Last night was the Chicago airing of The Freelance Beaver Detective followed by a discussion panel consisting of Pamela Adams, the filmmaker, Rachel Siegel of the Illinois Beaver Alliance, Sammie Clark of Urban Rivers and myself. Call it the urban beaver watchers tribunal if you will. It was fun and inspirational and I felt like a beaver little old lady picking thru memories at a grandchild’s birthday party. I kept trying not to start sentences with the phrase “Back in my day...”
I could not stop myself from thinking it, however.
Newer voices could not imagine a world where there were three single webpages on the entire internet that discussed coexistence with beavers. (Not websites mind you. just single pages.) And cannot imagine what it was like to post beaver video on youtube when it was just a year old such that sometimes I was notified that I earned the award that day for the “most watched animal video on youtube“.
They do not remember hearing the clarion calls of Mary Obrien or Sherri Tippie or Kent Woodruff or even Glynnis Hood who even back then had been working on this a lifetime, Maybe they have never even read Enos Mills or Grey Owl or seen a beaver with their own eyes,
But they are racing forward, advancing the story, turning the page onto a serious of dominoes that tumble into a hundred new cascades of beaver ecology and research. They are moving the baton to the next generation and they don’t need to carry the fullness of history behind them because it would just slow them down.
In many ways I envy them. To wake up just after the dawn of a new day and behold a world that is ready to be reshaped by their enthusiasm and creativity. A network of hands ready to reach out and clasp them forwards until they are the wise ones and the old voices leading the next generation. In many ways I envy them,
And in a way I know I am lucky. Because I saw the old world and the new world and can understand how hard it was to transform one into the other. I can blink like a gopher who just passed threw the network of tunnels others helped dig into bright sunlight and realize everything is different and we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Changing minds about beavers is a marathon. Not a sprint.
