This is Carmen Sosa. 
S
he is the president of the Farm and Food Coalition in Tyler Texas which is east of Dallas. She is responsible for the wonderful farmers market in Rose city and works to connect sustainable growers with restaurants and their community.
Carmen contacted me a few weeks ago regarding the beavers near her home on Placid lake. In the past the corporate association who handles their properties has regularly trapped out beavers and otters. (Otters because they’ll eat up all the fish, and beavers just because.) In addition to trapping she says they destroy lodges using the common in Texas ‘kerosene in a mason jar’ method.
(!)
Carmen wanted something different for these beavers and asked if we could help.
I introduced her to a fairly well connected beaver friend near by, and gave her lots of information. She was able to read up, confer and even consult some GIS water table maps. We were both hopeful that this could make a difference and that these beavers would have the chance that so few beavers in Texas have.
Yesterday was the big meeting. And even though she came armed with cheerful information and intention they voted to do the same thing they always do. This morning they would call the trapper out and the home owner nearest the lodge would burn it out.
Carmen wrote me in despair last night. She had kayaked out to see the beavers and was desperate to do something rather than let them be killed in their sleep. I didn’t really know what to tell her, but I shared her sorrow and alarm.
Mostly I thought about our beavers. And how lucky it was that things turned out differently for them. We don’t like to think it but it was a razor thin path to victory and for such a long time it could easily have gone either way.
For Carmen, who surrounds herself with green and growing things, this calamity of death is more than a hardship. What comfort I can offer is that she can use this lost effort to form a coalition of like minds for the future, so that the next beavers, or maybe the ones after that, are luckier than these,
The arc of ecology is long indeed, but it bends towards beavers.
