Beavers? Bret Weinstein Speaks with Jakob Shockey on the Darkhorse Podcast
Jakob Shockey, founder of the Beaver Coalition, has spent years researching and working to preserve, restore, and understand beaver habitats. He discusses with Bret the rarely discussed impacts of Beavers on all aspects of our world, and how we have thrown this equilibrium out of balance by trapping beavers and industrializing north America with little regard for preserving the factors that made it as hospitable as it has been.Find Jakob at his website: https://www.jakobshockey.com/Find the B...
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this morning with Jacob Shockey, who is founder and executive director of the Beaver Coalition.
Now, many people will not know what the Beaver Coalition is.
I should probably say right at the top that I know you because you were my student and you were Heather's student at Evergreen.
How many years ago would that have been?
Yeah, 2010.
2010, that seems a long time ago.
There's been some stuff that has happened since 2010.
It's a bit of a different world.
Yeah, it is a very different and in many ways more troubling world.
In any case, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you for having me.
Glad to do it.
There's a lot that we might talk about here and many different topics that are interrelated in various ways.
I will say that this conversation is spurred by the fact that you came to Portland.
You're living in Southern Oregon these days.
But you came to Portland while Heather and I and our family were living there.
And you walked us around some beaver habitat.
And frankly, what you told us blew our minds.
We both know a bit about beavers.
We're both outdoors people who have encountered them periodically.
know about them from from some academic work, but what you said really changed our understanding of the role that beavers play and have played in North America and I thought it would be a really good idea to bring that different perspective to a much larger audience. but what you said really changed our understanding of the So do you want to say something about How it is that those of us who think we know something about beavers get it wrong?
Yeah, I'm surprised that it surprised you.
They're kind of an unassuming animal.
For a long time they were the object of a lot of desire because of their pelts.
So a lot of people spent a lot of time thinking about beavers 150-250 years ago.
And then for a while now they've been kind of a pest species.
Sometimes they plug culverts.
I think what's missed is that for thousands of years beavers were the managers of the freshwater systems of the Northern Hemisphere and they predictably do things, which we should get into, to the landscape.
For their own needs.
And yet that predictable way that they garden and build a landscape, um, everything else has co-evolved to that as that's how, that's how streams look.
That's how rivers look when, when they're under beaver management, that, that is, that is the system that everything has come to expect.
And, uh, when beavers were absented from that system.
It fell into a state that is very different, and that's the baseline that has shifted away.
Even the meandering stream that you imagine as a stream, one can make the argument that that's a bit of a human construction.
And so, yeah, I'm curious to hear.
What your model was prior to thinking about beavers and a landscape context.
Well, I've done a lot of thinking in the aftermath of our conversation.
How could something that has such a profound importance have escaped my notice?
It's the kind of thing that I pride myself on seeing and to understand that I had had it wrong caused me to wonder how that happened.
And what I've come up with is That the importance of beavers is largely, it's not even historical, it's prehistorical.
And so I've been living my life in a context that was thoroughly haunted by animals that I was not seeing very regularly.
And I think that that's the crux of it is, you know, I have occasionally encountered beavers in the wild.
but not often.
And what that led me to incorrectly think was that they had always been a minor player and punching above their weight class by virtue of the fact that a small number of animals can alter a habitat profoundly.
But my thought was that's taking place where I see a beaver pond.
And I was not understanding that actually many of the things that are not now beaver ponds have been dramatically impacted by past beaver activity and then further impacted by the removal of those animals, both for fur and because people had other plans for those pieces of land and they didn't want a large both for fur and because people had other plans for those Deciding to terraform, you know, their development or whatever it was that they were doing.
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It was, it was that that I had wrong.
I thought that this was a comparatively rare animal and that just simply isn't the case.
So you want to talk about how common they were?
Yeah, well, so I come from, I've lived a long time in this place called the Applegate Valley, it's southwestern Oregon, and the native folks there called it the spink, and I'm probably butchering the pronunciation, but that was the Tacoma word for this area, and meant place of the beaver.
And that was the first thing that kind of alerted my attention because it's a similar situation as you described where there's an occasional beaver, you know, but you wouldn't name it the place of the beaver.
And it's fertile farm fields, it's a kind of narrow valley with fertile farm fields and a river or stream on one side or the other, maybe the middle, you know, little bands of trees on both sides.
Not very beaver-y, right?
There's a history there of gold mining.
This place, there was a huge rush that came in and this valley was full of gold.
And I got to thinking about that in the context of, well, this valley was also full of beaver and miners use this thing called a sluice box, right?
And it's basically a bunch of ridges that catches heavy metal that settles out.
And sediment settles out, too.
And so this valley is flat and fertile because of the aggregate settling out of sediment over thousands and thousands of years behind beaver dams.
But those beaver dams in this context were also catching the gold that eroded from the hillsides.
And so, you know, the first rush of folks through this area were the beaver trappers.
The second rush of folks through this area were the gold miners, and they were They were harvesting the spoils of thousands of years of accumulated wealth behind beaver dams.
And that's really what fertile valleys that we farm have done, too.
We drained wetlands and we uncovered this fertility.
But it's the fertility, it's the vestige of this beaver kingdom.
And we took streams and pushed them over to the side of the hill and, you know, made them The ditches that we see today.
So, to unpack this a little bit.
There's this cliche about gold and them thar hills.
And the idea really, I mean, let's take it all the way back as long as we're doing this, right?
Gold is not produced by anything here on Earth.
It's incapable of being produced by anything here on Earth.
It is produced by supernovas, right?
It gets spewed into the universe by exploding stars and then gravity draws stuff together, not just gold, a small fraction of it being gold.
And that gold and silver and platinum and all of the other stuff gets kind of haphazardly molded into some ball, right?
A planet.
And the point is that planet isn't perfectly flat because there are processes that push some parts up and Other parts, you know, erode away.
And that results in a process where all of these heavy things are distributed at arbitrary heights.
And then gravity slowly works them down, presumably into the seas.
But if you have a beaver doing its beaver thing, then the point is, well, that actually creates this sluice box.
Is that the term?
Yeah.
So you've got this sluice box being produced by a rodent that has no interest in gold at all.
Right.
But the point is, there's a deposit of gold there that is not the result of the fact that the process of supernovas and then the gravity pulling the stuff of the earth together.
It didn't put that stuff in that valley.
Beavers put it in that valley.
And so this first place where some huge amount of wealth is...
is the result of this rodents activity and then of course there's a gold rush which you know I've never heard beavers mentioned as an important feature of the gold rush in my life but of course they were central to it.
Key contractors for thousands of years.
There you go.
Did you say key contractors or pre-contractors?
Right?
So, anyway, so the point is I know all about the gold rush.
I grew up in California.
I didn't know that beavers were an important chapter in that story.
And what I find out is that that's actually the minor piece of it.
Right?
Gold is one thing, but there's also the fact of the fertility of the West, which is a result of a parallel process that is downstream, literally downstream, of exactly the same activity of this Absolutely remarkable rodent.
Yeah.
And we have an interesting relationship with it because I feel like we look at it as a fellow ecosystem engineer and there's a bit of admiration.
You know, we've got a busy as a beaver and all this stuff.
But we also have some disagreements around the landscaping.
We have not agreed on blueprints, and so when it starts architecting, if we have other designs on that piece of land, we consider it a nuisance.
Yeah, it's troubling, it's upsetting to our sensibilities, and the thing is, you know, we've taken these flat lands and we've assumed that Those flatlands are stable as they are.
We don't quite see that these fertile fields that we've been harvesting that fertility and, you know, food, that's a system that has been Degraded to that state.
And so I spend a lot of my time kind of helping folks with beaver issues.
It's because they've then brought in houses and roads and all these various things and they've built it on these vestiges of wetlands.
And gravity being what it is, when beavers show up in that context and they start to build back the dams, you sometimes have cities and subdivisions in the way.
And a lot of what I do when I'm talking with a city planning department is just to point out simply like, okay, well, be careful where it's flat.
Because a lot of what we're seeing right now, you know, a family's been farming a piece of land in Oregon for maybe five generations, and they've been farming right to the water's edge.
The water has been ditched into a stream, and then all this fertility is growing food and what have you.
And then when that sells to subdivisions, like in the urban sprawl, we do this thing where we say, well, now we're going to make the stream pristine.
We're going to plant trees along it.
And those are going to filter the runoff from all of our impervious surfaces.
And when we plant trees, that was the thing the beaver were missing.
Well, it was good beaver habitat and they were just missing the trees.
The farmer was... The last ingredient.
Yeah.
And so then they move in and they bring that water back up to where they would expect it to be and things get flooded.
And so there's this cycle that's happening across the West now with urban expansion that's actually facilitating more beaver habitat in these systems that have been You know, the nerdy biology term, right?
It's limiting factors.
The trees were limiting.
Well, so this is a beautiful story and a tragic story in many ways because isn't it marvelous at one level that you've got this creature that's literally responsible for making the bottom lands flat and rich and full of gold and all sorts of other things that we like And we've made it very inhospitable to them by shooting at them and terraforming in our own ways and ripping out their dams and draining their wetlands and all these things.
But some part of us still has a, you know, a vestige of that land is good because it's aesthetically nice, right?
That's a proxy for good land, right?
How would you know that you want to settle here?
Well, it might be that it looks very beautiful to you and that is actually an indicator and it has all the stuff you're probably going to want.
So, you know, we like it when the stream has some trees, right?
That looks good to us, and it looks good to the beaver, and you put the trees there, and holy moly, you've just unleashed this animal that's responsible for all of the wealth that you're profiting from, and your sense is, oh my god, that's terrible.
Oh no, those trees!
Well, I'll hear that even from folks who are restoration professionals and they put in the trees and, you know, then I get the call like, the beavers are in here cutting down my trees.
And these are folks with some title like wildlife biologists or what have you, but the knee-jerk reaction sometimes can be like, trap out the beavers, you know.
Right.
There's a disconnect that these are, like if you do restoration and beavers show up, You met the beaver's standard.
Like, congratulations.
Your restoration project worked.
It did.
You can hand it off to the professionals now.
They're going to run with it.
Right.
And you're right about, you know, this is why a good biological model is really what you want.
Because in some sense, it's not really surprising that you would sometimes be one ingredient short of perfect habitat for something like a beaver, right?
And if you don't think about it in those terms, right, you think, well, there are no beavers here.
It's probably not good.
And it's like, no, you're real close, right?
And if you put that one thing there, boom, there's almost nothing you can do to stop this next part of the process, which you might not like.
But it is, well let's just say, it is an incredibly powerful force.
That's really, to the extent that some of us have been, and even though I miss this aspect of them having transformed much of North America, I have been fascinated by this animal for a long time because the disproportionate capacity to affect the world around it.
A small number of individuals being able to radically alter a habitat and turn it, for example, from a rushing stream into a small lake.
Right?
That's an amazing capacity for an animal.
And then, you know, if you told me there was such an animal, I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that it was going to be a rodent.
Right?
A small number of individual rodents are going to build me a lake?
Right?
That seems odd, right?
This is not, um, it's not the clade that I would go to if I was looking for an animal that, you know, I mean, how hard would it be if somebody assigned
You know, in your case, you've spent enough time with beavers that maybe you'd do a good job, but if you gave the average person the job of, make me a lake here, and you gave them a saw to chop down some trees, and you said, you can put the trees how you want, and you can mud up the spaces in between, you know, most people would not be able to create a lake, and yet, this animal
It's not just that it chops down trees and uses them to block water flows and that that creates lakes.
It's that it apparently, each one of these valleys is its own puzzle.
And it solves that puzzle, right?
Each time it figures out how to do it.
And it does it collectively as a family, which is also interesting.
So let's get into this.
Let's just fill in the natural history of beavers so that people understand what a remarkable and strange creature this is.
So we can start with family, right?
They seem to mate for life.
You've got a mom and a dad and not very sexually dimorphic.
You can't really tell the difference.
Some biologists have figured out a method.
You turn the beaver upside down and you squeeze their butt and you sniff and it either smells like diesel or cheese.
Really?
Yeah, so you know a true beaver biologist if they know the diesel or cheese.
Yeah, so I can't really tell mom or dad apart.
Then they'll have like two to four young ones on average a year, and the young ones stick around for a year or two.
So you've got teenagers, helpers, right?
So some colonies can be 12 individuals or more, and they're territorial.
They've got an area of vegetation and water that they're managing actively.
And they manage it together.
I mean, I guess that's what made me think about it as you're thinking about, you know, this animal intelligently building a dam.
It's 12 animals.
It's even better than intelligently building.
It's intelligently collaborating on a project in which everybody's got to do their part right.
Yep.
And there's no foreman.
Right.
And they do a lot of digging, too.
So beaver, they're very graceful in the water.
They're not graceful on land.
And they can be 60 pounds of slow-moving protein, right?
I mean, anything They can, would love to eat a beaver.
So they flood landscapes to stay protected from predators.
Wolves were a big predator, historically.
Bears, big predator.
In my area, cougars are probably one of the main predator, aside from, of course, humans now.
Right.
And in my area, the humans were a predator for a long time, too.
Beavers were eaten.
So you've got this tight-knit family.
They are interested in keeping the big kitties at bay by flooding the landscape, right?
Yep.
And depending on the landscape, then they'll build a structure to live in.
And if they flooded the landscape all the way to the sides of the valley, Well then, you know, they don't breathe underwater.
They need a dry space.
They'll build themselves up a lodge.
And it's this freestanding mound of sticks and mud.
And it has an underwater entrance, right?
Kind of a front door.
And sometimes it'll have mini cavities in it.
Sometimes they have kind of a mud room.
Dry your feet off, and then come up to the main chamber.
I think I know which beaver thought of that.
It's the mother beaver.
There's no reason to track all that mud into the rest of the lodge.
I've crawled up into one of these one time, and they smell lovely, like crushed willow.
Do they really?
Yeah, yeah.
Beavers kind of have a willowy scent.
It's not the rodent scent that triggers the human brain.
Oh, this is something that could give me a disease.
That rat scent.
Yeah, no, none of that.
There's not even an undertone of that.
It's a crushed willow smell.
Yeah, that's great.
That's surprising to me.
But I get it.
Okay, so they've got a big enough chamber for you to get in.
Indeed, yeah.
And you're not tiny.
No, I'm not tiny.
I'm crazy enough to crawl into a beaver lodge.
Yeah, apparently.
Yeah, so they have this lovely little lodge, and in areas that freeze over winter, they'll pack a bunch of vegetation down in there.
