WILLIAM DEBUYS IS A MAN WHO SEEMS UTTERLY COMFORTABLE with the serendipity that has informed his life. For example, he was close to having to abandon his first book when he found a missing plane in the woods and landed a reward that saw him through.
He is disciplined man who starts every day at 8:30 by getting just once sentence right.
He is man who wrestles with how to live when so much of what he knows about the fate of the earth seems implacably grim.
He has written some of the best work on climate change, including the most recent and astonishing The Trail to Kanjiroba.
As my family pulled out of his side of paradise, eight miles north of Truchas, he – having absorbed the invasion of my daughter and two dogs in his meticulous study – gave us very earthy, specific directions to an obscure road to Taos: Take a right at the mural, just after the stone wall.
And he loves a good peach.
Is the new climate bill enough?
Is it enough? Is it enough to do what? The fact is the world has changed.
We’ve got a lot of really difficult change already in the system, in the pipeline, coming our way. And it’s not gonna go away, irrespective of how virtuous we think we’re behaving today or tomorrow. We’ve already created a lot of trouble for ourselves.
How you deal with feeling like you have to do something but knowing you can’t change things?
I just finished a trilogy. The first book was about climate change. The second book was about the war on nature and the loss of biodiversity. And the latest book, The Trail to Kanjiroba, is about a question: How do we not lose heart?
I went to Nepal hoping to learn a way of dealing with sorrow and loss and suffering without losing myself. And to learn a way of dealing with those hard things that still left me energized to keep working.
It really comes at the end of the book, the last 16 words: Every day a yatra, every situation a clinic, absorb the beauty, build an arc, be alive.
Yatra translates best as pilgrimage. That’s the whole package. It’s not easy, but I have a path – I have a checklist to work my way through.
The trip was a good idea.
I believe a lot in serendipity. I was at a New Year’s party chatting with my friend Roshi Joan Halifax from Upaya. And she said, Why don’t you come to Dolpa with us this fall? You just have to take a chance once in a while and follow your instincts.
You wrote about what was going to happen in the Southwest way before it happened.
There’s not a great deal of pleasure in having written about the predictions of the scientific community. No events have contradicted the main statements of my books. The only thing that has been different is that the changes have come faster than people expected.
All of it: the lengthening of the fire season, which is a function of warming; the intensity of drought, which is an interaction of warming with evaporation; the increasing insignificance of winter moisture; and our snow pack evaporating instead of melting. That kind of thing.
Of course, if you hang out with earth scientists, climate scientists, ecologists, etc. and tease out from them what their intuition is telling them about how systems work, you can get a somewhat different view than you would get from their published work. At the same time, the scientific community is just like the rest of us. What we think we know is so often in conflict with what we want.
And so it’s hard. Some of my scientific friends have a really hard time applying what they’ve learned to their home landscapes.
Why?
It’s too hot. It’s painful. One dear friend, after the last fire, was driving to Los Alamos and called me on the phone; he was in duress. His heart was breaking as he saw the effects of what he had known was coming for a long time.
But the main problem is that people insist on behaving like people. Maybe the greatest question ever asked in philosophy was when Socrates asked Alcibiades, Do you ascend to what you know? Almost none of us can say yes. We know so much, but the implications of what we know are disturbing, difficult to assimilate, hard to accept. That’s where the problem is. People have been communicating about climate change and species loss very, very effectively for decades and decades.
Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth very legitimately and justifiably won an Oscar. And how much have we done about climate change since then? Almost nothing, until the passage of the recent legislation.
But people still think they can drive more than one car or take way more jet plane vacations than they need.
But if individual action isn’t going to make a big difference…
It’s true that lifestyle changes won’t solve the problem because the problem goes to the core infrastructure of our whole society – the electrical generating systems and manufacturing systems, all kinds of stuff. It’s not just about your gas mileage.
But these huge changes demand a different way of thinking about the world. I think you can make the argument that people are just not very well-equipped – cognitively – to deal with this kind of danger, with this kind of problem.
