Ahh last night was the lovely premiere of Sarah Koenigsberg documentary “Beaver Believers” and many of our Worth A Dam friends were there to see and support. Here is a snap shot Rusty sent of the Q&A session on stage after the film. I recognize Suzanne Fouty, Ben Goldfarb Kevin Swift and Brock Dolman sitting with Sarah on stage. The man asking questions on the right is Steve Dunsky of the Forest Service.
We were home finally finishing packing the truck and crashing on the couch. Yesterday Jon met with the parks director, picked up the Uhaul and borrowed canopies from the John Muir Association and a friend in town. Today we will meet Amy at 7:30 in the park who will try to get as much drawing in as she can before it gets unbearably hot! Come by if you’re curious to see it unfold!
You are in luck today though because an expert from Ben’s book was published yesterday in Resilience and it made me so happy to read I got that tingly feeling you get when your about to weep tears of joy. I can’t think of anything better to read the day before the beaver festival so I’m posting it here.
Oh and check out the photo btw. 🙂
Close your eyes. Picture, if you will, a healthy stream.
What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle.
It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. It’s also wrong.
Let’s try again. This time, I want you to perform a more difficult imaginative feat. Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past—before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.
What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle. Instead it’s a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks; dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underfoot but sludge. The
musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. If there’s a fisherman here, he’s thrashing angrily in the willows, his fly caught in a tree.
Although this beavery tableau isn’t going to appear in any Field & Stream spreads, it’s in many cases a more historically accurate picture—and, in crucial ways, a much healthier one. In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity; you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely for the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creek-side willows. Wood frogs croak along the pond’s marshy aprons; otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. The deep water and the close vegetation make the fishing tough, sure, but abundant trout shelter in the meandering side channels and cold depths. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean captured the trials and ecstasies of angling in beaver country when he wrote of one character, “So off he went happily to wade in ooze and to get throttled by brush and to fall through loose piles of sticks called beaver dams and to end up with a wreath of seaweed round his neck and a basket full of fish.”
And it’s not just fishermen and wildlife who benefit. The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report released by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year. Although you can argue with the wisdom of slapping a dollar value on nature, there’s no denying that these are some seriously important critters.
Isn’t that an enormously translucent opening? Ben does such a heart-racing job of telling the story and bringing the reader personally alongside it’s unfolding. I first read this opening last year when he asked for my thoughts on the manuscript. I read the entire thing in 2 days like without stopping -like I was attending Woodstock or a revival. I knew it would change the conversation forever. and now you should understand why.
Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year.
If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind.
Go read the entire except, and be ready for your mind to be blown. What a great day for beavers and the people who throw their festivals! See you tomorrow!
So it begins!
