MARTINEZ BEAVERS ON KPFA

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Book, Beaver ecological impact March 15, 2022

How much fun to be Ben Goldfarb and slowly weave through all the audiences that are finally getting around to reading his book and wanting to talk about it. This groovy interview with Caroline Casey on KPFA brightens its way into lots of dark corners, Here is the description of the podcast:

The Visionary Activist

Dedicated to “anything we need to know to have a democracy”: Democratic Animism, Pragmatic Mysticism, Applied Divination, Renaissance of Reverent Ingenuity. Hosted by Caroline Casey. Her guests are allies contributing to a culture of reverent ingenuity. Critique and Solution.

That pretty much sums up what you need to know about her interviewing style, Except for the lovely fact that she referred to me as “Heidi Pennyman” which I guess is a kind of variation on Henny Penny the lovely children’s story who says that the beaver skies are falling…

There’s a nice long section on Martinez 10 minutes in so listen to that if nothing else! Enjoy!

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EAGER BEAVERS IN JAPAN?

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Art, Beaver Book February 25, 2022

Guess what was just printed for release in Japan?

Ben shared this the other day. How frickin’ cool is that? Japan doesn’t even HAVE beavers! I’m so glad Ben Goldfarb get spread the beaver good news to the four corners of the earth. The beaver “hat” image is hilarious! And that text is so beautiful I could frame every page. But certainly the ones about Martinez.

Wow I’m in a book in Japan. Weird.

DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE FAIRY BEAVERS?

heidi08 Beaver Book February 8, 2022

So one of my very favorite parts of the festival meeting on Saturday was that we were joined by Virginia of Fairfield who wants to help out with our next beaver s0iree and we were chatting about how I imagined it might help to personal mics if we’re all still wearing masks and she said casually, “Yes my sister uses them for her work now. She’s a fairy”

To which we all blinked heartily and said politely “What?”

Prompting her to explain that she was fairy for children’s birthday parties and that was her job. Which sounded to us like the very best job ever and reminded me greedily of hearing about Frank Baum’s chapter in one of his Oz books called:

Being the JK Rowling of his day, the author of the Wizard of OZ had a great many more fanciful stories which young people of his day read through at a great rate. In fact my mom remembers pouncing on the new books in the library and waiting ravenously for the next one. Now one of his books was (more…)

POIKILOHYDRIC: WHEN YOU CAN’T BE A BEAVER

heidi08 Beaver Book December 17, 2021

Yesterday a glorious accident befell me and I came across this stunning interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer . She is a member of the Potawatomi First Nation, the author of “Braiding Sweet Grass” and a distinguished professor at the Cuny University of New York in Syracuse.

The word Poikilohydric is one she taught me in this interview when she discussed the wonder of small mosses that are able to use their abundance when water is present to flourish and multiply and then disappear when resources evaporate and wait until it’s time for them to come back. She used it as a metaphor with her students about coping with the pandemic,

“Okay, I can do this for now, and when the time is right I will flourish again”.

I wish I could find a way to post the audio of the interview directly but you will just have to click on the headline to listen for yourself. It’s a stunning interview. And I can’t think of a single thing that would be better for you to hear this morning,

Why is the world so beautiful? An Indigenous botanist on the spirit of life in everything

“What would moss do?”

Robin Wall Kimmerer posed the question to her forest biology students at the State University of New York, in their final class in March 2020, before the pandemic sent everyone home.

The answer was at least as useful as anything to be found in the glut of ‘how to survive COVID’ stories that would follow over the next nine months:

- Give more than you take;

- Be patient when resources are scarce;

- Find creative ways to use what you have.

“Mosses have this ability, rather than demanding a lot from the world, they’re very creative in using what they have, rather than reaching for what they don’t have,” Kimmerer told Tapestry.

“When there are limits, the mosses say, ‘Let’s be quiet for a while. Abundance, openness, water, will return. We’ll wait this out.'”

I guess mosses are the opposite of beavers. They cannot engineer anything, They cannot shape their world. But I think that must be how life is. Sometimes you are a beaver that can work hard and create your own ecosystem that provides what you need and even provides enough for others…

And sometimes you just have to be Poikilohydric and wait.

DAMMING GETS NOT-SO-FAINT PRAISE IN VERMONT

heidi08 Beaver Book, Beaver ecological impact November 27, 2021

Well sure, new variant for Thanksgiving that’s possibly more cointagous and more deadly because God has a wicked sense of humor and we are trapped in a pandemic mobious strip. But there was turkey and stuffing and that can’t be bad, And there’s a nice beaver column from the Barton Chronicle in Vermont and that has to be good, right?

Beavers: landscape engineers

“Beavers are the only animals, other than humans, who will create entirely new ecosystems for their own use,” he writes. “And often, like humans, once they have depleted an area’s resources, they will abandon their holdings and move on.” (more…)