A pond as a larder to eat off of once the ice forms.
So this is wood or woody material.
And the environment softens it up over time or no?
You know, there's discussion around what sitting in the water does.
The main hypothesis for a long time has just been accessibility when the ice forms.
Got it.
Well, that certainly makes a prediction that where the ice doesn't form they will do less or none of it.
Yep, and we see that kind of borne out.
You do?
Okay, cool.
And kind of a knock-on effect of this collection of wood.
So you think about a rodent that's obsessively taking vegetation from outside the stream and adding it into the stream.
So just for the sake of filling this in for people who haven't spent much time in beaver habitat.
Yeah.
You've got beavers will put in a investment over what must be weeks on a very large log, right?
I've seen that.
Oh, I see.
One big tree.
One big tree, which has to be on the shore and has to be leaning in such a way that They can predict that it will fall into the water enough that they can then swim it to wherever they need to go.
It's a lot easier if it falls in the water.
A lot easier if it falls in the water.
There's presumably nothing they can do with a large tree if it falls out of the water.
They will utilize it.
But they can't move it.
They can't move it, yeah.
But they'll buck it up.
into links.
Yes.
I've never seen that.
Yeah.
That's cool.
So how long a length will they buck is when you cut a log into rounds before you split it into pieces of firewood.
Yeah.
So if you're making firewood, yeah, 16 inches, right?
Yeah.
And it's funny because beaver, and I don't know why, seem to prefer a similar, it looks like cordwood except for the tapered at the end, you know?
Really?
And you can spot a spot where a tree has been felled and bucked because there's the wood chips at approximately every 16 inches along the ground.
Which you would totally, if you didn't know what was going on, probably assume implied human involvement.
Yeah, they do look a little like somebody was whacking at something with a hatchet.
So beavers have these really impressive teeth.
They grow continuously for the beaver's life.
Which is true of all rodents.
Yeah, and the front of them are orange, which from what I understand, there's like a heavy iron component that keeps that front dentin hard.
And so there's self-sharpening.
These little chisels.
And it's impressive.
They can fell very big trees.
Now why they choose sometimes to fell big trees is interesting.
You know, beavers being territorial, they'll be managing a woodlot, if you will, a riparian area of trees and shrubs and the grasses and forbs through their lineage, through generations.
Sometimes they'll pass up a tree for many, many, many years.
And then one day it's like, that's the tree.
So why do they do it?
Well, I don't have a good example of, or explanation for, you know, there's something more complicated going on.
So what you're saying is, you see a pattern in which there is obviously some sort of, I don't, I'm not arguing that it's conscious, we don't know how a beaver's mind works.
Yeah, there's intentionality.
But there is some choice to, now I fell that one, and it could be that it is managing the habitat, right?
In other words, you liberate other trees that are struggling.
To get enough light, for example, by felling a big tree.
Yep.
And that might be the reason that that one goes.
And so again, this might be a management issue of parameters that make the habitat more productive of things that the beavers are eating or... And there's a whole conversation with the plant, too, and the chemical defenses that plants put out to avoid Browsers, right?
So every plant has their various phenolic compounds and whatever that they're spending some budget of energy on chemical defense.
So we will, this audience, the Dark Horse audience will have heard Heather and me talk many times about secondary compounds.
These are compounds that don't have a function inside the plant or the fungus or whatever that is producing them.
Their purpose is to interact with Animals, usually to poison them so that they will move on and eat something else.
So anyway... And they taste bitter.
Right.
Animals have developed a taste for this.
We have evolved the ability to detect these things.
Oh, that's a poison.
Yeah, exactly.
And in fact, you know, as you know, you've been to the tropics and you know there's lots of things out there that are obviously fruits, but it's not obvious whether or not you can eat them.
Right.
But there is a trick, which is, you know, you take a little fruit.
Put it on your tongue.
And if it tastes bitter, you don't eat that thing.
And if it tastes good, then you can gently explore it.
Proceed with caution.
Yes, this trick has never killed me.
Yeah.
Not yet, at least.
Not yet.
Not yet.
You being here.
Right.
That is proof positive that so far it has worked.
Yeah, well, beavers do the same things.
Sometimes you'll see them nicking into a tree.
You'll see like one little nick and they didn't they didn't choose to cut that tree and then you'll see three or four nicks along and then that somebody's coming down and an interesting thing too is it seems to be, you know, if you're a plant and you're low you're expecting more browsers and so you're gonna spend more of your energy producing these phenolic compounds, these bitter tannins to keep browsers at bay.
But as you grow high Well, that doesn't make sense to spend all that budget anymore on chemical defense because you're above the height of the grazers and browsers.
And so beavers kind of come in and subvert that by whacking the tree down.
Yeah.
And then they'll eat all the foliage and the cambium layer from the massive tree that stopped spending money or energy.
Energy on these poisons.
Yeah.
That is so interesting.
And then you can watch the deer come in.
Everybody loves it when a beaver drops a big tree because suddenly you have a very sweet food source sitting there.
That's mind-blowing, actually.
No, it makes perfect sense.
Why defend against the browsers if you're tall and they can't reach you but the beaver has this other, you know, it's a little bit... Those chisels.
Yeah, it's reminiscent to me of the way a strangler fig reverses the tables on the other trees in a tropical forest.
Where, you know, in general, the problem for every tree in a tropical forest is you start out on the forest floor where there's almost no light.
Like 1% of the incident light actually makes it to the forest floor.
And you've got to wait an awful long time before a gap opens up, right?
And so most would-be trees just die of light starvation before they ever get a chance.
And strangler figs start, well, at least often at the top.
They start, you know, a bat will eat a fig and drop a seed in, you know, a crevice in a tree that's accumulated some dirt.
And the tree grows down from above where there's plenty of light.
And now it has a water problem, weirdly.
But anyway, this strikes me as that same sort of thing where the natural logic of the forest has been out thunk by one creature.
And there are all sorts of consequences for other creatures of, oh, well, suddenly that tree just came, you know, though vibrant and alive, just came crashing out of the canopy.
And you can browse it temporarily.
That's really cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and it seems consistent with some of the observations I've made too, where sometimes you'll walk a section and it seems like there should be beaver here.
And you'll see sign that beavers have moved through, but they haven't decided to settle.
You know, there's plenty of water.
It seems like a good spot and I'm seeing lots of green things.
But then you go look at the green things and consistently I see this in areas with like heavy elk browse or public land cattle grazing browse where you look at the typical plants beavers would be eating and they've been munched and munched and munched and munched and they've got this kind of like dwarfed bonsai look going.
And my mind immediately says, well, that's a very bitter plant.
Right.
That is a plant that has responded with toxins and it's probably not worth the beavers.
It's probably not worth it.
So, so to our human minds, we're looking at lots of green stuff, but I feel like there's, there's this underlying conversation between the plants and the browsers.
That's really interesting.
And it does, there is one observation on a completely different system.
Um, that I wonder if it might not be related.
Cool.
So back when I used to study tent making bats, um, by far, by far, like by 10 or 20 times you would find empty tents.
Um, you know, and one in 20 times you might find a bat in the tent or a family of bats.
But then also, in addition to all of the empty tents, and the empty tents have a relatively straightforward explanation, which is that the bats are moving on to where, this was the hypothesis I tested while I was doing my dissertation work, was that these bats, all of the tent-making bats are small, And they pay a high price for locomotion.
The bigger a bat you are, the more efficient a flyer you are.
And so flying long distances is expensive for these animals.
And so they are placing tents near the fruiting trees.
But, you know, a tree might be in fruit for a week or two, and then it's not in fruit.
And having a tent there isn't all that useful, so it moves on.
So there's lots of empty tents because they're always in motion.
But there's also this other phenomenon.
Of partially built tents that never get completed.
And you know, presumably sometimes that's the result of the animal having started something and then being consumed by a predator.
Sure.
Right?
But there are too many of them for it to be that.
And I wonder if there aren't, you know, I wondered if some of it might be practice, you know, the building a tent that they build them in.
Well, when I was working on Barrow, Colorado Island, I was there for 18 months.
And there was literally only two species of understory plant with a large enough leaf to make a tent that I never saw a tent made in.
And so they're making them in hundreds of different species of plants, which have different leaf shapes.
And so.
Right.
And they're chewing into the little vine, right?
And they're collapsing the structure of the leaf?
They're mostly using the claws at the tips of their thumbs and they're using their flight muscles, which are their strongest muscles, to tear the leaf.
Nobody knew this because nobody had seen a bat make a tent.
I did manage to see it and actually videotape it.
And it's the pulling with the thumbs and the claws.
And it's one leaf that's been kind of collapsed onto itself, right?
Well, there are a bunch of different structures.
That's one of them.
That's one of the more common ones.
But there are a bunch of different structures including one really cool structure in which they cut a bunch of different leaflets on the same whorl and cause a kind of a cylinder.
But anyway, it's a There's a lot of partially completed tents and I, you know, I have wondered about whether it's practice, right?
Learning to build a tent in some leaf that you've never built one in before.
But it is also possible that there is something about toxins, right?
Now, it's unclear that they do very much with their mouths, so maybe they're not being toxified that way, but it is possible that the plant is releasing something, you know, when they tear into it and that is noxious or something.
So, anyway.
Totally, yeah.
I think that's a spot that we often don't think to look.
Right.
Yes, and the plant would only be doing that if they have an interest in no bats sleeping here tonight, right?
That is a, well, certainly the process of tent building is destructive of the plants.
It's wasteful.
It's parasitic from the plant's perspective.
Okay, yeah.
The guano that's accumulated isn't a trade-off?
Probably there's some benefit, but I can't imagine it's worth the expense of losing these large leaves.
I mean, for one thing, these large leaves, you know, I know because I watched leaves get modified and then, you know, I watched what happened to them afterwards.
So, I was sort of aware of individual leaves.
These leaves are, you know, investments that last for years, right?
And so, that's a big loss in the case of a small understory plant with a big leaf.
Anyway, but we digress.
We are so far away from beavers here.
No beavers in Central or South America.
No, I mean there are some other interesting things.
They got moved down there and it's a bit of a problem.
Is that true?
Yeah.
I have not seen them.
Oh yeah, the Patagonia beavers.
Oh, I guess that makes sense.
That's a landscape that did not co-evolve with loggering.
And so what has happened?
Well, so you see the plants drown and die, and there's these large deserts of water and vegetation death.
Wow.
Which is completely the reverse of what you see in the entire northern hemisphere, Europe and North America, where you just see this explosion of life.
Like, everything's like, oh, thank goodness.
That's so fascinating, and it's a beautiful demonstration of two things that Heather and I talk a lot about on Dark Horse.
One is, welcome to complex systems, right?
Just because this animal is a source of bounty in one habitat doesn't mean that it's a source of bounty inherently.
Right?
It can be a destructive force elsewhere, which is really interesting.
And it's also a question of hyper-novelty here, where, you know, a beaver from North America isn't going to find its way to Patagonia absent human help, right?
But once you provide that help, I would imagine it's a pretty difficult creature to remove.
We've been helpful that way with a lot of animals, and yes, beaver, their fur being as luxurious as it was, we thought it was a good idea.
I wanted to ask you about that.
I do want to finish out the natural history story, but in general, when a creature has a particularly cool pelt, there's a reason, right?
So, in the case of otters, sea otters, which have the densest fur of any mammal, I believe, it's a wetsuit, right?
And the point is you've got a small animal who is in cold water and would radiate away all of its heat.
It wouldn't be possible to have that otter if it wasn't effectively not in the water because it's wearing a wetsuit that is so dense that it is actually keeping the skin from contacting the water.
All right, so what's going on with beavers?
Same exact thing that you laid out, and in fact that's why their pelts were worth so much.
It wasn't worth a lot on the leather, if you will.
These pelts were being shaved And then that underfur, that densely packed underfur, was being felted.
And that's Abe Lincoln hat, you know, the tall stovepipe hat.
Those things held moisture at bay and heat in because it was the felted underfur of beavers.
Felted?
I never understood that.
Yeah.
The mat is a hatter thing is because they were using mercury.
Yeah.
So it's felted.
I knew about the mercury.
I did not know that that was beaver felt.
Indeed, yeah.
So that whole period where it was fashionable to wear a black hat of a certain shape and really silk, the influx of silk from Asia saved the remnants of the beaver population in this continent because then fashion There seems to be no end to the number of things I didn't know about these animals.
That is amazing.
I assumed that the pelts were being used in the classic.
I mean, people make coats and stuff too with the fur, but the real use, and still today, the best Western hats you can buy are, you know, I don't know how much you've worn a cowboy hat, but there's an X system.
Like it's a 1X hat, a 2X hat.
You know, you have a 10X hat and the X has got weird.
Now they're saying it's a hundred X, it doesn't matter.
That's grading on how much beaver fur there is versus rabbit and some other animals.
Really?
Yeah, it's a percentage of, you know, you're really ballin' if you got 100% beaver fur, because that was very expensive to manufacture.
But it also means it's the best hat.
Interesting.
You know, whereas a 10X, you know...
You're working up.
Yeah.
Well, I have a hat that people take to be a cowboy hat and they give me a lot of crap over it.
It's a leather hat, which is fricking marvelous for the field because it, uh, you know, it can be pouring and the thing just keeps the rain away from you and you can, you know, it needs a little work and you can put avocado oil on it or whatever.
It's a great hat, but it ain't, it ain't a beaver felt or anything related to it.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's go back to the natural history of these animals.
So, they build a lodge, pair mates for life.
Yeah, I didn't finish out the lodge story.
So, in a context where they've been successful and they've laterally, you know, across a valley wetted the system, and they've got this spongy wetland of habitat that's growing all this stuff that they're eating, then they have to build a lodge.
But if they're in a system where there's a high bank convenient to deep water, then they can just build a tunnel up into that bank and it saves a lot of effort.
And so a lot of times you also see beavers denning in banks where they can create that air pocket.
Usually they'll choose to den under the root structure of some big deciduous tree to help Avoid predators digging in on them, right?
That provides this latticework of wood bulwarks against digging predators.
Also sort of strikes me as reminiscent of the shoring up of mineshafts.
Yeah, totally.
It looks that way.
You've got these arching timbers over a hollowed out space.
I don't know what the tree thinks about having all that activity under it, but they'll often choose to go Do that, and we see more of that in the context of today's landscape because, of course, many of our creeks have collapsed into these systems where you look down at the creek from up on the flat, which is just an unnatural thing.
Not normal, huh?
