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_whiteCaps_ 5 hours ago [-]
There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area.
Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.
Waterluvian 1 hours ago [-]
I love this. Especially the part where you can ask the Government of Canada for beavers.
But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.
richiebful1 6 hours ago [-]
It was an interesting, but counterintuitive result that water temperatures went down after artificial beaver damming. Their theory is that the water is able to permeate more into the ground and exchange heat with the ambient underground temperature [1]
I’m rather partial to beavers myself and was sad to learn about their demise in North America. At one point their pelts were referred to as “the coin of the realm” https://youtu.be/8XToPq9lsOM?si=DJKedkQXuzJhSmf7
I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing.
I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000.
off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` (thanks airbnb for making it obvious, I guess) and I wish I'd have a "middleware" that removes them when I copy something, but I'm too lazy and it would not be cross-platform.
some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/
culi 25 minutes ago [-]
Yeah the best policy is to avoid using a "Share" button as much as possible and always just copy the URL bar. I have a browser extension that strips them automatically too but I don't think it always works. I wish my extension, instead of just stripping it, would mangle it randomly just to add some data poisoning to websites that do this
xp84 41 minutes ago [-]
I really want this to mean dams constructed by robot beavers. Move over, A.I.! Time for A.B.
josefresco 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?
petcat 7 hours ago [-]
The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.
cornstalks 7 hours ago [-]
TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it:
> But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
repeekad 6 hours ago [-]
Which they never will on their own, so surely conservation regulations need to be enforced, too bad the US is moving backwards right now in that regard
stouset 6 hours ago [-]
Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
fodkodrasz 5 hours ago [-]
The modern phrasing of "improve" and "develop" for destroy is pretty upsetting to me.
My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
stouset 2 hours ago [-]
The two meanings are not synonymous. One can certainly destroy land through improving or developing it, one can also do improve it responsibly and minimally.
Building one or two small permanent structures on many acres of forest is not destroying it by a long shot.
cucumber3732842 5 hours ago [-]
Everything you do to waste land area by "lightly" touching it further increases sprawl because it increases the land required to do things.
Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings.
Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
oatmeal1 4 hours ago [-]
High density development leaving as much pristine nature as possible is vastly superior to sprawl for the environment, but the comment you replied to didn't seem to describe a density issue.
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago [-]
Regardless we'd do a lot more pinprick development and develop fewer acres and there'd be less pressure to do greenfield development if not for the rules adopted at the behest of half baked 20th century environmentalism.
thunderfork 2 hours ago [-]
environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago [-]
Just another flavor of short sighted do gooders.
nkrisc 6 hours ago [-]
The alternative is we drive ourselves ever closer to the brink.
It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival.
The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
AngryData 5 hours ago [-]
If you don't want to deal with swampy land full of beavers, don't buy swampy land full of beavers.
They should of done a better job purchasing land.
stouset 2 hours ago [-]
This is the opposite of a useful perspective.
Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities.
Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further.
What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
AngryData 2 hours ago [-]
You act like it is impossible to use land that beavers live on without destroying the beaver dams or removing the beavers, and yet there are plenty of people that do that very thing their entire lives without a problem.
I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back.
Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem.
Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
stouset 1 hours ago [-]
No, but I do believe that the people who actually own these lands almost universally think that the government unnecessarily interferes with their ability to make small improvements that don’t meaningfully impact wildlife.
I agree with this kind of oversight. But as someone with a friend who is both an environmentalist and does own land adjacent to a river and land managed by the national forest service, the latitude for what you can actually do without serious oversight is essentially nothing. Luckily what he wants to do is essentially nothing, but even the very minimal bits he does want to do—which includes making fire breaks in a populated area which is wildfire-prone—is questionable.
It’s been eye opening to see the lengths he’s had to go to in order to stay on the right side of things. And it’s given me a decent perspective on the burden it puts on even those who want do to be responsible landowners.
It’s also been interesting to learn about the perverse incentives it does put on those who own this kind of land. One example is that new paths generally can’t be cleared, except when a wildfire happens, if you can justify it as part of firefighting or fire prevention efforts. So if and when there is a fire nearby, bulldozers come out in droves. I’ll leave you to connect that to what might be the root cause of some of these fires.
mulmen 6 hours ago [-]
Ignoring externalities remains popular.
We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
rylando 3 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
5 hours ago [-]
messe 6 hours ago [-]
Good? They don't own the commons.
cmrdporcupine 6 hours ago [-]
Beavers can be incredibly difficult to live alongside of.
My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another.
Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick).
Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours.
They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
xandrius 4 hours ago [-]
Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
throwway120385 3 hours ago [-]
That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
arthurbrown 4 hours ago [-]
What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?
jpollock 3 hours ago [-]
They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators. When they come across a culvert (or bridge), they will block it, eventually overtopping roads and washing them out.
giardini 1 hours ago [-]
Is there no more demand for beaver pelt and/or meat?
I've heard the tail is particularly tasty and easy to skin and cook.
arthurbrown 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the good faith reply. I can see that this would require regular maintenance.
