What the big boys had to say about Ted Williams article.
Ben Goldfarb
Here’s my own blurb, spoken from the heart as a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry (Aldo’s alma mater) and a former Leopold Writing Fellow. Feel free to share wherever:
Setting aside all the unscientific junk in this piece, here’s what bothers me most: the spurious invocation of Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which actually says precisely the opposite of what Williams thinks it does. The point of “Mountain” is that, by killing a native keystone species (wolves) to benefit a recreationally targeted game species (white-tailed deer), we inadvertently inflicted profound ecological harm upon the broader natural community. And yet Williams is advocating that we… kill a native keystone species (beaver) to benefit a recreationally targeted game species (brook trout)! In other words, he’s committing the exact mistake that Leopold cautioned against in his iconic essay — advocating for short-sighted, heavy-handed lethal management driven by recreational biases rather than ecology.
It’s a shame — I’m actually a big Ted Williams fan. Here’s hoping he goes back to defending public lands and holding corporate polluters to account, rather than misguidedly punching down at beavers.
Michael Poilock
I do think that we have created a lot of drainage ditches across this country, to drain “swamps” etc. and that beaver tend to restore these drainage ditches back into swamps or wetlands, when left alone. Another way of thinking about it is that in places like Wisconsin, there was a lot of wetlands, and that getting rid of beaver made it easy to drain these areas, or to convert wetlands into streams, or essentially, to extend the stream network into places where it didn’t previously exist. The same process has arguably gone on in the Sierra and elsewhere in the west, where erosion and incision has extended stream networks into areas that were once wet meadows with no discernible stream channel.
So if beaver are playing a role in zipping up drainage networks and reducing their extent, then yes, they will be reducing the amount of stream habitat, and increasing the amount of wetland or wet meadow habitat, and species that like streams, such as trout, will be less plentiful in those areas. I haven’t been to Wisconsin lately, but I speculate that something similar is going on and that the extent of the stream network is an artifact of land use practices from current and previous centuries. I also speculate that better land use management might reduce the extent of trout, but that on a watershed scale they would be more plentiful, since the increase in wetlands would improve water quality and quantity, as well as modulating hydrographs, creating more stable flows. If we think about streams as habitat networks, with different types of habitat in different parts of the network, rather than as drainage networks, with the implied goal of “draining” the landscapes, I think that helps point us in the right conceptual direction. We do better when we think about watershed restoration and process restoration and ecosystem restoration rather than focusing on the needs of a single species such as trout.
There you go. Expertly said by the real experts. I believe both brilliant minds think you’re WRONG and plenty of other brilliant minds wrote back that you’re very, very wrong but they hadn’t time that day to deal with your wrongness.
I just thought you’d want to hear from folks why are way, way smarter than me about this.
