Just a Couple of Reasons Why We Love David James Duncan

His interview in 1859 Magazine pretty much sums it up…

He has hope: "Where’s the hope? The Columbia/Snake system drains over a quarter square million miles of the continent. Its surviving wild chinook, sockeye salmon and steelhead migrate farther and more significantly higher, into the mountains than any other salmon species. The purity and high elevation of their wild Idaho and eastern Oregon and Washington birth streams make them more capable of surviving global warming than any other salmon species. That’s my big hope. Yet these salmon are endangered, and bound for extinction, due to little more than the brokenness of our political and information systems."

He’s not afraid to speak truth to power: "Because the BPA runs the dams, and greases Patty Murray’s political machine, Patty Murray has convinced the Obama administration to accept the biological opinion of the Bushies though that bi-op was driven by nothing but neocon superstition and is not biologically or scientifically or spiritually true at all. The removal of the lower Snake River dams would constitute the largest workable salmon recovery in the world at a time when the ocean’s fisheries have been reduced by 90%. We’re talking about saving our childrens’ freaking lives here. But our “news” and politics have become so manipulative and rhetorical and virtual that they aren’t capable of making contact with reality any more. Acknowledgements of physical reality would occasional be reassuring from our so-called leaders. Expressions of outright love, like those you find in the best science, poetry, film, prose, oral accounts, children’s drawings, local watershed group celebrations, of wild rivers and salmon, would be even better."

He’s funny: "Convince Congress to remove those four damned Snake River dams. Maybe with a filibuster in the meter of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham.
I do not like Snake River dams!
I do not like them Sam I am!"

And his words are incredibly poignant: "One day we’ll become worthy of our incredible world and the souls that tell our hearts to beat and the wild salmon that find the fire in water and use it to create astounding life. In the meantime, I stand in earth’s flowing water as if my life depended on it because, for me, it really does."

Oh, and he rowed through a wheat field to save salmon...

From your friends at Save Our Wild Salmon — Thank you David!