Emily Fairfax

Beavers are a geologic force because the scale they operate at, both in space and time, is enormous.

Beavers are all over the North American continent.

One beaver family is changing and shaping two kilometers of a stream.

Huge territories.

And they've been doing it for seven and a half million years.

They've been modifying things for way longer than people have been building dams or canals or any of our other feats of engineering.

They're great land managers.

I think we should work with them on public land.

We have our own interests to look out for.

We are not beavers.

But we could definitely collaborate with them a little bit more seriously.

I think a lot of times we don't want to work with beavers because they're pretty chaotic and we tend to like rules and order and plans.

Well, have you ever seen a beaver pull a permit or draw a blueprint?

No.

They do not give you any insight as to how they're going to build, and they change in the moment to respond to their surroundings.

They'll start their dam, the water will flow a little bit different, and they'll change their plan, and they'll change it again.

And they are just constantly making the landscape incredibly messy, and it's that messiness that makes it resilient.

We should work with beavers because we are facing what is probably the biggest challenge of our generation.

Climate change is an enormous, difficult thing for us to deal with.

And it might be too much to deal with on our own.