A million years ago, when the earth and I were both younger, I started filming a family of beavers near my house because I thought they were ‘neat’. I didn’t know anything about them or their role in the environment, but I still climbed out of bed and went to spend the morning with them because I liked their tails, and the way they swam and dove, and especially their voices. I didn’t start out understanding why beavers were important, and even now I can get rankled when I realize that for the salmon lobby they are just an “means to an end” and not important in their own right.

But one of the things I have learned on this epic beaver campaign, is that a central tenent to finding support and making new friends is that there is no WRONG reason to support beavers. Even though there may be some that make me less thrilled. Duck hunting for example, does not appeal to me and generally makes me uncomfortable. But Ducks Unlimited does a massive amount of work for wetlands and when hunters are smart enough to appreciate beaver help improving duck population, I have to appreciate it.

Aiming beavers at the leviathan of Global Warming seems to me like throwing beans at a charging buffalo, but I’m very happy that Ellen Wohl’s study is making the rounds.

Busy Beavers Battle Climate Change

(WILDLIFE/ANIMAL SCIENCE) We all know beavers have heavy workloads. But scientists have found that beavers also play a prominent role in cutting carbon emissions. Approximately eight percent of carbon is reduced by the carefully crafted beaver dam, which is 18 percent less than the potential reduction rate if it were not for human disturbance to beaver environments. The recent study suggests these animals sufficiently help keep the environment resilient against climate change, drought, and wildfires. Read on for more on North American beaver populations and their significant impact on the ecosystem. — Global Animal

Beavers play an important role in keeping the ecosystem resilient against climate change, drought and wildfire, the study notes. Wohl found that the abandoned beaver dams she studied made up around 8 percent of the carbon storage in the landscape, and that if beavers were still actively maintaining those dams, the number would be closer to 23 percent.

I have to assume that Ellen Wohl is a not-so-secret beaver believer, shaping her research interests to let the world see how important these animals are. She is a fluvial-geomorphologist in the Warner College of Natural Resources at Colorado State. I would love to meet her and have invited her to the beaver conference but she was always too busy. When I see on article like this on Global Animal or CARE it kind of irks me that large, funded save-the-planet organizations who have entirely looked away from beaver effect on salmon, birds, water quality, wildlife, suddenly say OH NOW ITS IMPORTANT to save the beavers because of carbon, (before I was too busy protesting Mansanto or occupying Wall Street), but I remind myself that there is no wrong way to get to the right place. And this is another very powerful argument in our quiver. If a few new people notice that humans interfere too much with beaver habitat we’ve come to the right place. Period.