The Action Needed

Eric Wagner’s essay and Tom Reese’s photographs do an excellent job in complementing one another in their book, Once & Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish (2016). This is a book of many stories: an ancient tribal story of how the river was once restored, stories of the river being poisoned to make a buck or make a fortune, and stories of the people working hard today to bring life back to the river. Wagner points out that although the river has been trashed by industry and the average citizen for over a hundred years, there is hope that it can make a comeback with a little help from its friends and politicians whose brains are for once inside their heads. The Duwamish is, after all, Seattle’s only river, and it deserves a chance to regain its dignity and once dynamic character that supported the Duwamish people long before white people flooded the region with commerce and homesteading. The cleanup will not be an easy one; what is left of its natural beauty can still found here and there, like a body from a former life.

The major challenge in saving the Duwamish River is that industries have made it a river of many poisons and have clogged its once fertile banks with an unrelieved collection of manufactured grotesques. Wagner shows his readers that the river deserves our respect, attention, and help in retrieving some of its character that made it a wonder to behold in earlier times. Wagner is convinced that when the people get to know it, they will grow to love it like he does. Natural beauty is like any beauty, it can inspire love and deepen the flow of our consciousness.

Once and Future River catalogues what we lost in destroying the lower Duwamish and what joy can be felt in restoring it. Tom Reese and Eric Wagner create poetry from a riverscape we have damaged and ignored for over a century. But the times are a changing, as Bob Dylan once sang, and hope can be generated from neglect. Even an ancient river can flow into resurrection. We have not forgotten that from decay can emerge a green fertility. And while the poet Dick Hugo wrote once that the river’s curves are slow and sick in many of his poems in tribute to the river, he would be overjoyed to learn that the river may regain much of its delight for humans and other creatures that live in its world. Impossible stories and impossible dreams feed the imagination and emotions and most of our art and literature. So the battle may not be won yet, but it is certainly not over.

Restoring the Duwamish will be a very difficult and arduous task. To face such a project as this outrageously dirty river will take Sasquatch strength and fortitude. If we go looking along its banks, we will see a river that until only recently has been ignored, dismissed, and almost lost. The challenges to redeeming it are horrific. Part of the problem is the early small settlement of Seattle has grown so vast that it is only a miracle that the river still exists. As Wagner suggests, the EPA re-naming it “The Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund Site” has added to its vulnerability as the EPA has stupidly defined it.

But as the Duwamish became one of the most polluted waters in the United States, the people who live along its banks have chosen to take it upon themselves to clean and restore it, turning it back into a living river. The biologist William Jordan, who helped create the field of restoration ecology, emphasizes that the effort is to try to make nature whole again. We recognize it as healing scars and eliminating disturbances. We cannot ignore that we are to blame for its near extinction. We cannot plea that we are not...