No you aren’t dreaming. This is really happening. Ben’s latest article is all about beavers in urban spaces. The headline couldn’t be more unbelievable if it was “Some cancers are good you” or “being left-handed makes life more convenient“. It’s NOT what we expected, but it’s written just the way we wish it would be.
IN PRAISE OF URBAN BEAVERS
As many a municipal engineer can attest, all those urban As many a municipal engineer can attest, all those urban beavers present a decidedly mixed blessing. The relentless architects gnaw down ornamental trees, jam road culverts full of woody debris, and inundate roads and yards. Even in Seattle, idyllic land of mandatory composting and ambitious climate targets, residents tend to reject meddlesome wildlife. After beavers felled some trees in Ballard, the Seattle Times responded with an unneighborly headline: “Locals to Golden Gardens Beavers: Please Leave.” present a decidedly mixed blessing. The relentless architects gnaw down ornamental trees, jam road culverts full of woody debris, and inundate roads and yards. Even in Seattle, idyllic land of mandatory composting and ambitious climate targets, residents tend to reject meddlesome wildlife. After beavers felled some trees in Ballard, the Seattle Times responded with an unneighborly headline: “Locals to Golden Gardens Beavers: Please Leave.”
Yup. This should surprise us not at all. Par for the course. Don’t you have anything nice to say?
Yet Castor canadensis is worth the trouble, and then some. In my book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter, I describe the animals as “ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront.” A full accounting of their virtues would take paragraphs—or chapters—but here are a few highlights. Beavers, by capturing surface water and elevating groundwater tables, keep our waterways hydrated in the face of climate change-fueled drought. Their wetlands dissipate floods and slow the onslaught of wildfires. They filter pollution. They store carbon. They reverse erosion. And, whereas our infrastructure is generally inimical to life, they terraform watery cradles for creatures from salmon to sawflies to salamanders. They heal the wounds we inflict.
Oh, that is SO much better! We sure picked the write guy for the story. Ben is doing such a wonderful job at talking about the subject most near and dear to my heart.
Many of my favorite beaver stories, though, are set in urban spaces, where rebounding colonies collide with dense human settlements. I met beavers in a concrete-lined ditch behind a budget hotel in Napa; beavers in a wetland adjacent to a Walmart parking lot; beavers in downtown Martinez, California, that have become a beloved fixture of civic life. And no accounting of urban beavers would be complete without extolling the legendary beavers of the Bronx River, whose saga demonstrates that, for all the ecological value these extraordinary creatures provide, their most powerful service may be the way they enrich our lives.
Ooh la la! A shout-out for us and praise for urban beavers in general! Did Christmas come early this year? Yes, I believe it did. What a perfect way to welcome in the new year. Thank you so much Ben, for making this all possible.
And let me just stop a moment and mention in passing how many reporters, researchers and authors were using the term “urban beavers” In 2006 and 2007.
That would be zero.
Look it up. Use an ngram to see the listings on google. There are none. Because I would argue that the phrase urban beaver began right here in the home of John Muir and in the nearly 1000 talks I’ve given over the decade on this topic in Martinez, Oregon, Utah, Santa Barbara, Portland, Piedmont, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Sonoma, Santa Rosa etc.
These are words I am so happy to find in common use that I don’t even mind not getting credit for them. Urban beavers. Urban beavers. Say it with me now. It’s a thing. If not yet, it will be your thing soon.
There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.
Hamlet 5:2
