Sometimes its hard to know if what we do here makes a difference. And sometimes we’re reminded in wonderful ways that it all matters very much. This has been a week for remembering that our actions cast ripples in the water that ring outwards for miles without us knowing.
Take Kris Shoemake for example.
Kris is a kindergarten teacher at the Clairborn school in Pasadena who 
recently recently reached out to Martinez’ own Cassy Campbell the director of the Martinez Early Childhood Center (where I worked for a decade while I was in school). Cassy has great ideas for getting kids personally involved – like letting them “SLAP” their tails by painting with flyswatters, or letting them makes bread sticks so they could “Chew sticks” like a beaver. Cassy is also the fearless spirit who coordinates our children’s parade at the f
estival each year.
Seems Kris is working on STEM project about beavers and dam building and reached out to Cassy for ideas. Cassy sent told her about the flyswatters and sent her to me. So this weekend I wrote Kris about the paper bag puppets and other things we do. Here is her email back.
Oh Thank you so much for emailing me back! I love the puppets and telling about beavers build a neighborhood and I had no idea there were beavers in Temecula! HOW AWESOME!!! I am excited to get this together and hopefully do it in a way that will really enrich our learning! Your ideas are great and I will get back to you if I have any questions! Thank You SO MUCH!!!
Kris
Which is wonderful in a warming kind of way, but it ain’t over yet.
Remember Carmen of Texas who was trying to save the beavers on the lake where she lives in Tyler? Seems she was on vacation last week in New Mexico and got talking beavers to the rangers at the US COE (thats the army core of engineers) up that way, and they loved beaverstoo and were excited about their coming back. Carmen wrote me about it last night.
“There is an effort on the part of COE and local Cochiti tribespeople to plant Cottonwood trees around the lands since most have disappeared for a variety of reasons including erosion and fire. The beavers are continually chewing down the small trees and the tribespeople are starting to shoot the beavers. The COE have talked to them about ways to protect the trees and will continue efforts to get them “to see the bigger picture.” One of the COEs asked me to look a website that has a lot of information on the positive impact of beavers across arid lands…it was the Worth a Dam website! I was happy to say I know you.”
Imagine that! A COE from NEW MEXICO praising our website to a visitor from TEXAS. I think I need to sit down. This is the kind of impact I always dreamed of making. Lead from the bench indeed…
Then I got an email from Carol Evans in Nevada, seems she and Jon Griggs have been working with a director on program about using beavers in arid regions to restore water. The producer is in Las Angeles but I think the director is in Japan. Anyway, they asked Carol for footage of beavers building dams which she doesn’t have. But she had just finished Ben’s book and read that I had “Two terbytes of beaver footage” and sent them my way. (HA!)
I showed them some youtube clips and they asked me what I would charge per second of footage. (!) So who the hell knows. The Martinez beavers might be in a film about Nevada shown in Japan and the funds will go to Worth A Dam.
Not bad for a days work.
Oh, and here is one of the clips I showed them. I’m sure they’ll edit out the train noises.