Yeah, not in the northern hemisphere.
Interesting.
So, what would it look like?
Well, so you read some of the old trapper journals, right?
How do we peer back into the misty past?
Okay, well, our baseline for what this is skewed.
You can't go to Grinnell's journals, the naturalist who came through and kind of recorded what he was saying because that was post-beaver trapping.
So you've got a little bit on trapping journals and some of the maps that were being produced.
You know, just some of the accounts where you'll hear about a party that would come off of a ridgetop and they'd get to a valley and they'd spend a day or two trying to find a spot to cross the valley because it's just one epic beaver's wetland.
Yeah, it's just a spongy, wild world.
And they would find, usually, a beaver dam to cross.
And these beaver dams had persisted on the landscape so long that you could actually walk horses and wagons across these things.
These things were wide.
Wow.
Deeply rooted.
Obviously you're telling me it's a little hard to figure it out because the evidence wasn't well preserved.
But any idea how long a history, a beaver dam, that you could take horses and... Yeah, right.
How old is that?
Well, that gets into kind of...
Do these things get passed down?
We know they get passed down, right?
We've got these families that are tending these things.
But it's not as simple as, you know, you've got your natal family and they defend it against all others.
There's many accounts of actually beaver families taking in refugees, even some of the early accounts from 150 years ago.
There's this one author, Enos Mills, describes this account where A wildfire came through an area and one of the places beavers were living was very pitchy and the trees were close and it cracked all their lodges open and it destroyed the habitat.
And there was a number of like 30 beavers living in this spot.
And then a few miles away, down a drainage and up another drainage, there's another habitat where beavers are living.
But they've successfully created that sponge that buffered them from the fire completely.
The fire got down to the water.
It didn't burn.
They moved on and they had a spot there that was working.
And he tracked the beavers whose habitat had been completely destroyed as they went down the stream looking for a new spot, but then turned right and went up and over the hill at exactly the point where it was the shortest distance to the habitat that was across the ridge, and then down and Join the beavers and the pond that had survived and so you and there was no sign of conflict like it, right?
So so we don't know, you know how these things are passed.
We know that there's these familial ties, right?
We know there's these territories and these I don't know how long it be I mean these things grow roots too because you think about willow, right?
Yeah beavers are clipping it into little segments and they're jamming it into these These dams that are built of mud and willow sticks and then those willow sticks root Yeah, you can plant a willow from a cutting and they're effectively doing that.
Yeah, and so a dam that's only even three years old will be starting to literally root into the landscape.
So let me ask you, there are so many things I want to ask you.
Obviously nobody knows in that case of these beavers who were taken in as refugees.
My prediction based on what I think I know about biology will be that they were closely related.
Sure.
But it's also possible that reciprocal altruism could do it where the beavers that had that piece of habitat that had functioned If they were limited in their reproductive rate and they could have used the labor of more beavers than they had, it's possible.
It's a little hard to imagine that because you would think that beavers could produce enough baby beavers to fill up that valley.
In any case, something interesting has to be going on.
There's interesting stuff that we don't understand.
There's a lot of accounts of digging a canal to move water into a different system to then build a dam and flood to access it.
Like, say you've got a really great stand of aspen over here.
Yeah.
Right?
But the stream is intermittent, there's not enough dam to get to the Aspen.
There's many accounts of beavers, they dig canals across the landscape and they'll divert water into an adjacent system, then utilize that water by building a dam, and then log out the Aspen Grove.
And again, they're doing this with no foreman.
It's like a flume.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, Canal.
Yeah, that's beautiful.
And, you know, as you probably remember from class back in 2010 or whatever, one of the things I'm interested in is ways that evolution solves longer term problems than you would think it could, based on lineage selection and explorer modes.
And so anyway, this strikes me as a good A good case that one might go pursue those things and discover that, you know, what has to be true for the reward of, you know, investing in a canal to a habitat that isn't wet enough, you know, pays off.
Well, that can very easily be true if you're dealing with a lineage level Indeed.
Phenomenon, for sure.
Yeah, and to your point about age of Beaver Dam, too, there's this stream called Spawn Creek outside Logan, Utah, and when you go walk up it, there's a number of beaver dams, and it's a very high-gradient creek, so they'll build a 12-foot-tall beaver dam, and it doesn't buy them a lot of pond before they need to build another beaver dam, right?
Right.
Because the stream is steep enough that Whereas like in a low gradient valley, you can build a two-foot beaver dam and get acreage, right?
So you walk up this stream and then you'll notice that there's these stair steps of calcium in the stream as well.
And they're these funny things.
They're like these benches of calcium.
Hypothesis being those are more or less fossilized beaver dams.
The calcium carbonate precipitated out over a very long period of time.
And Aspen being what they are, that being has been there for a very long time, and so beavers have been there for a very long time too.
I've wondered about this, looking at beaver ponds for so long, how they It's like they are a standing wave, right?
And you have to start thinking in terms of an equilibrium, and you have to start thinking about... Dawkins, of course, uses beavers to elucidate his concept of extended phenotype, which I think is actually a great concept.
And beavers really are a tremendous exemplar of this, where, you know, if you're just looking at the animal, you're really not looking at the animal, because the animal is all of the consequences of the animal that make the animal possible, right?
Including making its own little lakes, right?
That's an amazing thing, but if you then project it through time, and the point is, well, you know, a lake once made is valuable At lineage level and a lake once made is a way of bootstrapping your way to some location that was Too far to be useful, right?
the possibilities that are opened by an animal that can terraform and can do so over centuries or potentially millennia is That's a very powerful force much more so than you know, the rodent from which it's built and Indeed, yeah, and some of us use the term beaver as a verb sometimes.
That system has been beavered.
It's been beavered, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, to kind of Dawkins' portrayal of it, the animal is bigger than the furry thing that you're seeing.
Yep.
A system that is beavered, that brings a lot of explanation as to how that complex system is working.
Right, and we have in some sense anti-beavered these systems now, right?
Unambiguously anti-beavered.
But not just by removing the beavers.
We have in fact done, so on the one hand you've got, who knows, presumably it's millions of years that beavers have been modifying these landscapes.
At least since the last ice age.
The beavers didn't evolve since the last ice age.
So the point is there's some ebb and flow.
And most of the glaciation was, you know, up around the American-Canadian border.
So it's not like North America was completely inaccessible to these animals at all.
Even during glaciation.
So we're talking about millions of years of these creatures modifying habitats and sediments accumulating with their gold and their nutrients and all of these things.
And then, of course, you know, you have a couple of influxes of people.
You have the discovering of America from the East.
Well, actually from the West first, right?
From what we call the East, right?
Asians who have come through Beringia and, you know, developed into so many different cultures in the Americas.
And then you have the second influx of Europeans who rediscover America.
And intensively exploit it in a way that not only do they trap out the beavers for hats and the like, but we have now taken to intensively extracting resources.
The technological revolution has allowed us To produce, you know, with the Haber-Bosch process, we can fertilize crops and they grow ferociously.
We can irrigate them.
We can exterminate their pests.
But the point is, you forgot about equilibrium, right?
Right.
There were some things that you're depending on and you're now spending them down.
And topsoil is absolutely one of these things.
We are in a topsoil crisis and we are increasingly close to effectively growing our food hydroponically in dead soils that we then pump nutrients that are the product of an industrial process rather than a biological process, right?
And you know in some sense that's what happens when you view the beavers as a phenomenon limited to that little or not so little bundle of brown fur, rather than as a landscape altering equilibrium maintaining force of nature.
Well, we can even say weather changing.
Please, please tell us about the weather changing.
Well, so, you know, the hydrologic cycle that, you know, you learn when you're a kid and then you relearn it and you relearn it.
It's like the salmon cycle where people like to put it on a graph, but basically, you know, Water evaporates in the ocean, forms clouds, comes over land, rains, moves it back out on stream.
Yep.
Right?
That's a pump.
Yep.
And what drives that pump?
Well, one of the things that's most important in driving that pump is vegetative transpiration.
Right.
So you've got you've got trees and they do it most where it's a wetland breathing this moist air up.
And that's that's a or a lack of pressure rather that draws in the clouds off the ocean.
Yeah.
And there's there's some wonderful work on this.
This guy Professor Mian Mian has been working in Spain around this.
I think it sometimes is called the term biotic pump.
But you've got a cycle where you've got the land pulling The moisture up out of the out of the sea.
And it's really the it's it's how much moisture you're putting up there that creates that pressure or lack of pressure that draws in the clouds.
And so beaver wetlands that's that's where you get most of your vegetative transpiration.
So.
And you take that out.
Yeah.
You've got less and you put them in a parking lot.
You've got even less.
And you can imagine these rain pathways that have been thousands of years of rain pathways and there's a certain thing that maintain that pump.
And then we make land use decisions and we start doing things like turning these wetlands that were facilitating that pump into crop lands where we're keeping things on life support.
Yeah.
More or less, it's functioning as a desert as far as what it's giving back to the air most of the year, and you can see how we're going to start seeing the breakdown and we've seen the breakdown in rain patterns, and you know you can even look at in mythology and Iran.
One of the rules was you never kill a water dog.
They called the beavers the water dogs because a drought will follow.
Back to your useful mythologies, right?
They had laws on the park, like you killed a water dog and there was severe penalties.
You had to pay a restitution.
And similar thing within the indigenous communities of North America.
The trappers that came in had a really hard time persuading any of the tribes that were in drought-prone areas to trap beaver.
They got the forest tribes to sign on board much sooner than any of the tribes that were sensitive.
And most of those folk had stories that maintained a rule against over-harvesting beaver because then you lose the system.
I mean, I hunt.
People who I hunt will tell you The productivity is there at beaver wetlands, like that's where the fish are, that's where the game is, like you're hungry, go to a beaver wetland, right?
And so this ecological wealth is not only the beaver, it's not only the landscape, but it's also driving these patterns that We're even more reliant on.
Yeah, so it's interesting.
If you think about, you know, the thing that we teach about effectively evaporation creating humidity, the cloud gets to the mountain, it rises, it cools, the water falls out, it runs back down, eventually ends in the sea.
All true.
But what you're saying is how quickly it returns to the sea has a lot to do with whether or not there are beavers in between because the beavers effectively for their own benefit detain the water.
They detain the water in a way that not only does it sit there in these artificial ponds and lakes, but it incentivizes the growth of plants that are useful to the beaver.
Which then take that water and spread it out vertically, so it's not like a big bundle of water with a small surface area, but it effectively has a huge surface area.
Yes.
Right?
And then the sun... Vertically down, too, because gravity being what it is, you block up water that's trying to move downhill, and you're going to start recharging your ground water.
Right, recharging the ground water, which is so vital to so many of these...
Processes.
I'm tempted.
I won't detain us, but you know, as you also may remember from class, I used to joke about the fact that my bicycle was gravity fusion power.
I do remember that.
And the basic punchline of that whole story is that all of this stuff, almost no matter what, including things like Like nuclear fission are solar powered, right?
They may not have been powered by our sun, but they were powered by a star.
And the basic point is you could tell that whole story and you could look at all of the different places where energy from this, you know, gravity fusion reactor in the sky is pumping this water around in these waves that establish equilibria that will allow you to return To that wetland and hunt there for effectively eternity, right?
Or to farm there if you are careful to allow something to restore those equilibria and then if you just ignore those things and you say, well, you know, how high can we drive the rate of productivity up?
And the answer is pretty damn high temporarily, right?
Right.
Well, and if we're talking about residence time in that cycle, another component of that is if you don't have the draw, then you still have water vapor hanging out over the ocean.
But it just can't go anywhere, right?
Right.
That's a powerful greenhouse effect.
Right.
Professor Mignon Mignon uses the number 40 times more powerful than CO2.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know.
But you've got suddenly a lens of vapor that doesn't have anywhere to go.
It can't go condensate and rain.
Right.
And so it's stuck there.
It's not like we are running out of water.
Our planet has just as much water.
Right.
Right?
But our land is running out of water.
Yeah, that's interesting.
That's really interesting.
And actually, you pointed something out.
I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't know this also.
You're a rather intimidating figure to bring anything in this realm to and so I'm kind of pleased.
No, no, it's good.
I'm always delighted by people who know stuff deeply enough to just deliver important facts that you've somehow been overlooking.
I picked up the habit from my grandfather who was My earliest scientific mentor of being glued to the window of the aircraft when you fly anywhere because there's so much to see, right?
It's troubling for us with long legs because we both want the aisle and the window seat.
Yeah, I have not been in that predicament.
It's real.
It sounds tragic, frankly.
Yeah, I would just, you know, take the window and deal with the social cost of stepping over the... Numbness tingling for the next 12 hours, but you know, you had the window.
Exactly.
But anyway, so, you know, what has been out the window has changed in my lifetime a lot, along with a bunch of other things.
One of the things that has proliferated to insane proportions are these circular fields.
Pivots.
Pivots, you call them.
Can you describe what a pivot is?
So a pivot is where you have a well.
In a spot where potentially you can grow something, and where the water then comes out, it pivots into a long pipe that swings around the axis, and you get more or less a wheel as this pipe swings around, and there's sprinklers attached to the whole thing.
Yeah, so you've got an irrigation, an elevated irrigation tube on wheels that is Moving around a circular, and basically the idea is it's kind of an automated self irrigating.
Totally.
You can control them with smartphones.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Cool.
I guess that would make sense, you know, but you mix fertilizer in and it just distributes it at whatever proportions, you know, it's this, uh, yeah.
Yeah, so the thing that I didn't know, I mean I knew that those were crops and I knew that they were irrigated, I didn't realize, I should have realized, because obviously that's an irrigation, that circle is an irrigation scar effectively, but that every one of those is a well suggests something profound about the level to which this activity is
You know, unless somebody has paid direct attention to the equilibrium that the aquifer that they are tapped into is being recharged at the same rate it is being depleted, you know, or better, then that is a short-term process.
It's a short-term process.
Yeah.
Short-term process and at the same time what you've got is all of this habitat that was by definition involved in some sort of ecological equilibrium with respect to nutrients, right?
You are now extracting, you are taking off that land, whatever it is that is being grown there.
And so, you know, no kidding that we have a topsoil crisis and a aquifer depletion crisis.
And the problem is in the style of thinking that doesn't look backward enough to understand, oh, all of that wealth was loaded into these places by processes like beavers that you then turned into hats, right?
And you are now Not only Interrupting the process that would cause the rain to fall at a rate that would keep your equilibrium where it was but you're depleting the stored water Beneath right and we're withdrawing and we're not making deposits, right?
