Writing about beaver struggles every day can feel a bit like the myth of sisyphus. The Gods were unhappy about something he did and punished him in the afterlife with a hopeless task of pushing a giant stone up an impossible hill. By sheer effort and exhaustion he would nearly achieve his task every grueling day – only to have it slip back down to the beginning of the slope each night so he would have to start all over again in the morning.
That’s can seem like the beaver story sometimes.
But lately, with all the good Ben reporting and saturation of stories finally making a difference to the beaver dry terrain, it can feel more like a snowball. Something you work to gather and shape, but then with just a light toss starts speeding downhill getting bigger and faster with every inch. Until you are entirely caught off guard by how things look at the bottom.
Allow me to demonstrate with two pieces of good news. I have a feeling we’ll be talking about the second one a LOT over the next few weeks, but the first one deserves our full attention right this minute.
It comes from a writer named Stacy Passmore in Denver Colorado. Here’s how it starts.
Landscape with Beavers
In the American West, beavers are gaining a reputation as environmental engineers who can help restore water systems — and challenge their human neighbors to think differently about land use.
I was beginning a road trip through the Mountain West, studying the return of the North American beaver, which has lately gained something of a cult reputation as an environmental engineer. 2 I had heard stories about humans and beavers working together to restore wetlands and river systems, and I wanted to see for myself. That might sound weird — working together — but as a landscape designer you have to be open to unusual collaborations. 3 If farmers and ranchers were turning into “beaver believers,” I could respect that.
I know what you’re thinking. No WAY that a landscape designer is writing an entire article about beavers, but YES WAY! is the answer, She zooms across the west talking to scientists, landowners and engineers and advocating for flow devices and you really need to go read the entire thing for yourself because it’s that good.
[Glynnis} Hood helped me see that restoring beaver habitat is not just an ecological challenge but a social one. When beavers modify the environment through their constructions, the effects are felt downstream, outside wetlands and other conservation areas. 15 How are water rights affected by a beaver dam? How is risk managed? These are social and political questions. In fact, when the Scottish government started a beaver reintroduction program, it hired sociologists to work alongside ecologists. 16 People complain that beavers are destructive, they’re unpredictable, they cause flooding. These things are all true. Living with such a willful species requires careful negotiation. Humans have to recognize the ecological benefits beavers bring, and be willing to give up some control.
After spending some time at remote restoration sites, it’s not hard to imagine that such proposals will eventually move from the pages of design magazines to the realm of built projects — or anti-projects. Can we imagine tearing down walls and fences to live more collaboratively with other species, to let them be active landscape agents? Can we accept their measures of success, which differ from ours? Will we be able to predict and anticipate their activities, or be comfortable not doing so? How will we deal with uncertainty and destruction? Would I allow beavers to live in my own backyard?
Short answer? YES.
Any city smarter than a beaver can keep living with a beaver, as a very hardy woman once observed. This article is a feast for the eyes and an introduction to some unsung players that we rarely hear from. There was some discussion on the beaver management facebook group yesterday about the flow device schematic she added to the article which Mike Callahan thought wouldn’t work, so I wrote Stacy and got her in touch with Mike to tweak it.
The only solutions beavers need are the one that work. Right?
Anyway, I was still glowing from this discovered article when I received in the main the signed EARLY COPY of Ellen Wohl’s new book about beavers and immediately shot over the moon. It’s called “Saving the Dammed” and is 100% about the benefits of beaver modified ecosystems. I am not exaggerating. It’s published by Oxford University Press and on sale at next week.
It begins with an excellent and scientific look at how beavers impact hydrology and what losing them meant to this nation. She fittingly calls this overview “THE GREAT DRYING“.
The entire book is focused around observations of a beaver meadow complex in Colorado, Month by month she analyzes what she observes in a beaver rich terrain AND in beaver absent terrain. Making inferences about what it meant to the larger landscape when we suddenly and tragically lost beaver.
She fittingly says that Blake wrote once that he could observe “The world in a Grain of Sand” and she just wants to see all of American history in some beaver meadows -which, when you put it that way, seems a fair trade. Each chapter follows her beaver focused observations month by month. I’m on January.
Yesterday I think I graduated from Hades to the Elysian Fields.
