There are lots of minds that need changing about beavers. The farmers in Scotland who think they need shooting, their friends the anglers who think they eat fish The wardens at Fish and Game that classify them as a nuisance and their dam as ‘debris.’ But there are some people who don’t need to change one iota. Some folks have it down exactly right.
Like Sarah Hyden of New Mexico.
Let our forest heal
It’s changing by the year as the climate becomes warmer and dryer. Existing vegetation in many areas is becoming more marginal. Those of us who live by and with the forest can see it happening. Some years, we wonder if the trees will even make it, and then the rains come and they look healthy again. But they don’t seem to be able to tolerate even relatively small impacts
The forest is resilient in its own way when left free of human interventions. It’s evolving into the healthiest forest possible given current conditions, even if it doesn’t always look that way to us after such natural forest processes as wildfire and bark beetle outbreaks. There will likely be major shifts in vegetation types.
Sarah does a great job of talking about the danger Albequerque’s forest are in. She explains that they could pretty much recover from anything except US. And guess what she suggests might fix the problem?
Go ahead guess.
There are careful forest restoration projects we can undertake – to de-commission roads, restore riparian areas, build earthen dams to reduce flooding risk and to re-introduce beavers. Some very limited and light-handed thinning and burning may be needed, but only for strategic and site-specific reasons. This requires open-minded utilization of newer forest and fire ecology research. It also requires new local research that is not based on the assumption that widespread thinning and burning are necessarily a benefit in the cost/benefit analysis. And it requires just slowing down the process.
You break it we fix it. That’s what beaver picket signs would say if they carried them. We can repair pollution, extinction and damage. Just let us do what we can do and stop killing us before we do it.
It’s time to embrace a new paradigm for the forest. Instead of imposing the framework of our limited ecological understanding and perspective onto the forest, let’s be allies of the forest and help support its inevitable transformation. Let’s respect and honor life. First, do no harm.
Beavers are tireless protesters you know. Apparently there were some pretty rowdy beaver protests last night in the area.
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