Yeah, we're on a we're on a spending spree that we haven't noticed and and right now Part of what you're telling me is that what we are spending is downstream of a process called beavering right and To the extent that that is known, I don't think it's well understood by most people who are looking out the window of the plane or making decisions about farming and productivity or food security or whatever they're thinking about.
I think this just is not, it hasn't reached the public.
Well, so that gets to a decision being made as an individual versus something that's in the interest of the public at large, right?
If you're a farmer and you're irrigating crops and you're feeding people, but yeah, the water's coming out of somewhere that I don't fully understand and it's getting lower every year.
Do you take a hit and stop farming because you acknowledge that that is not a long-term solution, or do you keep farming and hope that something else happens in the broader world?
I forget what you called it.
You had something you'd talk about in class.
The Moral Paradox?
There's Tragedy of the Commons, Collective Action Problems.
Okay.
So, you know, there's a lot of ways to describe it.
What you're getting at is that we have a collective interest in not Liquidating the well-being introduced to the landscape by beavers.
We have a collective interest and a lineage level interest, right?
Right.
Our descendants five generations from now depend on the fact that we will not have ignored the equilibrium factor and just depleted it the highest rate possible and then assumed that some process would magically rescue us at the end of that.
Yep.
Right?
Those processes sometimes do rescue us and sometimes they don't and we can't afford the ones that don't.
But anyway, the point is, and this is one of these really important places where there is a discussion that absolutely has to take place between what I would call hard-headed progressives, and I don't want to presume to define you, but I believe you are a hard-headed progressive, as am I.
And so-called conservatives.
And what I hope will happen is that the conservatives of whom there are many who are frankly struggling to preserve the gains that ten years ago we all agreed were good, right?
Struggling to preserve, you know, a fair colorblind society in which Everyone has access to the market and you know a means to get ahead in which you know merit produces rewards Conservatives who are doing that job are I now find them as
Strangely deaf to the idea that being a conservative also naturally requires us to preserve the substrate on which we all live, right?
That the society that does, you know, reward hard work and insight and doesn't give a damn what color your skin is or what your sexual orientation is or any of those other parameters, that society Only works if the underlying stuff continues to exist for us to to utilize and in some sense what I'm getting at is
I believe that sustainability is a natural concept that conservatives should embrace, but because of the dialogue about ecology having focused so heavily on global warming, and because there are clearly things wrong with the portrayal of global warming.
I don't know, I assume you're not a Dark Horse listener, but Heather and I have navigated this a bunch of times, right?
We believe that global warming is real, but we also believe that we are being given a story that's far too black and white to be realistic.
It does have a high PR budget.
It has a very high PR budget.
My conservative neighbors would point out it gives them a certain amount of skepticism.
It is a very good reason for skepticism and the fact that we know from inside the Academy that any time people are in a panic over some process that is threatening them, the chances that the literature represents an accurate exploration of the factors that go in one direction or the other is effectively zero, right?
So, you know, I think the point is The models, A, models are not the same thing as empirical results.
And we are treating those models as empirical results.
And those models, models are always suspect because you can, if you are willing to put enough parameters into a model, you can get it to match any behavior you want.
It doesn't mean that you've identified something real, right?
It becomes just a self-fulfilling generator of academic papers.
So if we put aside that we know that there's something wrong with the discussion about global warming and that that's dangerous and tragic because we do need to know what the truth of it is, right?
But just put aside global warming.
The point is that we've got an environmental crisis that has nothing to do with global warming.
If global warming were a complete fiction, we would still be in a very dangerous circumstance because of Collective action questions in game theory, because of failure to recognize equilibria, and, you know, those things require good governance to solve them.
And this is the bitter pill, I think, for libertarianism.
I have some sympathy with libertarians because I believe they have identified the central value that we should be maximizing.
Realized liberty is a great value to maximize precisely because it forces you to solve every other issue.
You can't be free if you are in danger of being wiped out by a medical crisis in your family.
If we really tried to maximize how much liberty individuals could actually exercise, then we would have to solve all of these problems, and good governance is required.
Of course at the moment, I don't think anybody who's looking at what our governments are doing can be all that enthusiastic about empowering them, right?
So, anyway, I've again led us far afield, but... Well, I think there's an interesting thing here in that...
If we focus on carbon, it's kind of hard to wrap your mind around, especially when it's in the air, it's invisible.
Yep.
You know?
Non-toxic, can't see it, doesn't smell.
Maybe something technological will save us.
Yep.
Right?
But until then, there's not much anybody can do with the typical toolkit.
Yep.
Whereas if you're thinking about the water cycle and you're thinking about this complex system, There's a lot that each individual human can do to facilitate a shift.
It becomes a land-use conversation.
It's interesting, I have a lot of friends who are very conservative and they have a deeper relation to the land if I'm going to paint with a broad brush than a lot of my friends who are much more progressive.
Usually, the folks who know the most about beaver are the beaver trappers that are being demonized then by the folks who are trying to save the beaver, right?
And yet, these folks know more about beavers than a lot of the folks who are raising money for beaver projects, right?
But I wonder if there's something with the baseline, you know, the baseline that conservatives are feeling protective of.
Um, doesn't extend far enough back to prior to when we started the extractive process that is, um, you know, not going to go too long in the future.
Like, like there's something that's invisible back there when beavers were in charge of water for all of North America.
And, and we, the conservation tendency, the conservative tendency to like, Hey, let's stabilize this system where it's at and just change when we see it necessary.
I don't think it sees that.
I mean, this was the case when we came in and made national parks, right?
Yosemite is the perfect example where there's these huge, beautiful meadows and these, you know, towering trees.
And there was the conservatives at the time were like, there's just this one problem.
There's these people who live here.
Right.
You know, and I encountered this with some of the work I did with you and Heather when we were in Panama, too.
Like, this tendency to be like, well, let's just get the people out and then this beautiful thing will be retained.
Right, the Ahuanichi.
Yeah.
The Indians who were in that beautiful valley.
And then now what does that valley look like?
Well, it's fully encroached in brush, you know, all those flowers that were The first foods that people were maintaining are diminished and you realize that was another ecosystem engineer that we took off the landscape.
People were in charge of, just as beavers have been methodically managing the waterways, right?
People were methodically managing the uplands with fire.
So we see these collapses, right?
But the conservation tendency Was blind to the process, blind to that people were maintaining a productive system with fire or that beavers were maintaining a productive system with water.
So I don't know.
I agree with your diagnosis.
There's a, you know, there's a willingness to look back a certain distance, but not far enough to really understand.
That you know you have stepped into a new realm and you're you're failing to you know whether you're a conservative or a progressive or whatever you are you're failing to preserve this thing of value and My sense is that people are basically alike in that they Appreciate Beautiful places, they appreciate things that don't require intensive work to maintain, right?
Give people the opportunity and everybody looks at a gorgeous landscape and has a positive feeling about it, right?
Right.
What I don't know what to do about is we start doing something.
At a small scale, inherently.
That's how everything starts.
And when you are at that small scale, the fact that that process, if you were to extrapolate up to some immense inflation of that same process, then becomes a threat to your very ability to persist.
At what point does it make sense to have that conversation, right?
Does it make sense to have that conversation when you're experimenting, you know, on the workbench in your garage with that little process that if it really caught on a hundred years later would be an issue?
No, right?
You should be allowed to experiment, but the There is no way that functioning at the scale that we are at, that the right answer to the question doesn't involve, okay, in what way can we rationally rein ourselves in without triggering any of the failure modes, right?
Well, if we rein ourselves in, And our competitors don't rein themselves in.
The place gets destroyed anyway.
And we will also have lost out and they will be more powerful than we.
Classic tragedy of the commons.
Yep.
That's a problem you have to solve.
Right?
You cannot do this as a matter of personal responsibility.
You cannot do this with your nation behaving responsibly and others not behaving responsibly.
It has to be done as a matter of some kind of good governance.
And I don't know how you would do it at the moment.
Absolutely terrified of governments having more power because I think they're all malignant.
I don't know of a government that I trust at the moment.
But, you know, I also don't want to die of that concern because it means we're not going to manage any of the things that have to be managed.
For us to persist.
So, doesn't this seem like a natural place where conservatives and progressives ought to be talking at this moment about how can we keep doing, you know, how can we continue to have the goose that lays the golden eggs without destroying the world on which it lives?
Yeah, yeah.
And what I found doing the work that I do is it is uniting For folks.
Like as long as it can not become a fuzzy animal that needs saved issue.
If we can stick to beaver or process, this is an intelligent complex thing that we need to defer to.
We need to put the professionals back in charge of our water because what we've been doing with the water doesn't seem to be working very well, right?
That's something that I've found consistently everyone can get on board with.
But then you start saying, well, on your land, you now have to make a concession.
You have to take those three acres out of productivity and allow beavers to return it to wetland.
And that's where things get edgy because people are making livelihoods off this land, right?
And it's like, why would I incur the cost to society?
Society values a system that's working better and society values beaver.
But then I, as a landowner, going to incur the cost of that.
You know, what's in it for me?
Right now, actually, this raises.
I don't want to pretend to know more about it than I do, but there was an episode in in Ecuador where Ecuador under President Correa made a point that I thought was exactly accurate.
So Ecuador has the world's most diverse habitat in it, in Yasuní, in the Amazon.
And there is oil in Yasuní.
And Correa basically said to the international community This is a treasure.
It should not be destroyed over the temporary extraction of oil.
But that is not the responsibility of the Ecuadorian people.
This is a treasure of planet Earth.
And what we need is the resources so that the people of Ecuador are not punished for preserving this global treasure.
And then we will not extract the oil.
And the world stared him down and said no.
And my sense is game theoretically...
He was perfectly right.
This is exactly the problem with all of these things, right?
Just because Yosemite happens to be in your backyard doesn't give you the right to destroy it, right?
Same with Yasuni, same with any of these things.
Do we have the right if we want to screw up all of the aquifers in North America to let all of the topsoil wash into the sea, you know, to, you know, use fossil fuels to inject the systems with You know, non-biotic nitrogen.
Not really, right?
Why does any generation get the right to screw up the planet and leave a lesser place for future generations?
That just seems to me that we have a moral obligation.
We're never going to be perfect at it.
We're always going to destroy some stuff we don't mean to.
But in principle, no generation has the right to leave a lesser planet to future generations, and You know, the idea that, well, we'll think of something.
Sometimes you do.
But then, you know, extinction is a one-way process, right?
We are going to lose creatures that will not, you know, future generate, you know, it's like the Tasmanian wolf.
It's gone.
Gone.
One example.
But that was something that was part of the richness of Earth and it's no longer.
And in any case, I do hope that That conservatives will begin to recognize, you know, I sometimes hear, and it frightens me, that modern conservatives, you know, I say this provocative thing, which I mostly believe.
Do you say provocative things sometimes?
Sometimes.
I say conservatives defend the gains of past liberals, right?
Which is mostly true.
Maybe it's entirely true if we think broadly enough about it.
But anyway, it's somewhere in the ballpark.
And what comes back lately is, you know, progressives have done their job.
It's over, right?
This is now the time for us to conserve what has been achieved.
And it's not like I don't know what they're talking about.
I do.
On the other hand, It's not achieved because you can't continue to do what we're doing indefinitely, which means that you've got a system which is going to destroy itself for all of its failure to pay heed to those equilibria and it is going to inherently leave.
A more boring, more... a depleted planet of fewer, worse opportunities that is just simply less pleasant to be human on.
And it's not our right to do it.
And I think... I hope that conservatives will understand that there is still something that they have to partner with hard-headed progressives about because we've got problems we haven't solved yet, which is How do you do good governance without it becoming captured and being malignant, right?
Or failing to protect the things that future generations are entitled to have?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and that's where, as a progressive, We get a lot of ideas, and we need the conservatives to help rein us in.
100%.
Because we like those ideas.
You don't want to unleash the progressives without the constraint of somebody saying... No, we need the leash.
You need somebody who pays attention to the unintended consequences of your solutions, because they're always there.
But conversely, there needs to be somebody who's saying, This doesn't look like it's working out.
We need to shift.
You know?
Right.
And so that's that's what I guess we find ourselves doing.
I'm curious to put on your game theory hat.
If we were to try to make, not even make it, see I'm talking like a progressive.
We were gonna make something.
A system where individuals weren't penalized for turning back over control of the landscape to beavers, especially in these areas where historically beavers have maintained this system that we have a lot of interest in seeing into the future.
How could that look in a resilient game theoretic way?
How can we create something and it's going to involve governance, right?
Because there needs to be some larger party that's putting forth a program.
But where people who are stewards of land and trying to make a living off of land aren't penalized for turning over that land to a rodent steward, right?
Right.
And, you know, as somebody who owns a little bit of land, I get it, right?
Sure.
The last thing you want is you buy some piece of land and you've got some idea for it.
And then suddenly a sacred animal shows up and starts moving stuff around.
And you're not allowed, you know, your piece of land's value just radically shifted on you.
Right and yeah, and there's regulations that come in if that wetland becomes a wetland of an official sense on the county, you know, right?
Yeah.
No, you're praying for you know, no beavers in my backyard kind of thing.
Yeah, I get it on the other hand.
I think the problem is you've got to get the pieces of the puzzle that are disjointed to meet, right?
If we all like the kind of world that a highly active beaver population produces, but none of us want to pay the price of keeping that thing functioning, then, you know, there's a natural interaction of those two things, which is that there is a small price to be paid
And my biggest concern about it is how do you discover what, you know, we're not going to turn North America back over to the Beavers.
It's not going to happen.
But it doesn't mean that you couldn't figure out, well, how much, you know, where can we effectively allow this activity to take on its full scale?
And where can't we Yeah, all of our preoccupations.
to have it.
I mean, one of the things we haven't even talked about yet, it's not just this water cycle, but it's all sorts of other things that preoccupy us like fire.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All the, all of our preoccupations, you know, fire, water security, carbon sequestration, I mean, you've got anaerobic wetlands sequestering carbon.
These are all things we're spending billions of dollars on.
And I spent almost a decade running a restoration program where I spent a lot of money.
And, you know, I was doing these projects and the way that everyone's putting these projects out, you know, we're going to We're going to save salmon.
And there's a bit of a reckoning right now because it doesn't seem to be working.
We're spending money, but it's not working.
And then over, you know, nobody's paying attention to a little piece of land and a beaver starts doing its thing.
And pretty soon you have a system that I can't build with a million dollars of restoration funds.
