Dammed If You Don’t
On beavers, or how I learned to stop worrying and love political compromise
Maybe it’s the beady eyes, or the fact that they cup their little hands like giant chipmunks when they eat. Whatever the reason, beavers are adorable. But our attraction to the species doesn’t just stem from its cuteness. The animal’s industriousness captivates our imagination. Children’s books are filled with pictures of beavers sporting hardhats and examining blueprints as they cut down trees and dam up rivers. Perhaps we like beavers, because they remind us of us.
In the language of ecology, beavers are ecosystem engineers. By damming up streams, the animals literally restructure the surrounding ecology. The resulting wetlands not only boast a range of aquatic species but also are often oasis for other animals during dry periods. And this brings “ecosystem services” to human beings, in the form of flood control, water purification, and so on.
Because most of us really only experience beavers on the television screen, from behind a telephoto lens, or at a distance while hiking, it is easy to lose sight of disruptiveness of these rodents. Beavers have no understanding of what humans want from the environment. They flood farmers’ fields just as readily as grassland. They fell trees planted for erosion control or other uses just as soon as other ones. While many of us may delight in their environmental mischief, to others beavers are just giant rats with a knack for engineering.
Although overshadowed by controversial calls to return wolves and other predators, beavers are often at the center of efforts to rewild or restore wilderness in North America and Eurasia. A 2018 paper counted some 97 projects involving beaver relocations in the western United States alone. These efforts provide us with clear lessons about what successful environmentalism requires: Proving not only a proposal’s environmental bonafides but also the integrity, beneficence, and trustworthiness of the whole effort.
A Tale of Two Lodges
No one knows how beavers got to Tayside, Scotland. Whether they escaped from a private collection or were purposefully released by environmental activists is anyone’s guess. In any case, the population exploded.
The reemergence of beavers in Tayside wasn’t controversial simply because of the agricultural risks. It certainly didn’t help that the area was low-lying and flat, meaning that dams could easily inundate a lot of cropland. Considerable resentment among farmers developed, because the beavers arrived through an unofficial release that officials essentially shrugging their shoulders at. Landowners regularly deal with environmental regulations under the threat of fines. That an environmentally consequential species reintroduction was effectively ignored by the government struck them as patently unfair—and understandably so. Some locals even began to see officials as in a “conspiracy” with environmentalists against them, proposing that they take care of the pesky beavers themselves by shooting them.
It would be easy to write off Tayside as simply another case of the inevitable incompatibility of conservation and agriculture, if it weren’t for the fact that other beaver reintroductions have turned out differently. A similar unofficial release in the Highlands sparked little controversy, because officials quickly moved to relocate the animals. More important is the case of Knapdale, where an official reintroduction process has sought to reintroduce the species, while also being responsive to potential conflicts.
The process by which new things happen is as important as the eventual outcomes. In Knapdale, beaver reintroduction is happening at a small-scale. And it is licensed as a scientific experiment. Not only does that help conservationists learn about how the beavers impact both nature and agricultural lands, it signals that the effort is both legitimate, monitored, and tentative. Should things fail to turn out well, the decision is potentially reversible. It also allows for farmers and other stakeholders to have input prior to any full scale reintroduction. It is little wonder that polarized conflict has not erupted in Knapdale.
Building Bridges, Not Just Dams
Politics not just about grand ideals, differing visions of the future, and competing ideologies. It is also rooted in mundane, everyday concerns. Successful politics requires balancing the two, specifically ensuring that one group’s grand ideals don’t come at the cost of the everyday things that matter to other people: a livelihood, feeling respected and listened to, an ability to trust government, etc.
Contemporary environmentalism has often been rooted in a vision of nature that is at once romantic and highly rationalistic. Especially in the face of the scale and urgency of problems like climate change and biodiversity decline, an idyllic vision of an ecologically restored planet is often wielded as a moral trump card. All the pedestrian concerns of land users, whether farmers, hunters, or others, is supposed to give way to more ecologically enlightened goals.
Yet that sets up a false binary. The political situation in Tayside didn’t need to turn into “beavers versus farmers”, at least not completely. Many conflicts can be avoided, if the process allows for social learning. Fencing can protect valued trees or stop beavers from blocking culverts. “Beaver flow devices” can help prevent cropland from being flooded by giving excess water an escape route.
Solutions that reconcile conservation with the rest of life, however, remain invisible whenever environmentalists aren’t ready to take skeptics seriously as political opponents, as people worth understanding. No doubt that at some point most policies get imposed despite the cries of a small minority of naysayers. But a little carefulness and thoughtfulness can reduce the size and the magnitude of the opposition.
Ultimately, that is what will make seemingly radical environmental policies more likely in the future. The farmers of Tayside will probably have a sour taste in their mouths whenever they hear about potential reintroductions in the future. The portion of them that could have remained or been convinced to become conservation allies may forever consider themselves to be environmentalists’ enemies. But it didn’t have to be that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way for many environmental policies.
 | A guest post by
|