Emily Fairfax

So we need to work with nature.

And we are so lucky that there is another engineer out there that has millions of years of experience doing exactly that, creating stable habitats, surviving climate change, making habitat for other species.

We can put our human brains on stuff we're really good at and then partner with beavers for the things that they're good at, like creating biodiversity and stopping fires.

Beavers are definitely key to wildfire mitigation.

When you think about what North America used to look like when we had all the beavers of the past, it was 10 times as many as we have now.

Every single stream was this bright green belt of vegetation.

It was wet.

It was difficult to burn.

It would have been so much harder to have huge destructive fires back then.

So bringing back beavers is about making landscapes that are resilient to fire, not just patches, but entire ecosystems, entire states.

They're outstanding at this.

Yeah.

So after a fire, one of the big concerns is you'll have a lot of ash and debris and all sorts of things flow into the water and contaminate it.

Beaver wetlands are really good at removing pollution, both post-fire and ordinary pollution, from the water.

They slow it down, it has time to settle to the bottom, and then it gets buried.

Which doesn't always sound like the best solution, but we bury a lot of our pollution too, so it's an acceptable solution for most people.

Yep.

Yeah, there's a couple ways that beavers can actually remove the pollution from the water.

The first is just by settling it.

So when you have heavy metals like lead and arsenic and cadmium or phosphates, which is an agricultural pollutant and a nutrient, those can latch on to these really fine sediments, sink to the bottom, and just get buried over time.