Right.
You know, and my projects don't hold a candle to that.
Yeah, it's... But they did it for free.
Right.
They did it for free because it was in their interest to just do it.
Yeah.
And, you know, increasingly, I mean, this is the lesson of biology, right?
When Heather and I say, welcome to complex systems, that is us effectively needling people for failing to understand that, you know, again and again, they walk into a complex system and they think they understand it and they think they're going to improve it.
And they, you know, in the end, Or scratching their head, well that should have worked, and such.
No, it shouldn't have worked.
You didn't understand a fraction of what you needed to understand to make this happen.
You know, presumably the viewers don't understand it in conscious terms either, but they intuit how you interact with these systems.
And so anyway, the punchline to almost all of these puzzles is the lighter handed your intervention is, the better.
Right?
- Yeah.
- And you know, this is a-- - And can you successfully kick something off that's an evolved complex system where you can stand back and say, my work here is done, you know?
What's the little push that gets... Right.
Because in the habitat restoration world, we've kind of fallen into a little bit of a trap, maybe set for ourselves by doing too much ecology where we, you know, measure things.
And we then describe an ecosystem based on what we've measured.
You know, this many stems of this species, this many stems of this species.
And a lot of the restoration world is caught up.
And then, you know, well, here's what a reference site, I mean, that's the term, right?
A reference site looks like.
And so then I'm going to go build an analogous site over here.
You know, it might be a cattle pasture right now, but I've got Tonka toys that burn diesel and big budget.
And then what happens is we build these arms.
Artifices.
You know, we build what we think would look like habitat, but we haven't keyed in to beaver as a verb or whatever the underlying process is that actually resulted in that habitat.
You know, habitat's just the product of a bunch of process that consistently works upon a system.
And so we go build something that looks like it, and it looks like it for one or two years, and then it starts falling apart because of entropy.
Like, there's nothing maintaining that, right?
Right.
And that's a huge blind spot.
And the way we've been going about fixing things.
It's not, what can we do to turn a complex evolved system on again?
It's, well, how can we construct this idea of beautiful and healthy?
Yeah.
I mean, that's such a tragic, tragic story because, you know, Once or twice and then you ought to begin to realize what you're doing wrong which is assuming that you know the proxies that you are using to indicate what's taking place in one of these habitats are not the sum total of the story and the number of things That have to work together is large and the chances that you've missed one are near certain, at least one.
And the thing about, you know, whatever the beaver is, it intuits these things, right?
I mean, if you compare just in your mind, you know, the guy with the excavator, And his intuition about exactly how, where, and in, you know, in what fashion to dig versus this animal with millions of years of built-up experience that causes it to intuit these things, there's no comparison.
And you know what's more, the dude with the excavator goes home at night, right?
The beaver's there and presumably there's a feedback where the beaver understands something about what it had tried to do didn't quite work and it needs a little And you know it's a... I mean really in some sense you captured it.
Beaver is a process, right?
It is an animal but it's also a process and that process is way better than anything that you're going to be able to describe in a publication and you know deploy and you know get a crew of people to bring into the world.
It just doesn't work that way, right?
Yeah, I mean, our publications are useful in that we can go into a beaver wetland and we can say, hey, look, it actually is sequestering carbon or, you know, hey, look, there actually is a massive amount of insects here where we don't see insects elsewhere, you know, or we can take the constituent parts and admire them.
It seems to me an excellent tool for evaluating how effective something is.
It does not strike me as particularly likely to describe what you should do.
Architecting habitats, you know, you're talking about aesthetics, you're talking about better zoos, you're not talking about a habitat that works.
And, you know, the Biosphere Project also tells this story, because you would think You would think it is possible to enclose a space and make a system that is self-sustaining.
You can make it simple enough, you can load anything in it that you want, you can put highly intelligent people there to troubleshoot.
No.
Right?
It doesn't work.
That's not to say it's impossible.
Of course it's possible, but it's way harder than you think it is.
Yeah.
Right?
Yep.
I'm reminded too of this, I think it's one of the great cautionary tales, which nobody seems to know, but there's this animal in Madagascar called the Indri.
You know it?
No.
It's a beauty.
I'm one of the nobody seems to know.
Well, it's the most marvelous creature in some ways.
It's very surprising.
It looks like a big teddy bear, right?
It's got big teddy bear ears, has kind of a teddy bear face, and it's a large animal, like, I don't know, it must be 60 pounds, something like this.
It's a lemurid.
It's not a true lemur, but it's in that... Lives in trees?
Yep.
Yep.
Monogamous.
Locomotes by vertical grasping and leaping, so it holds on to a tree and then it flings its arm and lands in the next tree and bounces from one tree to the next.
Amazing creature.
And to cap it all off, the call of this thing is like humpback whale.
Imagine a humpback whale call in a forest.
It's just a totally marvelous, very surprising creature.
It's a folivore.
Eats leaves.
It's a lot of different kinds of leaves.
Why?
Because they're toxic.
Spread that around.
Yeah, you want to deal with a bunch of different toxins at low levels rather than any heavy dose of any one toxin.
But here's the thing.
This animal would be a slam dunk winner in any zoo in the world that could have one.
It's never been successfully kept in captivity, right?
You can't do it.
There's no way that you can get a diet varied enough.
Even worse, okay, they have literally tried to just put a limit on a piece of habitat that it's already in, right?
Just put a fence around something big enough that the animal is just technically in captivity.
It dies.
Whoa.
We just don't know enough, right?
Yeah.
So something we're missing.
There's something we're missing.
And, um, and I think the point is all of these puzzles are like this.
We have to realize how early in the story of biology we are, right?
We're just getting our bearings and yeah, we know a lot and it's impressive, but it, you know, the degree to which we know a lot is nothing compared to the degree to which it is complex.
Right.
Right.
And, um, anyway, the, uh, Yeah, I mean, there's just, in thinking about beaver wetlands, there's just little hints of some of the, if you imagine all of the animals that were reliant on that predictable version of habitat, beavers managing habitat for thousands of years.
For example, trumpeter swans seem to specialize on nesting specifically on beaver lodges.
Really?
Yeah.
And you read accounts of, you know, trumpeter swans were ubiquitous as a topping for the beaver lodge, right?
Which makes sense, it's a beautiful place to put a nest, right?
Sure.
Protected.
Protected, and you've got a moat around you, right?
Yeah, got an alarm system.
An alarm system, yeah, that beaver's going to be out there slapping its tail if it sees anything in the undergrowth.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just kind of realizing there's a whole world of other forms of life that are reliant on this predictable system, and we're not going to understand all of them.
So let's go, we're not going to do an exhaustive list, but what are, what are the kinds of creatures you're thinking of beyond trumpeter swans?
Okay.
So you've got a couple of things that are less visible, the beavers are doing, or maybe not less visible, but we don't think about them as much.
Right.
So one of the things that we all look at is the beaver dam and it's spreading out water laterally across the landscape.
They're also moving literally tons of vegetation from Outside the stream system, into the stream system, right?
We've got this nerdy term in biology, a lochthonous, right?
Lochthonous inputs.
It's like from one space out down into another.
So you've got a system where this rodent is probably driving much of the food web within the stream.
Mmm.
Right?
Because it's enriching the stream.
Yeah, enriching the stream.
I mean, when you think about like fall leaves.
Yep.
Right?
But this animal is churning vegetation into the stream.
And in fact, folks who are snorkeling for looking for, you know, juvenile fish often refer to these collections of chewed on beaver sticks as river reefs because you snorkel up to them and it's all fish eyeballs staring out.
It's this aggregation, you know, and all the little inverts are there and then the fish and it's cover.
And so there's, I mean, that's one example of just like something that's kind of invisible, like the, yeah, the insulin sticks.
And that, um, that suggests a whole other process too, because one of the weird things about salmon is, They make no sense in the streams that they're in.
They're not a stream creature.
They're an ocean creature, which is breeding in these streams, right?
And, you know, it's obvious when you watch them go upstream and they're like, you know, too tall to fit in some little section of this stream.
Like, this is a giant ocean predatory fish, you know, breeding in this riparian habitat and then dying.
But the thing is, OK, well, what does that do?
This thing is effectively fanning out into the Pacific, right?
Collecting marine resources in huge numbers, dragging them against gravity up a mountain and then leaving them.
Yep.
Right?
Yep.
That's That is a powerful process, right?
That is nutrients going uphill to enrich those ecosystems.
And now you're telling me that beavers are having this important, encouraging effect on that process.
Yeah, and I mean, if you're a fish, it really only makes sense to go through all that expensive.
That's right.
I forget sometimes.
It's hard to remember, but I think I'm a fish too.
You are.
You are definitely a fish.
Well, if you're a fish that specializes in hauling your carcass up before depositing it, you'd want to do that if the habitat you're putting your offspring in ensures Like it's really good, right?
Yeah.
It ensures success.
And so having a obsessive rodent that's like, come summertime, there's going to be water here.
Right.
You know, and I'm feeding the bottom of the food web.
Yeah.
You know, and I'm creating all this cover.
And there's food for all the little fry.
Yeah.
No, it's, you can see how all these things fit.
The fish going up the stream doesn't make sense when it's standing out of the water.
Yeah.
But that's a stream that's degraded down into a ditch too.
Oh, true.
You know, so, so we, Even with watching salmon go up and you're like, why, you know, they're spawning often across the Pacific Northwest in an incredibly degraded landscape.
Depleted.
Yeah.
And if you look at even like the Oregon Coast Coho, the main thing that's highlighted as, well, we could probably get it off the endangered species list if, is juvenile rearing habitat.
So where the little ones grow up.
Yeah.
And the one thing they point to is, well, we need more beaver dams.
So, I think the answer to your earlier question then is in part, if people understood, I mean I don't know that this connection makes sense, but you're talking about the alteration of weather based on the distribution of water heavily affected by beaver activity.
So, did the skiers know that the depth of snow and the quality of the snow that they're interacting with is affected by, you know, beavers?
I don't know that it is, but probably it is, at least somewhat.
Maybe it's a lot.
Do, you know, the sport fishermen, right, who are fishing for salmon, Out, you know, in the sea.
Do they know that the, you know, that their success rate is dependent on beavers, you know, upland beavers?
Probably if they do only, you know, only a couple.
Yeah.
So the question is, do people drinking water?
Right.
You know?
No.
Right.
Water, which has It's turned so terrible in my lifetime, right?
Water almost everywhere is kind of gross to drink and it's amazing that wasn't true.
That's why I hide in the hills.
Right.
Mainly where the water is good water.
Yeah.
It's a big deal.
It's a huge deal.
People are drinking water that's compromised.
Heavily compromised, and to the point of being distasteful.
It's not even trace amounts.
It's significantly different.
That's your body saying, go find other water.
Other water, yeah.
Yeah, this is not your, this is water if you're dying of thirst.
And you know, beaver dams, that's another thing we didn't talk about, but you've got sediment accumulating behind beaver dams.
Well, that leads to cleaner water, right?
You've got a filter system built in.
And a lot of things that cities are struggling with is, one, clean water.
And two, as you cover soil with asphalt and concrete and buildings, then when you get a deluge of rain, it all runs off really quickly, sweeping a lot of the crud from humanity with it, you know?
And so we have these huge pulses of water through the systems that are still streams.
Right?
Right.
It goes way up and then it slacks way down.
So then it erodes without soaking in.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so you have both a problem with, you know, the water being dirty, but then you also have a problem with like too much at once.
And so what do you have?
A beaver dam?
Well, you have a filter and a speed bump.
And so you've got enough of those speed bumps and you increase the residency time of the flood, too, right?
So these catastrophic things where then you see downstream towns getting just havoc being wreaked by these floods.
Well, if you had more speed bumps higher in the system, that would be retaining some of that sediment that's moving, you know, cleaning the water up, but also increasing the residence time before it's just this Charging torrent.
Charging torrent that washes off uselessly into the sea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And washes our soil and our water.
Yeah.
Oh man, that's really powerful.
I will tell you, years ago, there was a, I don't remember if you and I ever went to it together, but there was a beaver wetland near Evergreen.
I explored that wetland.
Yeah.
At the moment, I'm not remembering its name, do you?
No.
Grass lakes?
No.
No.
There was a couple beaver dams just near campus and in fact the first beaver that I saw in the wild, I was waiting for the 41 bus at Red Square and this beaver wanders out of the slough.
What was it doing there?
I don't know.
It like wandered over to the smokers Oh, it was smoking.
That's why.
Everyone stopped and the bus was late.
I kicked myself for not getting out and going and following it.
I don't know what I was up to.
What was it up to?
I just then wandered back into the Slough and that was my first beaver sighting.
Yeah, that's good.
But yeah, Evergreen had beavers.
Yeah, there were definitely still does.
Definitely beavers in the habitat.
And then this one place, which I think I'm embarrassed to say, I'm not sure that when I first started going there that I knew that it was beaver created.
It was a large body of water.
And at some point I figured out it was a beaver created body of water.
And I started exploring the dam and it was a huge structure.
You know, I had entire classes walk out onto this thing and stand there to talk about.
Um, beavers and their implication and, you know, extended phenotype and whatever else.
But I remember one year, uh, I think it was particularly heavy rainfall and the beaver dam burst.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and it was crazy.
Just the thing, like, emptied.
And it didn't empty all the way.
It emptied down to a much lower height than it had been.
And then, so I, you know, of course had the biologists overreaction to this, that this was like the end of that habitat.
Yeah.
You know, because you know beavers, what they did was they fixed the damn thing and it filled right back up.
And, uh, so what this leads me to wonder is that dam is Antifragile.
It's bound.
Every weak spot is the place where it's going to burst.
And those beavers are presumably not putting it back just the way it was, but, I mean, building it in such a way that it is probably growing stronger over time.
And so... Yeah, the dams that are most likely to fail are the new ones.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah.
Makes good sense.
So, then, what you're also describing is a self-assembling, self-upgrading filter system, right?
You're talking about a sequence of beaver habitats that are, you know, dampening that pulse of water, filtering the water as it comes through, slowing it down so it's able to soak into these habitats, making them richer and wetter habitats, right?
That's a process that gets better over time.
And I mean, I guess there's a part of me that doesn't want to introduce tech here at all, but just as an analogy, imagine that Elon Musk, right, had a secret robot project in which
He had these little robots which were going to terraform some landscape, obviously being prepared for a trip to Mars where they were going to improve landscapes over time and make them hospitable to a series of creatures that would Then be, you know, introduced.
