A dam fine letter: West Michigan man embraces Internet fame 14 years after defending beavers
By Jonathan Oosting
I would like to challenge you to attempt to emulate their dam project any dam time and/or any dam place you choose. I believe I can safely state there is no dam way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.
All regular and occasional readers of this website should recognize this paragraph immediately. It is from the finely saucy letter sent in response to the Department of Environmental Quality in Michigan when they claimed a dam was built without a permit on his property. The clever writing of Stephen Tvedten has become something of an old chestnut on the internet(s) and more often than you can possibly imagine I am sent a copy by someone I know, or who knows me. Often they are folks who should know better than to assume I haven’t seen this many, many times before. (In fact, I’m contemplating a t-shirt and a beaver tour for the millionth person to repeat the action.)
Well today’s Michigan Live has a nice article on the author of the famous missive. Check it out.
Stephen Tvedten has dedicated his life to serious research, but the Marne resident is best known for a funny letter that took him all of 10 minutes to write. Tvedten, now in his 70s, continues to generate Internet fame for the letter, which he fired off in 1997 after the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality accused a tenant on his Montcalm County property of constructing two dams actually built by beavers.
Why has Stephen’s letter survived the test of time and maintained such a long ‘forward’ record? Besides being well written, artfully making fun of bureaucracy (which everyone loves) and the need for permits (which everyone hates), I would argue that it also taps into the undercurrent of growing disconnect between man and nature that we all feeling a little worried about. As we get farther and farther away from the land and its native inhabitants we are a little less certain of our future. Remembering that beavers build dams better than bureaucrats build dams makes us smile and feel centered again.
It turns out that Stephen’s life work has been research on Natural Pest management, and the production of an exhaustive encyclopedia which is online at his website here. He calls it “Intelligent Pest Management” (a play on the term Integrated Pest Management which has the same goal). Because all roads lead to beavers I learned about IPM from Susan Junfish of Parents for a Safer Environment who contacted me about possibly combining our interest in protecting the beavers home with her interest in removing pesticides from the watershed. PFSE will be at the beaver festival this year. All I’m sayin is that it’s a very, very small world.
“I wrote that letter in about 10 minutes,” he said. “The funny thing about it is, I’m more famous for that than all of the other things I’ve done in my life, and I’m a research guy.”
Tell me about it, Stephen! You do one dam thing for beavers and all of a suddenly the rest of your life pales by comparison. I know just how you feel.
