You know I don’t bring out the big Star Wars award ceremony clip for just anyone, When beaver benefits earned an article in the New York times a few years back I thought it deserved some pomp and circumstance. But this in the Washington Post might get a double dose. It even mentions the Martinez Beaver Festival!
How beavers can save the world from environmental ruin
Beavers, those paddle-tailed, buck-toothed dam-builders we know from local ponds and streams, create chaos. They pull down trees, cause creeks to flood and generally confound the human need for order and control. But in his new book, “Eager,” environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb makes a convincing case that we should change our view of this tumultuous behavior and recognize it for exactly what it is: animal engineering capable of restoring our ailing environment.
Subtitled “The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter,” the book shows the many contributions of this oily-coated rodent. Beavers create wetlands and make conditions favorable for many animals to thrive. Beaver ponds and meadows store carbon, which keeps it out of the atmosphere and thus helps counteract the rising temperatures associated with global warming. We must, Goldfarb contends, overcome our penchant for seeing beavers as pests — and too often killing them as a result — and instead recognize them as “the ultimate keystone species,” indeed as “the animal that doubles as an ecosystem.”
Ahhh let that sink in. Is this what basking feels like? I’ve done it so rarely. Remember it’s in the Washington Post so it must be true! I hope every snorting city manager reads this, and every disbelieving trapper and everyone at Fish and Game. Shhh here we come:
To document these transformations, Goldfarb treks all over the United States, from Western wilderness areas to Walmart parking lots. In Washington state, under the direction of a biologist, he hikes up a creek to help release a pair called Sandy and Chomper to their new home. He attends the 10th Annual Martinez Beaver festival in California, where he interviews numerous “Beaver Believer” ecologists and activists, including inventors of flow-device tools that partially drain ponds or prevent beavers from damming up culverts and washing out roads, and thus save beavers’ lives. The result is a book that’s a most unexpected gift: a marvelously humor-laced page-turner about the science of semi-aquatic rodents.
We’re in the post! Our silly little beaver festival made the Washington Post!!! I need to sit down. Wait, I am sitting down. I might need to stand up! Ohhh the city is never ever going to live down the Martinez beavers. Not Ever! Isn’t that wonderful?
But here’s the take-home message: Goldfarb has built a masterpiece of a treatise on the natural world, how that world stands now and how it could be in the future if we protect beaver populations. He gives us abundant reasons to respect environment-restoring beavers and their behaviors, for their own good and for ours.
Ahh Ben, you have ringed the world with a glowing fire of beaver praise, I have dreamed of this day since forever it feels like. I can’t believe it’s happening. I don’t think I will ever stop thanking you. If you, gentle reader, have resisted this far, resist no longer Buy the book! It is good. It is well written. It is true, It is important. And it is FUNNY! If you don’t want to keep it forever and ever march down to the city hall or public library and donate your copy when its done.
Everyone should know these things.