We think this was, you know, incredibly marvelous technology.
Yeah.
But here it is.
It's happened on its own completely.
We all know the name of the thing.
Most of us do not understand how profound its impact on North America has been.
And we Because we don't understand what it has produced, because every time we see a flat-bottomed fertile valley, we don't think that is the work of past beavers that I am looking at.
We don't know enough to lament the fact that the beavers aren't there, and therefore there's a clock ticking.
It's not going to last.
Yeah, that fertility, right?
There's a clock ticking.
There's a clock ticking.
Yeah.
I think the answer to the question that you asked is somehow we've got to close the logical loops on this system.
So the point is, again, I don't know if skiing is a good example of something that's benefited, but it at least would work in that direction.
You like skiing?
Think about the beavers and their role in it.
I know that sounds crazy, but it's not, right?
Right.
You like salmon?
Here's the role that they're playing there, right?
You know, do you like affordable food?
Right?
Well, here's the... In the Mars context, people would get it.
Yeah, right.
You like living on Mars?
Well, you still need these robots doing the thing that's maintaining the system of life support.
Right.
That's the thing.
If you did this on Mars, the point is, you know, if you don't know what an equilibrium is, you're fired.
Right?
Because that's fatal.
Yeah.
Right?
You need to know.
Anytime you're intervening in a system where you're depleting something, you're interfering with an equilibrium, and those equilibria are necessary for life.
And the point is, that's what we're doing, but nobody's fired for not knowing what an equilibrium is.
Right?
Right.
It is not unpredictable where that ends, right?
That ends with us scratching our heads at how so many things that were once grand are no longer functional and, you know, it's totally needless.
Which is what we're doing already, but it's only going to get more pronounced.
It's only going to get more pronounced.
And, you know, you're flying over The landscape looking at the opposite of beavers, right?
Those, what do you call them?
Yeah, the pivots.
The pivots.
My mom had a good analogy.
She's like, we were talking about it and it's like looking at mosquito welts.
You know, you're sucking this life force out of the landscape and it's causing this inflammation.
Yeah.
This little circular welt, right?
And that's productive for us right now.
We're growing food there, but you can only have so many mosquitoes.
Right, right.
Yeah, there's a point at which there's no there's no more lymph there.
Yeah.
Well, I hope we can close some of those circles so that People, you know, I think, you know, what I hope people will get from this discussion is that a topic that probably most people thought they had no interest in turns out to have a thousand fascinating, and even if you're not fascinated by them, important facets, right?
Right.
Right?
You know, fire suppression is not a small matter here in the West.
This is a serious issue that we deal with.
The smoke that comes off these fires, even when the fires are remote, the degradation and the quality of life, you know, as a result of a failure to understand equilibria with respect to the natural process of fire that, you know, removes the fuel at a particular rate where, you know, we had, what, a hundred years of Fire suppression that resulted in a huge buildup of fuel so that when the fires burn they decimate the landscape, right?
That's a failure to understand equilibria.
And what I learned from you is that actually beavers are also an important factor in suppressing fire by Adjusting the way water flows to these ecosystems so, you know Are you interested in fire suppression in the West?
Well, if you live in the West, you better be, right?
Because you're going to be breathing the consequences otherwise or driven out of your home or whatever.
So anything more to say about beavers and fire?
I had the experience of So I volunteer with Search and Rescue and I responded to a fire, I guess it's two years ago now, that burnt two of the nearby towns down, more or less, Phoenix and Talent.
And there's a greenway that connects all of these towns in the Rogue Valley.
You know, a really great thing, right?
Somebody said, hey, we want a greenway.
Let's buffer the creek.
Let's give it a lot of room.
Let's put a bike path in.
Yeah, I believe I've ridden.
Repeatedly down there when I went when Heather got me a bike building course in Ashland.
Yeah, of course I used to ride that greenway all the time.
Yeah before the fire before the fire.
Go ahead.
What?
Yeah, so so we had some intense winds and somebody started a little fire that became a big fire That greenway which to our human perspective looked like verdant healthy habitat acted like a wick and it it drew fire through two cities.
Wow.
You know, and we imagine fire coming in from the hills and like, time to escape this way.
But no, this was, it never even went into the hills.
It drew fire through these cities because the stream had collapsed down into a ditch.
The water was unavailable.
It was down there.
Right?
And people got used to that.
It's like a creek.
It's something you look down on, right?
And even in that context where we had a really wide space where people hadn't actually built close to it, the fact that the creek was collapsed meant that plants that could take advantage of this novel niche like blackberry Had fully colonized this entire riparian area, right?
If there was water that was all over the place and there was this messy, braided, marshy thing, you know, blackberry don't do well in that, right?
And the native plants that we're lamenting the loss of would be doing excellently well because that's what they are used to, right?
But instead of having a fire buffer, instead of having something that wouldn't burn, We had something that was extremely explosive when it came to a spark.
It was productive with exactly the wrong stuff.
Exactly the wrong stuff.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I remember standing at a roadblock that I was helping to maintain at that point near the creek.
And you could just hear like people's propane tanks exploding and the valley was glowing.
And, you know, two towns burning down puts off a lot of light.
And Yeah, looking at the creek and just realizing, wow, this is what we've wrought.
By allowing these systems to collapse out, to allowing that soil to dry up, these novel niches where then we get this dense vegetation, you know, it has consequences.
Has huge consequences.
And so the reverse is true too with beavers and fire, where you have a system where beavers are maintaining a landscape.
It's wetted.
You see wildlife run to that when there's a fire.
A lot of folks that work cattle will see their cattle go to the beaver wetlands when there's a fire on the east side of Oregon.
So there's got to be two reasons for that, I would guess.
One, the activity of the beaver is fire suppressive in nature.
But two, The choice of beavers to alter a particular piece of habitat may be responsive to it being resilient to fire.
Because if you... Because remember the other ecosystem engineer that's been operating the same timeline.
People were burning, making use of fire, right?
So there was a boundary between the two ecosystems that had to be maintained.
It had to be maintained and you can imagine, let's say that you had a beaver that was naive about Fire.
And it was very good at engineering and it modified some habitat that was particularly prone to fire.
And the point is, well, that's a short term project, too, right?
Because to the extent that the beaver is dependent on, you know, trees in the riparian zone surviving, then the point is it made an error building in a place that had an Achilles heel.
So, anyway, yeah, you could see both of those processes at work, and you could see augmentation, right?
Whereas, again, in the West we have a plague of eucalyptus trees, right?
I presume beavers do not utilize eucalyptus?
I've never heard of it.
Yeah.
Although they will go after incense cedar, which has a pretty Pungent.
It does seem to be rare, though, and they seem to mostly use it for building things with and not eating it.
Building with cedar mix.
In an aquatic setting, right?
Right.
Totally.
Exactly.
Well, the interesting thing is, too, in the context of fire, if you have a degraded system that doesn't have beavers, Maybe it's super incised and so they can't, every time they try to build a dam, they can't persist because the velocity is just too much.
It's like a bowling alley of water every winter and it blows beaver dams out, which is the case with Bear Creek, for example, from my valley.
And that's usually because we've straightened it or what have you but that would happen naturally in some systems too if something catastrophic happened and you get this channelization and well then that's an especially fire prone situation because beavers can't Maintain that, and you do get a fire that's a stand-replacing fire.
Well, stand-replacing fires, then you have a lot of accumulated woody debris that starts crashing down in that stream, and your velocity barrier is suddenly not such a thing anymore because you've got all this roughness and tangled, burned wood that starts catching the sediment that comes off the fire because you know sediment's moving once a fire landscape gets rained on.
Fires are a reset for a system that beavers find hard to utilize.
And suddenly you've got something where every single one of the hardwoods is bouncing back with fresh new shoots.
You've gotten rid of the conifer layer that beavers don't really find palatable anyway and all those are racked up in the stream and you've hit reset and now it's ready for beavers.
The tragic thing is of course then what we usually do is we go clean out every single stick that falls in the creek because we're worried about flooding implications and so it only makes it worse.
Oh my goodness.
But the intelligence of the system being what it, you know, fires could be a good thing for Beaver too, in that they prep it, prep a habitat that's inaccessible to be more accessible again.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I like that concept of reset, and it is a kind of a hopeful one, right?
Even a place that isn't beaver hospitable because the velocity of the water is too high can, as a natural process, can find itself within range of, you know, beaver architecture.
That's cool.
We don't have to wait for wildfire.
We could go stick sticks in the creek, you know.
Well, let me ask you this.
And people do.
Yeah, you could encourage the beavers in that way.
And presumably, my guess would be that the beavers actually detect the reset.
That the consequences of fire might cause beavers to go into explorer mode because it may be possible that some piece of habitat that wasn't useful is now useful.
But presumably they are in explorer mode enough just by virtue of producing offspring.
Yeah, and it actually seems like the adults themselves go into explore mode every summer.
So there's accounts dating back 150 years of naturalists noticing that, you know, like, where did the beavers go in July and August?
And it does appear that beavers will go assess the surrounding landscape and check in.
And then they come back and they keep investing or they don't, you know.
So one of the things we see happen on the landscape sometimes is like, You know, there's a nearby colony and it gets trapped off and it's in better habitat than this other colony.
Well, they go into explorer mode that summer, they find out, hey, those digs are open and then they jump ship on this one and they move downstream.
So what happens then in the context of some human who is having a disagreement with beaver at their driveway culvert, you know, the pipe where the water is supposed to go through and beavers plug it and they're like, ha ha, you know, That human left one hole in a perfectly good dam.
Right.
Oh, goodness.
Now I've identified that.
I've fixed the issue.
We now have flooding.
So people get on this treadmill of trapping beavers.
Trapping beavers and they get replaced by... And they get replaced by other beavers in the landscape who have identified, no, that's the better habitat.
And so you have a population sink.
You have a black hole.
All right.
Right.
So you can have just one One person chopping out beavers, depleting land that they are not actually trying to keep beavers out of.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But because that was the preferred habitat, then you're going to see depletion and probably because of that explorer mode, you know, and we've seen this where, you know, a whole Little sub watershed will be full of beavers and then some land ownership will change and the new landowner is intolerant and they happen to be at the best beaver habitat.
And over the course of the year or two or five they trap a lot of beavers and suddenly there's no other beavers around.
Wow.
You know.
That's such a terrible story.
Yeah, I mean, it's also encouraging, I guess, in that usually folks don't want to be trapping beavers and they're on that treadmill and it's frustrating for them too.
So, kind of helping folks think through, you know, can the monkeys outsmart the rodents?
Generally you can't.
Or the fish outsmart the fish.
Right.
That's confusing.
Yeah, but the promise in doing that is if you can identify those population sinks, if you can identify those black holes where folks are struggling and it's just a pest species, whatever, it can have profound impacts on the entire square miles.
Are you talking about by getting them to rethink Getting rid of the beavers, or it seems to me that if you could, I mean it's a weird thing to advocate for, but if they're going to be a black hole for beavers through this process, getting them to reduce the quality of that habitat that they're trying to keep beavers out of so that other beavers don't adopt it would also have that effect.
It would, yeah.
Probably very illegal in most areas.
Really?
Yeah, because our wetlands are so well protected, legally, that you can't purposely degrade a wetland.
And that's part of the fear that people feel when a beaver shows up.
Now I'm going to have this animal that's going to encumber my property with additional regulation.
Right.
You know, quick off it before it starts doing stuff.
Yeah.
I get it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yes, that's true.
If your property was in a degraded state in comparison to other adjacent properties, then you could predict the beavers are going to occupy the next best available habitat.
And what we often see is if you have too many population sinks, The only beavers you see are the ones that are living on rivers, because life is peachy on a river, man.
You can have a bank den, you've got all the willow you could ever eat, the water's deep, no need to build a dam, right?
And as long as there's always room, they never hit carrying capacity, right?
Like, not all the spots are filled on the river, then no juvenile's ever gonna have to go make A living higher up in a stream where you got to build a dam and life is more work and water is scarce.
And so that, you know, people will say, well, we have enough beavers.
They're in all these systems, but we're living in a, I've heard the term like functionally extirpated, right?
And that, yes, there's beavers, but functionally.
Right.
They're no longer a verb.
So my guess, based on what you've said, is that the river beavers are present, but they're not as valuable.
That the work that they do is not in a position to have this fire suppressive... Right.
They're not managing water.
Yeah, they're not.
They're cycling nutrients still, sure.
But selfishly as people, looking at this, We need it to be at the point where the river is so chock-a-block full of beavers that the young ones are forced to go out and do real work.
To go do some work, yeah.
Right, right.
That's interesting.
Quite sad, really.
It's interesting that it's the same animal that can do this on a river and managing upland habitat.
Yeah, well, and that's cool too, right?
Because you can take a river beaver and go stick it upland and it's like, damn it, it does exactly that.
It does a thing.
Which actually makes sense, if you think about it, because you probably have a You know, a population level phenomenon where the rivers are the thing that links all of these disjointed upland habitats.
And so, you know, it'd be really interesting to know, maybe you do know, what the relationship is between the river populations and all of these little tributaries in the hills.
Yeah, no, I don't.
There's been some genetic studies done and basically it says, you know, beavers are more related in watersheds than they are in the next watershed over, you know, but I didn't really tell.
That's not surprising.
Yeah, exactly.
Is anything known about how many generations a particular, you know, a large dam and lodge represent?
How long a particular lineage of beavers will manage a particular piece of habitat?
Well, it's kind of like the big whales, right?
We went, killed them all, and then we're looking back at historical records and we're like, that whale was way bigger than anything we see now.
How old was it?
We had no idea, you know?
It's that bowhead whale that they found a 200-year-old stone point in.
They're like, okay, well, we know they get to 200, right?
We're in a similar position with beaver because Where are the places that we didn't go trap out beavers and bust beaver dams?
There's one spot in the boreal forest where there's a beaver dam you can see from space.
It's clearly been there a long time.
Wow.
And it's shifted so much of the landscape that it's a spot you can identify.
But yeah, the life cycle of a beaver dam in a place where there's a lot of sedimentation, right, where the water turns murky in the winter, is that that will accumulate behind the beaver dam and eventually you'll get a meadow.
Yep.
You know, back to it being flat because of beaver dams.
Yeah.
Right.
But the water has to go somewhere, so it'll be threaded through or maybe it'll be over on this side now more than that side and beavers will be building additional dams.
And so it's this process of uplift.
Right.
And creating land.
Creating land.
