Join us for an evening celebrating our new climate & ecosystem heroes, the beavers! Santa Barbara Permaculture Network hosts an evening of fun & film, featuring the recently released documentary, The Beaver Believers, to be shown in the spacious outdoor patio of Bici Centro (Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition), in downtown Santa Barbara. Families welcome, bring your own picnic sandwiches, snacks provided.

The Beaver Believers documentary film tells the urgent, yet whimsical story of an unlikely cadre of activists – a biologist, a hydrologist, a botanist, an ecologist, a psychologist and an hairdresser – who share a common vision: restoring the North American Beaver, the most industrious, ingenious, bucktoothed little engineer, to the watersheds of the American West.

The Beaver Believers encourage us to embrace a new paradigm for managing our western lands, one that seeks to partner with the natural world rather overpower it. As a keystone species, beavers enrich their ecosystems, creating the biodiversity, complexity, and resiliency our watersheds need so desperately to absorb the impacts of climate change.

A biologist, a hydrologist, a botanist, an ecologist, a psychologist and an hairdresser walk into a bar – stop me if you’ve heard this one. It ends with stream restoration and biological diversity!  There has been a LOT of media on this event. I have gotten four notices an hour for the last two days. Someone at work knows how to plug their events.

They even have a link and mention to the beaver festival!

THE ECOLOGICAL BENEFITS OF BEAVERS – Martinez CA Beaver Festival June 29 2019

Because the beaver isn’t just an animal; it’s an ecosystem:
https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/the-ecological-benefits-of-bea…

Plus tons of excellent information about beavers

Eager, The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded wetlands dried up and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat:

And this:

In an interesting historical footnote mentioned in the paper, California brought back some beavers to stem erosion from 1923-1950, bumping the statewide population from a dwindling 1,300 in 1942 to 20,000 by 1950. The translocations happened in 58 counties — including Marin, Napa, Contra Costa, Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Cruz — and are thought to be responsible for the beavers that live here today….So, it’s not a crazy idea that beavers could be brought in again to help mitigate twenty-first century problems like climate change-induced droughts and water shortages. https://baynature.org/article/beavers-used-to-be-almost-everywhere-in-ca…

And even this:

Most south coast residents aren’t aware beavers were in our region, and some still remaining, but when hiking in the backcountry behind Santa Barbara and Ventura, you might come across beaver rock art done by the original native peoples of this land, proving beaver have been here for thousands of years. Let’s welcome them back to help rehydrate the land!

What a great event this is going to be! There’s even a local artist who’s fallen in love with the animal and is going to premiere his “Beaver float”

Ray Cirino, local artist, has fallen in love with beaver, and will display and share his Summer Solstice Beaver Float, and other beaver artwork. Others are encouraged to bring artwork, poems, or favorite books about beavers to share.

Ray looks like a very interesting artist. I would LOVE to see the beaver float. Hmm maybe he could share it at the festival…