Category: Who’s Killing Beavers Now?

What a great article about the flooding in England from George Monbiot. It could just as easily apply to the Missouri floods, or whatever comes next.

This flood was not only foretold – it was publicly subsidised

These floods were not just predictable; they were predicted. There were clear and specific warnings that the management of land upstream of the towns now featuring in the news would lead to disaster. By straightening, embanking and dredging rivers where they cut through fields, the boards accelerate the flow of water, making flooding downstream more likely. When heavy rain falls, some land must flood. We have a choice: fields or cities. And all over Britain, we have chosen badly.

Farm subsidies everywhere are conditional on the land being in “agricultural condition”. This does not mean any actual farming has to take place there – only that it looks like farmland. Any land covered by “permanent ineligible features” is disqualified. What does this mean? Wildlife habitat. If farmers don’t keep the hills bare, they don’t get their money. Scrub, regenerating woodland, forested gullies, ponds and other features that harbour wildlife and hold back water must be cleared. European rules insist that we pay farmers to help flood our homes.

Building higher walls will not, by itself, protect our towns. We need flood prevention as well as flood defence. This means woodland and functioning bogs on the hills. It means dead wood and gravel banks and other such obstructions in the upper reaches of the streams (beavers will do such work for nothing). It means pulling down embankments to reconnect rivers to their floodplains, flooding fields instead of towns. It means allowing rivers to meander and braid. It means creating buffer zones around their banks: places where trees, shrubs, reeds and long grass are allowed to grow, providing what engineers call hydraulic roughness. It means the opposite of the orgy of self-destruction that decades of government and European policy have encouraged: grazing, mowing, burning, draining, canalisation and dredging.

So nicely said, at exactly the right pitch and time. Thanks Mr. Monbiot. Now if only people were half as worried about what’s going on with their waterways as the are with their roadways, we might get somewhere. You know, like instead of traffic reports every 15 minutes they had watershed updates, and helicopters reporting on seepage? Go read the whole article and think about every straight creek you have ever seen as a terrible scar on the land or a horrifying dystopian view of the future. Beavers could help, if we let them.

Here’s yet another example of how we fail to let them.

Towns to discuss mosquito control budget

NORTHBOROUGH – Central Massachusetts Mosquito Control Project officials will meet with representatives from the program’s 40 member towns next month to discuss the organization’s proposed $2.1 million fiscal 2017 budget.

The project provides surveillance to determine the degree of a mosquito population in a community, spraying only after pre-determined thresholds are exceeded. The agency also maintains ditches to avoid stagnant water and has a new program to remove tires which can become breeding grounds.

The organization also runs a program to breach beaver dams, which cause rivers and streams to become stagnant and attract mosquitoes.

“They’ve been very helpful the past five to seven years with that,” Mark Oram, Ashland Board of Health director, said of the beaver dam program.

Holliston Health Agent Scott Moles characterized the town’s fiscal 2017 assessment of $53,701 as money well-spent.

Now I don’t know much about the mob, or how protection money works, but that sure sounds like a racket to me. “Lovely stream you got here, gentlemen. Shame if something were to happen to it, like a mosquito infestation for example“. Give us the cash or West Nile will kill your grand babies. Never mind that beaver ponds are notoriously FULL OF FISH that happily eat mosquito larvae for free. And that ponds are surrouded by birds and bats that will happily clean up any mosquitoes that survive to adulthood. The mosquito control takes money for destroying the dams and letting all the fish escape, so people keep forking over the cash and never know any better. Hmm.