And so, yeah, those cycles are iterative where you'll have, you know, Ghosts of beaver kingdoms, you know, buried underneath the new meadows that have been formed more recently, right?
It's, yeah, so a beaver dam that exists for a really long time.
As one dam, I would predict that there's not a lot of sediment coming in, I guess.
Because otherwise it would have turned into a meadow.
But there's no reason these things didn't last a really long time.
Hundreds of years, right?
Or more.
And again, it's going to be compromised by the fact that we're looking at modern stuff and we don't necessarily know what the pre-Columbian or maybe even pre-human situation was.
Yeah, and a beaver dam that's old, even 20 years old, you can't tell it's a beaver dam.
Right.
I mean, that's the great thing, right?
The classic, like, oh, latticework of sticks.
That only lasts for two or three years.
And then it looks like a landscape.
Right.
Yeah.
They're funny.
You have to identify them by the fact that the water is behaving in a way you wouldn't expect it to.
So what is the largest beaver?
body of water that is known.
Oh, I don't know.
I don't know.
It's a good question.
And because there's you can measure that two way like tallest beaver dam.
Right.
Right.
And you could measure laterally out beavers when they when they.
So say you've got an incised system, right?
Incised meaning that this creek has collapsed into this trench.
Yeah.
And beavers successfully build a dam there.
At first it kind of looks like the Hoover Dam in a sense.
I mean, it's just this plug.
But then quickly, if they get out on the valley floor, they start chasing the water with a really, usually pretty low dam initially.
And they are remarkably adept at more or less tracing the topography lines.
So, if you look at a beaver dam from above, and then you were to overlay a topo line map at sufficient detail.
That dam, you know, every decision that they made making that would overlay well with topography.
Well, it makes sense because water is self-leveling.
Exactly.
So all you have to do is make a decision the next inch over, you know, right?
And so then they'll chase that usually to the valley edges and then those things start going up and then some of that blows out, but then they catch it down lower.
And so it's back to it being a process, right?
Like the dam itself, very quickly, if this process is working, you can't point to and say, this is the dam.
In a simplified system, it's really easy to say, well, that's the primary dam.
That's the dam that they use to back up water over their denning situation.
These are auxiliary dams.
These are just facilitating habitat, right?
But then as soon as it actually really starts working, it's all kind of unclear and Well, I feel better now that I didn't spot that wetland near Evergreen.
Yeah, it suggests that it's more mature and developed.
Yeah, it was definitely a long-standing spot.
Pretty nifty.
Is there, before we move on from this topic, is there anything more on deeper natural history that we ought to know?
You talked about the lodges, talked a bit about the dams.
I would point out that they're vegetarians.
Yeah.
They're vegetarians, but they're not annoying about it.
No, no.
That's a terrible joke.
They're kind of like, you know, that family in the neighborhood who they homeschool and they're vegetarians and they're like obsessively gardening all the time.
Yes, and they have huge tails.
Everyone else is just like, they might be onto something, but we can't quite tell what's going on in there.
Right.
Yeah.
That's the beavers.
That's the beavers.
Yeah.
We look in and we're like, you know, are they simple or are they the deepest thinkers on the block?
Right.
We don't know.
Yeah, so in Tales of Narnia, the beavers serve fish to the lost children.
I don't know if that's the origin of the rumor that beavers eat fish, but there's a pretty pronounced rumor that beavers eat fish and, you know, they don't.
They're vegans.
I think the more interesting part of the Tales of Narnia is it's actually the beavers that are guiding humanity through this landscape that is having an ecological crisis.
You know, if we're going to draw any analogy, that one's a helpful one.
Sounds insightful, yeah.
Getting distracted by, I mean, they were also, I think, drinking beer too, so.
Gotta pass the time somehow.
I know.
Yeah.
Yeah, I feel like we covered diet and the one thing that in the natural history piece that people don't necessarily notice first, too, is that beavers dig a lot.
And you probably saw this when the dam collapsed, but the topography is highly complex.
It's not just a basin of mud when a dam, there's movement channels and mud has been moved here and scraped away from there.
And the canals that go out into the landscape to facilitate, you know, beavers knock something down, but it's 40 yards away from the creek while they can float it out on a canal.
And so they're doing a lot.
Of digging as well.
And when you wade through a beaver dam, or dammed area, beaver pond, what you'll notice is the temperature differences are pretty staggering.
You'll be in a really cold area, and then you move into a really warm area, and then you'll be back in cold.
You know, all in the same pond.
To us, it just looks like a pond.
Yeah.
Right?
And there's complex things happening with upwelling because of all the water being forced down into the landscape.
Where, you know, there's I guess the other persistent kind of mark against beavers people will trot out as well.
Don't they warm the water?
That's a lot of solar radiation you're collecting, right?
But they're missing a below ground process where this water is sinking in and upwelling and When you start thinking about the frogs that need to oviposit in a warm, shallow place, but also the salmon fry that need a cold, deep spot with cover.
You can kind of start to peer at why this has worked, you know, for all these various life forms that need various types of habitat.
They're creating diverse opportunities in a single wetland.
Yeah, and we get used to measuring streams in like linear miles, but if we were honest about what a healthy stream looks like, it should be acres.
Right.
It's not a line.
It's not a line.
And there was a good paper where they took a bunch of stream professionals at a conference somewhere and they're like, draw a healthy stream.
You know, here's a piece of paper and a pencil.
And consistently, everybody drew a squiggly line that kind of did a little snake thing.
And these were the professionals.
Right.
And so the blind spot is pronounced, you know, the healthy stream that is this sponge of habitat.
So is this why the meadows in Upper Yosemite look the way they do?
I don't know.
I haven't spent much time with them.
I mean it's unbelievable, it's like they're almost beyond, their beauty is so staggering, right?
These just large, it looks like somebody with a very good eye has made the most glorious Trying to avoid analogizing them to a manufactured habitat, but it just, it strains credulity how lovely these places are.
But now that you talk about this, it does strike me.
As likely to have been a process that sort of took the relatively small bounty of these very cold streams running through the upper parts of Yosemite and drove it out horizontally.
Yeah, that's the kind of ironic thing here.
Those systems that are being maintained in these processes, whether it was people burning or it was beavers flooding, we find those aesthetically beautiful, but have still done away with both of those processes en masse.
We're dealing with the encroachment.
Well, we made the error that is maybe at the heart of our culture, which is too young in some sense to have become wise about this, but we took that gorgeous thing and we consumed it.
And we are still consuming it.
And I think it's very clear in the story that you tell, but we ought to be like the beavers, replenishing it, right?
Because it is, you know, it is the stuff that high quality life is made out of and Yeah, and you know, there's an uplifting piece of that in that I meet a lot of people who are struggling with feeling like, where is my niche as a human, right?
Yeah.
You know, this guilt or the shame or fear, all these emotions that are either seated in the present or the past, right?
But where's my spot?
Where do I fit in?
And I think, as I've been advocating, we need to defer to the professionals when it comes to water systems.
That's not our spot.
Yeah.
But people were burning the uplands and maintaining, just like beaver, predictable habitat for the rest of the ecology for our own purposes, right?
Yeah.
Facilitating better forage.
That's the spot.
I have friends down in Yurok country who are still doing it the way that they've been doing it for a thousand years, and those folks are very generous in teaching other humans.
All right, you ready to listen now?
Yeah.
All right, let's talk.
So we have a role to play just as much as beavers.
There are forests that need tending with flame.
I think there's two parts there.
There is a role for us, but we need to be clear-eyed about which of the complex evolved systems we had a role in, and it wasn't the water.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I do think that some of the wiser conservationists that I have known have had a sense that there's a kind of fetishizing of nature that is counterproductive and that basically Even the Amazon, we now understand, was much more managed than we knew.
It's not an untouched habitat.
It's an intensively touched habitat.
But, we can take a lesson from that.
And I think there are two lessons in tension.
One is, we should manage these things to the benefit of humanity going forward.
But two, managing them means as light a touch as possible.
And, you know, sometimes as light a touch as possible may not be any, you know, using fire is not all that light a touch.
It should be done well, but it may need to be done... Right.
Light touch but consistent with...
The process that's led to our current ecology, right?
Yes.
If we're going to do novel things, then we really need to be careful.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I was actually going to mention that when you were talking about those two towns having burned down, that one of the things that happens when stuff burns down is it doesn't just burn down, but it liberates all the toxins that were involved in that thing.
They go everywhere, right?
You breathe them, they end up in the plants.
It's terrible.
But, in the case, you know, maybe fire is a place where a slightly heavier hand is necessary, but it needs to be done in a way that does not disrupt those equilibria, and with respect to water, let the experts deal with it.
I like that approach.
I think that makes good sense.
It requires some humility, which sometimes we as a species struggle with.
Yeah, I've noticed that pattern about us.
Yeah.
So, all right, let me, before we close this out, I think there's another thing that's probably worth exploring a little bit.
Evergreen has been misunderstood because for most people it didn't exist in their minds until they saw it go crazy in the episode that actually brought Heather and me to prominence.
And that has always been a bit of a bitter pill for us because Evergreen was simultaneously an amazing place and a tragic failure to live up to its potential.
And, you know, before Evergreen blew up, we were basically voices shouting into the wind about the central flaw of the place, right?
We wanted to cure it and there was no appetite for curing it and I wanted to just Say what I think it was and then talk a little bit about your experience because frankly I think if people got to know some of the folks who had graduated from Evergreen and gotten something out of it they would have a very different sense that this wasn't a demonstration that a radical departure from the educational model was inherently a mistake because it wasn't.
So the flaw as I see it, well the beauty I used to say Evergreen was, the founders threw out absolutely everything from a normal university or college and replaced it with something else.
And half of what they did was brilliant and half of it was crazy.
And that the only problem was that we never got around to saying, all right, which fraction doesn't work and getting rid of that.
That would have been a perfectly good process.
That would be the next step in the experiment, right?
Sure should have been.
So the biggest flaw that I see The biggest value was that professors were liberated to teach whatever they wanted to teach in whatever way they wanted to teach it, which sounds like a recipe for disaster.
But the fact is, if you're interested in teaching, and the place was founded around the idea that teaching should be paramount, Right?
But if you had an appetite to figure out what could be done that nobody had ever done before in a classroom, then you could do it.
You could figure it out.
And what people, viewers, most of them will not know, is that that structure involved what were called full-time programs, where you as a student take one class full-time, professor teaches one class full-time, and those programs could go on for a full year.
And what that does, especially with the low professor-to-student ratio, or the high professor-to-student ratio, the low student-to-professor ratio, but what that does is it means that professors and students know each other very, very well.
Right.
Right?
And it means that the professor, if they have an appetite for it, can figure out, you know, even down to the individual mind in the classroom.
What is that person hung up on, right?
You know what's going on and that process is potentially great.
Yeah.
Right?
That was the awesome part.
Bad part was And I would add to that that some of those full-time programs were taught by multiple professors from across discipline.
So in just painting the picture, that was part of it too.
It would sometimes be a team of two or three professors that are Ushering the same group of students through a program for a year.
Yeah.
Team teaching.
And those programs were, often students didn't know this, but those programs were just inventions, right?
One professor sits down next to another professor someday and they have a conversation in which they're each focused on their own thing.
And it's like, well, actually this conversation is pretty good.
I wonder if we could build a program around that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The bad part though is, You get hired at Evergreen.
It's not obvious that just because you've got a PhD somewhere in some subject that you're going to be any good at all at figuring out how to teach if you're completely free.
Right?
Lots of people aren't.
So what I would have done if I had had the ability to to fix it is after you're hired there's a period of three years maybe maybe it would be five years in which you have to demonstrate that you can figure out what to do with all that freedom and if at the end of that period you're doing a great job and students are feeling really you know energized by what you're doing Right?
You stay.
And if you can't figure it out in that period of time, it doesn't matter how much we like you, you should go.
Right?
Because that spot that you're in, that is a, you know, Evergreen, the faculty used to say, it didn't pay in money, it paid in freedom.
Right?
Those were glorious positions.
Not because of what they paid, but basically because if you had a taste for the work, right, it was rewarding, you knew why you were there every day.
Right?
And so by not having that process in which we selected for people who actually were good at figuring out what to do with freedom, it resulted in basically, there were some professors who were great, and there were some professors who basically used it as an excuse not to work.
Right?
So anyway.
For somebody who clearly got a lot out of the thing, I'd be interested to know what you're overarching.
How many classes with Heather and me did you take?
Just the one.
Just the one.
Yeah.
Animal Behavior and Zoology.
Animal Behavior and Zoology.
You were co-teaching it together.
Yeah.
Which I know you didn't always teach as a team, but that year you were teaching as a team.
Yeah, we taught as a team that year, which we did a number of times.
And then we also had the experience of teaching separately and there was a group of students who would bounce from one of our programs to the other, right?
There was like a large group of students who had become interested in evolution as a result of the fact that there were two of us, you know, teaching related topics and we had very different styles.
Anyway, that seemed to work for a lot of people, even to the point that many students would continue to show up for class even after they were no longer registered with one of us, even sometimes after they graduated because they got so used to the idea that there was a community of people who spoke the same language that they would... I think I did that one year.
I came through Olympia and...
I found out you were teaching in a lecture hall and I sat in on a lecture on gay dinosaurs.
Gay dinosaurs, yes!
Right, yeah, that would have been a lecture that was part of a two-part lecture that I did where a student, Colin, who was quite paleontologically expert, had teamed up with me
And so basically it was about the evolution of homosexuality and I did the human part of it which was a topic I had become interested in and he did a kind of survey of other things and you know the grand finale was Gay dinosaurs.
Which, you know, it's amazing.
Clearly stuck with me.
Yeah, right.
You remember it all these years later.
But all right, so what was your experience at Evergreen?
To the extent that people don't understand what the place was, what can you tell them?
Yeah, well, so the hazard you identify was clear to me and I think to most of the students, too.
You know, you'd have this thing called the Academic Fair.
Where all the professors are sitting at individual tables and you, as a student, have the opportunity to decide, where am I going to commit an entire year of my education?
That's risky business in that if you hit a stinker, it's a big waste.
And so that was both the strength and the weakness of this.
Back to your get rid of the folks who don't know what to do with this.
I was in a navigate trying to navigate a landscape where there were folks who knew what to do with it and folks who didn't.
And as a student, you're coming into it.
And you're trying to assess.
And often the folks who did know what to do with it, their classes were waitlisted.
There was a vicious process of trying to get in.
I mean, I know with you and Heather, you always had waitlists.
People were trying to get in.