Slow change doesn’t trigger our adrenal systems. If a nasty guy comes over the hill with a club in his hand, you get a shot of adrenaline and you’re ready to react. But if the earth is warming, you don’t get a shot of adrenaline. As organisms, we’re just not well-equipped for these long, slow things. Our attention wanders.
There’s also a nasty side to this – all of the misinformation and the hostile propaganda that has been coming out for years and years from big oil, big coal, and their servants in the political arena. In a country where QAnon can get traction, trying to talk about the future of the climate on its merits is a very, very difficult proposition.
You’ve said that we now know more about the origin of the world and how we got here – more than we’ve ever known.
Thanks to the theory of natural selection in the 19th century and the theory of plate tectonics in the 20th century, we can now tell ourselves the history of our planet and the universe without resorting to magic. And we are among the first generations in the history of humankind, possibly in the history of the universe, to be able to do that. It’s an amazing thing – in a way, it’s the universe becoming conscious of itself.
At the very same time, it’s about ready to commit suicide. We, the agents of this explosion of knowledge that blows open the doors of wonder about the creation of the planet, are also the agents of the destruction of that creation. If that ain’t enough paradox for you, you’re never gonna get enough.
You love living here, and your books are full of love for place.
I got the place connection bad; it’s not just being in an aesthetically agreeable place, but I feel that this place, this little farm where we are right now, has been one of the greatest blessings of my life.
You refer to it as a living being of sorts?
I really feel that it is. Yeah.
I walk out here all the time, and I’m learning from my walks by experiencing this place through the seasons.
One of my books, The Walk, is about the depth of learning that can come from visiting a familiar place over and over again. A lot of people always want to be somewhere new. There’s learning to be had in a new place, but to get really deep, it’s good to go back and back. The familiar can be a better teacher than the new.
You and I, we didn’t finish learning to walk when we were two or three. We’re still learning to walk.
How did you get to this place?
I’ve had enormous strokes of luck. Being hired as a research assistant by Robert Coles – who, in 1972, was quite a celebrity – brought me to New Mexico. Without that job with Coles, I might never found my way to this part of the world.
It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, but in order to do that, you have to be able to trust your own judgment and turn down the noise in other places. You seem to have that ability.
When I was writing my first book, I might have quit on it, except that I found a crashed airplane in the mountains, in the Sangre de Cristo. Sadly, there were four dead people in the plane. And believe it or not, I got a reward for finding the airplane, which had been lost for a long time. It wasn’t a lot of money, but in those days, I didn’t need a lot of money to live on. I felt as though I had received a grant from the mountains themselves to write about the mountains. If I quit the project, I couldn’t give the money back to the grantor and would be incurring a lot of bad karma.
When you look back, you can see a certain logic to how things lined up – how one thing led to another – but when it’s happening, there’s no logic to it. Most of the time, it’s just serendipity and coincidence and oddness. And so we wash up; we are almost like flotsam.
Bob Coles used to talk about a scene in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer where people are described as handing people along. We get where we are because other people have handed us along to the next step. Certainly in terms of knowledge, we’re always standing on the shoulders of people who came before. So I think in most cases, gratitude should be our principal means of transportation.
You are remote up here. Do you like the solitude?
I love the solitude. It’s good for me as a writer. From the point of view of Santa Fe, El Valle seems like a pretty isolated place. But from the point of view of El Valle, I have lots of friends and neighbors here in the village; we know where we are – we’re not in the middle of nowhere. We’re right here. So it’s isolated in terms of goods and services and the currents of the main world, but it doesn’t feel isolated when you’re here.
How do you suggest we New Mexicans deal with the climate issues coming our way?
I think the environmentalist Bill McKibben put it very well; I was with him when he gave a talk down in Las Cruces. After the talk, a woman came up to him and said, Okay, you’ve convinced me about climate change. What should we do to defend ourselves against it?
He responded right away: Live in a strong community.
She asked the obvious follow-up question: How do you find a strong community?
He replied: You don’t. You build it.
That’s probably the best thing that any of us can do, and it’s really hard work. Accommodating diversity and getting people to agree on a set of facts about how the world works. But that’s the work that lies ahead of us – that’s the work we have to take on.
