They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry.
But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators
Maybe part of the problem is that humans in North America are largely not hunting beavers anymore?
We're very capable of being the predators that keep animal populations in check, and plenty of people do still hunt, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone hunting beavers in my life
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.
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.
They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry.
But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.
Give it a few more dry years and Europeans will learn to love their beavers, again.
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.
TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it:
> But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
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
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
Just another flavor of short sighted do gooders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
Good? They don't own the commons.
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.
Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
what's wrong with it not reverting to nature when they pass? people put flowers on loved ones graves.
floods roads, buildings, neighbour's properties.
they are very persistent buggers and breed like... rodents
What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?
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.
> They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators.
Just like our fellow humans. Godzilla to the rescue!
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.
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.
> They will continue to breed, expanding territory unless there are predators
Maybe part of the problem is that humans in North America are largely not hunting beavers anymore?
We're very capable of being the predators that keep animal populations in check, and plenty of people do still hunt, but I don't think I've ever heard of anyone hunting beavers in my life
Busy beaver problem?
Why are you wanting transform the beavers property?
this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
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.
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.
> 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.