It is interesting that we see our infrastructure as 'valid' or correct, but the work these engineers (beavers) put in as a nuisance. In an ideal world, the benefits to local biodiversity and ecosystem health should be balanced with the cost of relocating roads when necessary.
tosapple 4 hours ago [-]
what's wrong with it not reverting to nature when they pass? people put flowers on loved ones graves.
cmrdporcupine 37 minutes ago [-]
floods roads, buildings, neighbour's properties.
they are very persistent buggers and breed like... rodents
cogogo 5 hours ago [-]
Busy beaver problem?
parodysbird 3 hours ago [-]
Why are you wanting transform the beavers property?
evan_ 4 hours ago [-]
this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
cucumber3732842 5 hours ago [-]
Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability.
Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
devilbunny 2 hours ago [-]
His freeform, not-too-serious libertarianism can easily be mocked, but PJ O’Rourke did have a very good point about well-intentioned but counterproductive environmental legislation like the laws governing wetlands: imagine that, should an Old Master painting be discovered on your property, you were required immediately to cease all other use of the property and protect that Old Master painting against damage or theft, under penalty of law, but without any compensation for the expenses this might incur. You can imagine that any new ones found would simply be burned immediately, not protected. And wetlands laws work a bit like that.
pvaldes 6 hours ago [-]
> Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?
My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.
krm01 5 hours ago [-]
Whatever they eat, did that go down to an all time low. Im m curious about the chain reaction vs an isolated result.
rmunn 5 minutes ago [-]
That was my thought too. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Change a single variable, especially a dramatic change like going from 8% to 60% on a single variable, and there will be ripple effects throughout the local ecosystem. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of those unchangeable, eternal laws that when you forget them, the Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more*.
I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us! Seriously, that would require statutory change here in Washington state. I live in a rural area with salmon waterways all over. Farmers just quietly clear the way for them, because it's illegal to make any changes to the waterway even if it's trash thrown out of cars.
tolugenius 5 hours ago [-]
> I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us!
This really made laugh for some reason, just imagining a beaver typing away at HN specifically.
rmunn 9 minutes ago [-]
And probably playing Timberborn on a second monitor at the same time.
pstuart 6 hours ago [-]
With freshwater increasingly being a problem, being able to slow down tributaries and allow the water to percolate and help rebuild aquifers is something that should be happening everywhere possible.
Lost cost, high reward. Not sexy enough to get the attention it deserves.
declan_roberts 5 hours ago [-]
The temperature is cooler? That can't possibly be the only reason to explain such a dramatic change in survival rates. We definitely need more research on this topic.
oatmeal1 4 hours ago [-]
There's more food, less energy wasted fighting excessively strong current, and more places to hide from predators. Water quality goes up downstream of a beaver(-ish) dam.
margalabargala 5 hours ago [-]
If you do even a moment of reading about salmon, you will find that they are extremely sensitive to warm temperatures. Even a couple degrees F above their "normal" will allow disease to run rampant.
declan_roberts 5 hours ago [-]
I give the salmon a little more credit because the entire river can't be a beaver dam. That's their theory and I think will more research we're going to learn more about what's happening here.
analog8374 2 hours ago [-]
we clearly need to design better salmon.
lotrjohn 45 minutes ago [-]
Been there. Done that. Even attended the “spawn till you die” festival in ‘98 but all I got was a stupid t-shirt.
Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.
But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.
1. https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-...
I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing.
I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000.
https://www.leilaphilip.com/beaverland
some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/
> But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
Building one or two small permanent structures on many acres of forest is not destroying it by a long shot.
Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings.
Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival.
The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
They should of done a better job purchasing land.
Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities.
Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further.
What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back.
Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem.
Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
I agree with this kind of oversight. But as someone with a friend who is both an environmentalist and does own land adjacent to a river and land managed by the national forest service, the latitude for what you can actually do without serious oversight is essentially nothing. Luckily what he wants to do is essentially nothing, but even the very minimal bits he does want to do—which includes making fire breaks in a populated area which is wildfire-prone—is questionable.
It’s been eye opening to see the lengths he’s had to go to in order to stay on the right side of things. And it’s given me a decent perspective on the burden it puts on even those who want do to be responsible landowners.
It’s also been interesting to learn about the perverse incentives it does put on those who own this kind of land. One example is that new paths generally can’t be cleared, except when a wildfire happens, if you can justify it as part of firefighting or fire prevention efforts. So if and when there is a fire nearby, bulldozers come out in droves. I’ll leave you to connect that to what might be the root cause of some of these fires.
We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another.
Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick).
Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours.
They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
I've heard the tail is particularly tasty and easy to skin and cook.
It is interesting that we see our infrastructure as 'valid' or correct, but the work these engineers (beavers) put in as a nuisance. In an ideal world, the benefits to local biodiversity and ecosystem health should be balanced with the cost of relocating roads when necessary.
they are very persistent buggers and breed like... rodents
Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.
* https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference in that last sentence. Most people will, I hope, but there's always the lucky 10,000. (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
This really made laugh for some reason, just imagining a beaver typing away at HN specifically.
Lost cost, high reward. Not sexy enough to get the attention it deserves.