People were writing you love letters.
So many.
Please, please, please.
Right.
But, once you were in that cohort, and you were invested for a year, I mean, you could do fantastic stuff.
You could go take the entire cohort out of state for months on end, because why have the college?
They don't have anything else they're committed to doing.
They don't have anything else they're committed to doing, yeah.
And if you don't need the lab, then why?
So, I thought that was...
I loved Evergreen.
I came to it as someone who had a severe tracking difficulty, which I eventually worked on.
But if I'm reading music or whatever at the time, I'd go one, two, five, oh back here, which made it difficult.
Evergreen was a place where those of us who had those sorts of, you know, different ways of learning disabilities, right?
Or whatever you want.
You could just kind of sweep it aside because it was a very different model.
It was like, well, where are you at on the content, you know?
And there's many ways to approach understanding the content.
I remember, so after your class, I went to a class that was kind of pre-med school.
You know, we got really deep in all the pre-med school subjects and it was kind of stressful because it was like, you know, oh, are you going to be a doctor or not?
Even at Evergreen, they still somehow cultivated that vibe.
I would get stressed out and take my fiddle down to a local pub every Wednesday night and play Irish tunes with folks.
There was like a bottomless pitcher of dark ale and light ale for anyone who came in and could halfway play an instrument.
That was my little stress release.
I was talking to an old guy there at the pub and I told him I was an Evergreen student.
He's like, well, yep, Evergreen, that's a school of deep divers and floaters.
Which was kind of my experience too with both teachers and students.
You could choose to deep dive and it was risky and there was the promise of great reward Or you could choose to wear the water wings and four years later you pop out the other side and you have a degree of dubious value, but it's the same degree that any of the deep divers got too.
And there's this wonderful thing around rather than grades, you have the evaluated.
That was pretty cool too.
where I write in Evaluation View, I say he was great except for his hair.
You do the same and he was great except for his hair.
Right, exactly.
And then they match.
And then they match and then they're forever the record too.
Right.
But that was pretty cool too.
I really appreciated that.
And especially if you're through the same program for multiple terms, you're doing this evaluation at the end of every single term. - Yeah.
Yeah, I mourn that that doesn't seem to be there anymore.
It was an amazing thing and I really got a lot out of it.
I got a lot out of it from you and Heather.
I got a lot out of it.
The next year I was able to do another independent study on whales with a local graduate who started one of the premier research collectives in whale biology.
I know who you're talking about, but you might not know.
Yeah, John Cal McKittas, the Cascadia Research Collective.
He and a number of Evergreen grads.
This is what you could do with an Evergreen education, right?
They graduated with bachelor's degrees and they started an independent science collective.
Which is important in whale research and actually bat research in the Puget Sound.
Yeah, yeah, and because it cultivated a, like, I don't actually have to ask permission to do this.
Right, and that's the thing, is because of the freedom, right, if you couldn't figure out what to do with it as a student, then maybe you didn't get anything out of the process.
But if you did, you know, get your bearings, then the point is you came out of it with something that was a lot closer to what graduate school would give you, where you knew how to get stuff done.
You didn't need somebody to tell you to do it.
Well, and I'll admit, when I was in your class, I pretended to be a GLORAD student many times.
Probably mostly, so we were in Olympia for two terms and then I went to Panama.
And there's an example of what you can do, right?
I proposed a research project out on this island 14 kilometers out into the Caribbean.
I said I want to work on the pygmy three-toed sloth and Heather was my advisor.
She said, okay.
And, you know, we ended up...
I persuaded a few more students to come with me on this crazy adventure, and we ended up doing the first population census of a critically endangered species.
We got the thing published, all of that, and I didn't even think about, like, oh, you're not supposed to do that as an undergrad, except for when I would try to access, like, the resources at the Smithsonian Institute in Panama, in which case they would let me in if I pretended to be a grad student.
But undergrads, you know, it was a tour experience.
It's funny, I don't know that we ever talked about this, or if we did, whether you'll remember it, but I think the reason that you ended up on Pygmy Sloths actually had to do with, am I correct that the description of the Pygmy Sloth was a Charles Handley paper?
It was Charles Hanley, but that wasn't actually the connection.
Oh, it wasn't?
Yeah, I was interested in Antillian manatees.
So I started calling all the researchers down there on manatees.
And I was like, all right, how do I get, what are the questions?
What is, what are people puzzling on?
And I ran into this one guy who said, well, you know, manatees might be hard to tap in with, but there's the sloth.
There's the sloth.
And then yes, the descriptive paper.
Charles Handley, who was one of my mentors on bats, actually, on Barrow, Colorado Island in Panama.
He's now gone, but anyway, I think he would have been very pleased that you guys went and studied this very odd creature on this island in the Bocas del Toro.
Inhospitable little island, but... Yeah, Scudo del Paraguas.
Yeah, way the hell out there.
Yeah, and we were talking about phenolic compounds earlier.
The pygmy sloth is a funny puzzle because they seem to specialize on only mangrove leaves.
Yeah.
And you don't see that as we were talking about with Grazers and browsers, browsers rather, because they're trying to distribute the toxins amongst many different types.
Yeah, it's an interesting puzzle and interesting that you were able, you know, yeah, as an undergraduate you're able to, you know, not only manage an actual research project that was able to get to the point of a, you know, a useful and publishable But to do so under really inhospitable conditions, right, that's an amazing accomplishment.
Yeah, three months in a pretty remote place.
Yeah, pretty remote.
But that's what Evergreen enabled.
There was no one to say no.
Right.
Right?
You had a guiding mentor in your faculty, and as long as you could convince them that, you know, there was some hope that you would come through it with something that is worth the education.
Yeah, and I learned a lot from that experience.
Well, you mentioned Academic Fair, which to be honest with you, I haven't thought about it in some time, but I used to love that.
It was very stressful as a student.
That was the dating game.
I used to love it because most faculty hated it.
You had to show up on a day when you would otherwise have been free in the afternoon and sit there for hours, you know, as one student after another would come and sit down in front of you and say, well, what's your program going to be about?
But For me, it was an opportunity to, this is going to sound terrible, but because our classes were, for both Heather and me, our classes were always oversubscribed, and that meant that there was actually something to be accomplished in figuring out what students would be best if they got in there, what students had the most to gain from it, and what students brought something to the table that would make the programs lively.
And so, you know, I wouldn't just deliver the same, you know, what's your program going to be about?
Well, we're going to study this, that and the other, right?
I would use it as an opportunity to figure out who was sitting down in that chair in front of me and figure out whether or not they were a good fit.
And if they were a good fit, I would do everything in my power to try to get them to sign up.
And if they weren't going to be a good fit because they really needed, you know, a syllabus and they needed to know on what day that, you know, if that was what was going to happen, then I was not, I was doing them a favor by driving them off.
Right.
And so anyway, I, you know.
Many of the people who took my programs and went on to do really interesting things and to become friends and people that I admire, I met them at academic fair as they thought they were interviewing me and I was kind of pushing them around to see whether they could, you know, could handle it and whether or not it was going to be the kind of thing that was to their taste.
So anyway, I have many fond memories of that.
Yeah, I remember I had to write a essay on trade-offs in order to get into your class.
Oh, were you... You must have been... You weren't... You didn't get in on the normal... I was late to signing up.
Right.
And I didn't attend academic fair.
Right.
And so then I was assigned an essay.
Assigned an essay, right.
Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, so I mean, I don't.
My hope is that by the time my three little ones are at the age where they're looking for a mentor of that caliber, there's a place where mentors have that freedom.
I don't know where that is right now, but it's nowhere right now.
Yeah.
I hope it happens too.
I of course have one kid right at that age and one kid a couple years out and the fact that there's nowhere obvious to send them is so disturbing and you know it is it is evidence of exactly the same kind of shortsightedness as we were discussing with respect to the destruction of all of the things that the beavers had built into our landscapes because
We are effectively sowing the seeds of our undoing by allowing education to be captured by ideological agendas and just lunacy, right?
I mean, how crazy is it that a place, you know, that produced really great students who were capable of, you know, I mean, look, you've founded an organization You are now returning to your former professor and teaching him about important features of the life of a mammal, even though he's a mammologist, right?
So anyway, that kind of liberating encounter with education It wasn't a place for rich kids.
important there is you know people totally misunderstand you know evergreen is a public college right yeah why which was one of the reasons i could attend i was on pell grant and food stamps you know and wasn't a place for rich kids yeah there weren't a few there there were for sure but it was a place it was inexpensive to afford you could if you you know if If you had a learning disability, it wasn't the end of the world.
There was 1,100 acres of forest.
I came back from Panama, I was like, I'm not going to do a renting a lease thing, and I lived in the forest for the rest of the term.
Did you?
I didn't realize you did.
I was one of those students, yeah.
Maintained three different lockers and showered in the gym.
Yeah, this is one of these things that happens at Evergreen.
It was a truly special place and, you know, it's very upsetting to me that its legacy is that the Lunacy staged a coup, which it did, but that was not the sum total of the story of the place.
And for those wishing to build, you know, Higher ed 2.0 Understanding what evergreen had right would be crucial.
Yeah, right if you could take the part that evergreen had right and prune off the part that didn't work right then you've got the seed of something really powerful and you know, you're a testament to that and I I Greatly appreciate what you did with the the freedom that you had as a result of going there Well, thanks As you're saying that, I'm reminded.
Kind of the process that Twitter's going through right now, where they seem to be pruning things that aren't working and trying to retain things that work.
Which, yeah, it's kind of a non sequitur, but I know that you spend a bit of time there, and I don't, so I'd be kind of interested on your thoughts here.
But my experience with that platform and as a public square, I was a little leery of the app, so I had a browser open on my phone and I had multiple tabs.
Each tab was some thinker that I was interested in their take, right?
Because the way Twitter was working, you couldn't actually, you know, you're following 100 people, you couldn't say, these 12 people, I want to check in with what they said, right?
But I did that by a bunch of tabs, and that was my news filter for a long time, until Twitter did away with the ability to open it on a browser in the way I was doing.
The ability to check in on a daily basis and say, OK, what's Brett saying?
What's his brother saying?
And then go down the list was a powerful news filter.
As I was struggling to understand the world and feeling like I'm being sold a bill of goods everywhere I turn, the one spot that I was able to find
A place where I could get kind of a thinking person's perspective, but then across various political spectrum, you know, 20 minutes later, I knew what all these various minds were thinking about whatever the issue that had come up was.
I thought that was a really powerful piece that I think is very promising and that, you I'm curious, like, as one of those people, you know?
This is a very dangerous moment, and I did not even think to do what you're discussing doing.
It strikes me as, you know, it's tragic that you have to, right?
What you want is one or a couple of sources of news where they have effectively done that, and they have figured out what the various perspectives are, and they present it in some way that doesn't require you to kludge together a solution like that.
That's not the world we live in.
So I know when some story is happening, I am constantly in the bind that I then think, all right, which news outlet is liable to be able to report that story straight?
I want to know what's going on.
There's no news outlet that is capable of reporting all stories as straight as they can get them.
They all have a bent.
And so the point is on that story, Right.
Is that a story that the New York Times can afford to report?
Or is that a story that they will be telling me?
Complete nonsense.
And so you're describing a solution to that problem built of individuals.
Right.
Here are some individuals who, you know, have a track record.
I'm not going to listen to any of them individually.
Exactly.
The power is in the aggregate and broadly spreading out who you're listening to.
So what I would say is I am very hopeful about what Musk seems to be up to.
And I'm very nervous about it because a lot depends on him getting it right.
And I guess I hope that he will hear what you were doing and hear that it is no longer possible because the app effectively forbids it.
Driving people to the app is so much a part of Twitter's business model.
I open it on the browser.
It says, well, we've got an app.
Right.
So the question is, look, there's no reason as far as I can tell that the app, since Musk does appear to be interested in people using this as a source of news, which sounds crazy, but in this era, I think it's actually the best hope we've got.
There's no reason that that couldn't be done in the app.
What you need is control.
And in fact, Many of us have been in a sort of private conversation about what might be done to make an environment that didn't drive us crazy.
And one of the things that might be done is the ability to peer through anybody's eyes at the thing.
Part of the problem with something like Twitter is that I know what it shows me, but I have to bend over backwards to figure out how well that matches what it shows somebody else.
And I certainly can't see, you know, I don't have a set of controls that allow me to go in And say, you know, toggle, right?
Yeah, let me see this through the eyes of an NPR listener, right?
I'd love to know, right?
But I can't do it.
I'm too trapped in my own, my own bubble.
So anyway, the idea of you were colluding something together, it's clear that there's such a value.
It's clear that Musk wants people to be using it this way.
And there's now a structural obstacle to doing it.
Maybe that results in him thinking, huh, How can we build that into the app so that instead of, you know, being shortsighted and, you know, milking people's attention, we can be farsighted and we can give them the opportunity to do something that is so valuable from the point of view of building their perspective on the world, that that will keep them around long term, even if they look at it for fewer hours.
Yeah, exactly.
Because you were doing work for me, right?
If I tune in to 12 Perspectives, I don't know how many hours you spent.
Too many.
Too many.
But I am a parasitic recipient, benefiter, from the amount of hours you spent coming up with your, and I read it in 30 seconds, and then I'm moving on to the next person and the next person.
And that is a powerful, that's a powerful tool.
Yep.
You say, I know you're joking when you say parasitic.
I have to tell you though that it is exactly the opposite of the right thing because in my case, I confess, I would be better off if it wasn't on Twitter.
But I can't not be.
And the reason that I am there is because it is necessary to do the kind of sense-making that I do.
And it is necessary to provide something useful to other people, right?
If people are going to listen to what I have to say, then it ought to be informed.
And there isn't a good place to go get informed that doesn't look like a kludge.
So I use it as a tool.
I'd love a better tool, and I'd love for people like you who are using it as a tool to be able to do it deliberately, right?
Right.
Just set in motion, here are the perspectives I would like to be able to scan between.
I want a tool, not an experience.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, and actually this goes to...
One of my, I won't call it a pet peeve, but one of my concerns is that too many phenomena that where we interact with something have been turned into consumer phenomena.
You know, you don't want to be a consumer of Twitter, right?
You want a tool with which you can discover something, interact in ways that are useful, and turn it off at the point that it's not benefiting you.
And, you know, it will be the first of its kind if it becomes that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, this has been fabulous.
It's great to see you and it's great to see you making your way in the world and on such a important, if strange, topic as beaver well-being and terraforming of the earth to our benefit.
