Okay. I’m proud of this, so you have to go look. I thought the academy of science article by Ben had such remarkable graphics I had to try my hand and see what I could concoct. I like it a great deal but I had to cannibalize the other new page I did to manage it. It was worth it. I’ll figure out eventually how to get the other one back. Go look at the page, wait a few seconds for it to load and please don’t forget to come back, because I have a fun article from WIRED to talk to you about.
How immersive is that! Actually a little more than I wanted, because I was trying to make just a strip of video across the top, but that will do for now. Moses Silva shot this video of our current habitat behind the Junior High School. It’s so lovely. Now we just have to figure it how to get a web cam down there.
Well, Beavers do rule the world. This article by Virginia Hefferna of Wired magazine said so, so it must be true.
Tundra-Trailblazing Beavers Shaped How We Coexist
Having gnawed their way across the Bering Land Bridge with their iron-glazed teeth, beavers by the tens of millions straight-up built North America. They worked like rodent Romans, subjugating the deciduous forests with formidable infrastructure: canals, lodges, dams that can last centuries, and deep still-water pools used to float building materials. By clear-cutting trees and blocking streams, the nocturnal, semiaquatic creatures also damaged the environment in some of the same ways humans do. Much later, beavers unexpectedly became the toast of a rarefied academic circle at the University of Toronto, where they inspired, of all things, media theory.
Oh darn, Virginia. If it wasn’t for that ONE FALSE WORD this might have been a contender in the top five opening paragraphs for 2018. Too bad you had to fall for that old fish-tale about beavers “ruining” the environment. What beavers do is transform the environment, in a way that makes it better for many many species for decades to come.
That’s nothing like what humans do.
It’s axiomatic: Humans follow beavers. When humans showed up in the pre-Columbian Americas, various tribes built their cultures around beaver dams, where they harvested meat, fur, and glands, including the musky secretion of the castor anal sac, which is still used in perfume.
Hundreds of years passed. Europeans of the 17th century became almost erotically fixated on a certain kind of supple men’s high hat made of beaver, and they skinned their continent’s supply to near-extinction. So the English established, in 1670, “the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay” and sent the stouthearted human subspecies known as trappers to chase the rodents up the Canadian waterways.
You’re right. Humans DO follow beavers because humans follow water and fertile soil which beavers make available. It’s kinda like Robins following gardeners. Except humans kill the beavers and complain about drought. We are so funny that way.
North of the Saint Lawrence River—and especially in the sublime Precambrian shield, the exposed section of billion-year-old metamorphic crust that runs from Michigan to Greenland—the beavers, with their lush pelts that fetched the highest prices from European milliners, turned haute couture. Because the indigenous groups had the advantage of experience, trappers from Hudson’s Bay Company (today the oldest company in North America) aimed to weaken tribal bonds. Europeans learned all they could from the better trappers, then encouraged them to depend on imported goods, including brandy. This eventually broke up the native communities and gave the colonizers what’s known in communications theory as an “information monopoly.”
Because the parties to the fur trade mimicked, and pushed, one another forward—beavers imitated the damming styles of humans, humans dressed as beavers, animal and human cultures fought and fused—their ways of communicating evolved rapidly.
Hmm. That’s an interesting thought. Did beavers make us stronger? Absolutely. Do humans make beavers stronger? Not in the least. They don’t need anything from us, but we need everything from them.
Humans may soon follow the beavers and push north again, seeking not pelts but asylum from extreme heat and drought, floods, and poverty. As if hurricanes in the US and Revelation-caliber fires as far north as the Arctic last year weren’t signals enough, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in October that, absent rigorous intervention, Earth in 22 years will be almost 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it was in preindustrial days.
In a hot, parched, salty, and melting world, Canada can look like a life raft. But climate refugees should be warned: In the coming decades, even southern Canada might not be entirely habitable. To get safely out of the heat, you might even have to get all the way to the tundra of the far, far north.
And you would hardly be trailblazing. Beavers, ever adaptable and enterprising, got to the tundra first—and their now flourishing Arctic empire can be seen from space. As so many times before, they pushed past the northern edge of their traditional habitat, out of their comfort zone, exacerbating and repairing and fleeing climate change all at once, past Alaska’s boreal forest into the Arctic, ambling ever upward, their luxurious pelts thickening and thickening.
So climate change is going to drive humans to the edges of the possible, but it’s okay because beavers will have already lead the way. It’s nice to read an article about beavers in the Tundra that isn’t complaining for a change.
And if beavers are already there, I won’t mind following one bit.
