of cities dry up as glacier-fed rivers shrink. As though risking seawater inundation and the displacement of hundreds of millions of coastal people is not a sacrifice—and reckless risk. But don’t tell me to own a more efficient car; that would be a sacrifice! We think we don’t want to sacrifice, but sacrifice is exactly what we’re doing by perpetuating problems that only get worse; we’re sacrificing our money, and sacrificing what is big and permanent, to prolong what is small, temporary, and harmful. We’re sacrificing animals, peace, and children to retain wastefulness while enriching those who disdain us.

In taking questions after his reading (which he at the last minute pared down from 50 pages to 15, he told me), Duncan returned to the idea of restoration: “It’s not a metaphor,” he said. “It’s a beautiful fact that water forgives us again and again and again.”

David James Duncan is working on a new novel, Eastern Western, “very much a comedy,” he said.

For more on the free Headwaters Summit 2008, click here. Click here for the agenda (PDF).

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