We’re just about the part where I start coasting. All year I’ve been peddling frantically, applying for grants, making plans, coaxing auction items, encouraging musicians and securing volunteers. It is not a lie to say that planning a beaver festival literally takes nine months. It was harder this year because of the earlier time and less resting in between. Well, I’m nearly full term now. There’s a certain point where all my work is done, and it’s up to everyone else, I get a strange, glassy look in my eyes and start to shrug a lot.
There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come.
If it be not to come, it will be now
If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.
Hamlet V:ii
And now that the coasting begins, let’s truly enjoy the ride. This is an extraordinary year for beavers. I found out yesterday that Ben Goldfarb will get to author a column soon in the Washington Post. And this morning there’s this from author Kate Wheeling.
How Beavers Can Save Us From Ourselves
Since I first picked up Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, I haven’t been able to stop talking about these semi-aquatic rodents.
Beavers are not content simply to survive in the environment that nature provides them. Instead, the animals engineer it to ensure access to things like food and shelter, reshaping entire landscapes in the process. Sound familiar? Humans, for better or for worse, may be the most planet-altering species—but beavers did it first. To quote Goldfarb, “We are living in the world that beavers created.”
Before their numbers were devastated by the fur trade, North America looked much different. For one thing, it was a much soggier landscape. Beavers don’t just build lodges and dams, but entire wetlands. Thanks to the beavers’ efforts, streams back up behind their dams, forming ponds, marshes, and swamps, filled with stumps and dead or dying trees and bustling with frogs, fish, and otters, to name just a few of the countless creatures that rely on beavers to make their habitat possible. Beaver ponds help store water, recharge aquifers, filter out pollutants, mitigate floods, and stop wildfires in their tracks.
I guess some very spiritual people feel this way when they read the bible: Every time you hear the familiar story it’s precious and you learn or feel something new. Well, that’s how I feel about beavers. I LOVE that we’re going to be hearing this story over and over for the foreseeable future.
You make the point that beavers are not endangered, they don’t need us, but that we need them. What can beavers do for us?
One great example is water quality. There’s a huge problem in this country with agricultural pollution with nitrogen and phosphorus from chemical fertilizers ending up in rivers and estuaries and oceans and leading to dead zones. It’s critical that we keep that pollution from reaching the ocean, and beaver ponds are incredibly effective at settling out those pollutants.
But the biggest example is climate change: As the climate warms, more precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow. Instead of remaining in snowpack and gradually melting throughout the course of the spring and summer and fall and keeping rivers and streams wet well into the dry season, now all that precipitation is falling as rain. Any entity that can store water on the landscape, that can keep water high in some of these mountain headwaters in places like the Cascades or the Sierra, becomes incredibly valuable. What stores water better than a beaver? Basically nothing.
Ahh do you know that feeling you get when you just slip into a hot tub on a deck at the ocean on a starlit night and your head is cool and your body is gloriously relaxed and warm? I’m having that feeling right now. Thanks SO much Ben for your excellent work on this book!
What do you hope readers will take away from Eager?
First and foremost I just want people to appreciate the incredible role that these animals played in the development of our landscapes and our history as a people and a culture. I think that lots of the ecological and hydrological problems that we’re confronted with now can be, to some extent, addressed with more beavers. I don’t want to portray beavers as some kind of silver bullet because, for example, climate change is obviously a problem that’s so vastly beyond the scale of beavers to address that sometimes I feel a little bit silly suggesting it. But they can absolutely put a dent in some of these issues, like water storage. So they’re not a panacea but they are certainly a help to us, and they’re an incredibly cost-effective help. If you think about how much money we spend, for example, retrofitting irrigation infrastructure or installing new gray-water systems or no-flush toilets, this water-saving stuff can be pretty cost-ineffective sometimes. Getting more beavers on the landscape is something we can basically do for free.
It literally makes me light-headed to think about the number of readers who are getting the message around the country. I can’t imagine anything better, honestly.
How about seeing our name mentioned?
I imagine you had some fun picking out the title for this book. Can you share some of the other titles you considered? Obviously beavers lend themselves to puns. There’s a million different dam puns: Give a Dam and Worth a Dam.
I will tell you a secret because we know each other so well. Shh come closer. Ben told me privately after lunch on the back porch of our home that our name was the very best beaver pun of all, and the one he wished he had thought of. Shhhh. Yes you can feel proud of that. I certainly do.
We humans tend to regard ourselves as kind of unique in the ways that we modify our own surroundings to maximize our own food and shelter. But beavers do that too. They build dams, they create ponds and wetlands that they use to protect themselves from predators, to irrigate their own food supply. They almost act as rotational farmers; they’ll raise the water table to increase the growth of willow and other water-loving plants. That’s one of the things that always drew me to them: They just remind me of people in a very real way.
Ahh Ben, we are SO lucky to have you in the world and writing this book and coming to our festival. I am so excited about the ripples this this change is going to cause. What excellent timing for it all to happen now. Especially since I just got some very exciting news about our own meager beavers that I’m going to tell you all as soon as its confirmed.
One last thing. Yesterday I finished the post test for the kids doing our sticker activity. I wanted something more visual for the younger kids. How do you like it?
