This timely report from Boston tickled all my fancies. Here’s a young girl using advanced technology to communicate with beavers and listening to the elders teaching at the same time.
How one Blackfeet Nation scientist is using robot beavers to help the environment
Beavers are powerful architects of the land that bring innumerable benefits to the land and the people living there. They can make rivers run backwards, create fish habitat, mitigate wildfires, among other things. Indigenous people know this, but colonizers have disrupted the relationship between beaver and human. One researcher hopes to repair the relationship now… through robots.
Jordan Kennedy is a beaver expert and a former engineering post-doc at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, now working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She’s also a member of the Blackfeet Nation. As a part of her research at Harvard, she worked with a robotics team to create a robot beaver, affectionately called Beaverbot 2.
Truly. How fricken cool is that? A Blackfoot Harvard Grad with a passion for beavers. R Grace Morgan would be so proud.
The beaverbot is programmed to make decisions about where to go in the same way as a real foraging beaver might. Kennedy hopes once the beaver is finished, they can use it on a research site.
“We’re trying to reimagine these landscapes as if beavers had been deployed on them in order to figure out a way to make it hold more water on the landscape,” Kennedy said.
Beavers are incredible ecosystem engineers. Their works make rivers run backwards, create fish habitat, mitigate wildfires, and many more things. But in the past few centuries, American settlers hunted beavers and destroyed their habitat, driving them out of the lands they used to build on.
Listen to the entire program. It’s very wonderful to imagine a native graduate trying to use robots to teach beavers to do what they never forgot. And to teach people to let them.
(I’m very low tech and wonder if it might not be better to plant some willow and stand back and watch.)
