The Sierra club is happy. It has a large corporation to blame, a native hero to champion, and a water story to unfold. Even if it does mention those tiresome beavers.
PG&E, the Mountain Maidu, and a Very Powerful River
A group of Mountain Maidu has reclaimed its former lands, but not the
In the spring of 2021, a crew of nine workers arrived at Tásmam Koyóm, at the headwaters of Northern California’s Feather River. They began to cut down saplings, dragging them over a fast-moving creek that ran through a meadow, then bending them into a tangled weave of trunks and branches that held strong in the current.
The landscape around them was an artifact of decades of cattle grazing—the utility that once owned this land, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), had leased it to ranchers. The cattle had compacted the soil and dried out the meadow’s outer reaches, transforming what had been a wetland into a field of dry grass. As the work progressed, and the sapling dams blocked the current, areas of the parched meadow began to fill with slow-moving channels of water.
The crew—made up of Mountain Maidu youths and employees of a local habitatrestoration outfit called Swift Water Design—called themselves “beavers.” Actual beavers haven’t been seen in this region for years, and it is forbidden by state law to introduce them. Some researchers claim that beavers have never been here at all, although there are dozens of words for the species and its handiwork in languages native to this region. The beaver dam analogs would, hopefully, create an inviting habitat for any beavers who happened to make it this far upstream, encouraging them to keep the dams up and running in perpetuity.
Ahhh the Sierra club FULLY ENDORSES beaver analogs. If not actual beavers, just so you know.
“We’re trying to build this meadow to be like something the Maidu, precontact, would have recognized,” Kevin Swift, the owner of Swift Water Design, told me one afternoon in May. He estimated that the water table near the dams had already risen by a few inches in the past few days. The crew was in the process of building 40 dams along Yellow Creek, a tributary of the Feather River. “Channelization isn’t a natural state,” said Trina Cunningham, executive director of the Maidu Summit Consortium, as we splashed around ankle-deep in the revived shallows. “Water wants to meander and roam.”
The consortium had recently taken over the ownership of this land, and the dams were only the beginning of its plans for Tásmam Koyóm. As the restoration progressed, the meadow’s waters would be near stagnant in some places, move slowly in others, and rush swiftly downstream elsewhere. These micro-ecosystems would become habitats for a variety of plants, fish, and amphibians. The changes would keep valuable sediment in the meadow and out of reservoirs downstream, and they would increase the landscape’s ability to store carbon and filter water.
The meadow would also, Cunningham told me, serve as a potential firebreak in the increasingly likely event of a wildfire. “Why are we digging fire lines during a fire when we could have natural fire lines cut with water?” she said. Months earlier, Maidu elder Lorena Gorbet had told me that the Maidu planned to use Tásmam Koyóm as a teaching ground to show “the right and respectful way to take care of the land.” Gorbet and I spoke on a day when the wildfire smoke choked the skies purple both where I live in Berkeley and where she lives in the Sierra, hundreds of miles away. Her great-grandfather, Gorbet explained, used to be in charge of keeping the forests between Indian Valley and Mountain Meadows clear of brush, ensuring that there wasn’t too much new growth accumulating in the understory. When he’d visit family members on the other side of the ridge in the late 1800s, she recalled, “they always knew when he was coming back” because they’d see small plumes of smoke rising from the forest. He was tending his landscape—keeping fire away with fire.
Nice to see a triumphant photo of Trina Cunningham. She was a fantastic speaker at our Beaver Summit and is no one to be trifled with.
The glossy article is more about the BAD Pge than the GOOD beavers. But you should go check it out. It’s a good reminder of what it might look like if the Sierra Club through it’s resources behind California’s fire-fighting water-savers and biodiversity defenders for a change.
