Emily Fairfax

They leave the water column.

They're not going to continue to be in the water that we want to drink and recreate in.

You can also have it be truly removed.

So when nitrogen, for example, comes in as nitrates and other agricultural pollutant, that'll settle to the bottom.

But then there's all sorts of really interesting little microorganisms that live in the bottom of beaver ponds that can process it and turn it back into inert nitrogen gas, send it to the atmosphere in a way that is not going to harm people or plants or cause an algal bloom.

So they genuinely removed it in that situation.

We're getting better at living with beavers and acknowledging that beavers are really helpful for us, but we still struggle with them a lot.

And I've noticed more and more that you'll find people who are excited about beavers in theory, but then a beaver moves into their property or place they work and they're like, hold on, not here though.

I don't want it to chew on my trees.

It can go chew on someone else's trees, on public land trees or something.

And that's a problem because we benefit the most from beavers when we are living alongside of beavers, when we have beavers right on the edges of our towns, helping us remove that pollution from the water, when we have beavers protecting our communities from floodwaves or from droughts.

So we're getting better, but I think we need to get more comfortable with being in that chaos and seeing messy wetland environments and acknowledging that that's both useful for us in nature and also beautiful in its own way.

Absolutely.

I think one of the pitfalls we fall into with beavers is asking people to just give up everything to the beaver.

And like, the beaver now controls my land.

I don't care if my driveway is underwater.

Let it flood out all of my carrots.

And that's not fair.

It shouldn't fall on the individual to lose a lot of financial security.

If you are relying on those carrots to bring in your income this year and the beaver floods them, that's not good.