Jakob Shockey details how Project Beaver survived a board crisis by refusing to condemn writer Heather, proving mission purity outweighs donor pressure. He explains that beaver removal caused ecological collapse, increasing wildfire risks and invasive species, while their intelligence rivals human problem-solving. A proposed economic model pays landowners $1,500 annually to host beaver families, generating more revenue than crops and creating functional wetlands. This stewardship contrasts with historical extractive patterns like the Highland Clearances, offering a path toward regenerative wealth that replaces devaluing currency with growing land assets. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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The Story of the Beaver Coalition00:09:39
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Inside Rail.
I am thrilled to be sitting with returning guest Jacob Jockey, who is the founder and director of Project Beaver.
Some of you will remember that we did a prior episode on beaver ecology.
I've learned a ton from Jacob about that amazing topic.
As fascinated as I was before, I was stunned by what I learned.
We are going to talk about a bunch of new issues regarding beavers.
But before we get to that, let me just say first, thank you for joining me and welcome to Dark Horse.
Thanks for having me.
There's a story before we get to the beaver ecology that I think viewers of this podcast will be fascinated by.
You have been doing your work in the nonprofit world and your organization stumbled at the point.
Well, maybe you should tell the story of what happened to the Beaver Coalition, the initial presentation of your organization.
Yeah.
So we were the Beaver Coalition.
We.
I left my job doing restoration work and started this nonprofit in March of 2020, which was a great time to start a new endeavor.
But we had a lot of momentum.
We were doing little interviews with folks that would land in National Geographic and such, and attracting a lot of attention.
And then at some point, I got a hold of you guys and said, hey, you need to come.
See a beaver wetland.
At the time, you were living in Portland, and viewers will be familiar with that.
We'll drag you out into the beaver wetland.
Afterward, Heather published a piece about beavers on her Substack.
And at the very end of that piece, she said something like If folks are interested in learning more about beavers, there's a nonprofit started by a former student and friend.
Go check it out, the Beaver Coalition.
I didn't even know Heather had published this piece until I saw suddenly a flood of donations coming into our nonprofit.
And chase them back.
And that's all coming from this piece.
Folks read her work, she writes very well, and they were persuaded that maybe it was worth paying attention to.
Some folks that I was working with, folks on the board, also noticed that and Googled Heather, found her Twitter, and found things that they disagreed with.
And reached out to me and said basically, We have to distance ourselves.
We have to issue a public condemnation on our website, all of our social media channels, and we have to do it now.
And I said, well, no.
We're an organization with the mission to empower people to partner with beavers, and I fail to see how what anyone writes on their personal Twitter page has anything to do with that.
And the result of that was that the organization almost collapsed.
And I almost lost a job.
We were one vote away from dissolving because when it became clear that I wasn't willing, as the director, to publicly condemn Heather in this case or anyone, I mean, at the time I remember these board meetings, and one of the questions that came up was, like, well, what if it was a Trump supporter that was saying stuff about us?
That's a fascinating question.
And when I made it clear that that doesn't matter at all, then they were like, 'But what if you were driving up to somebody's house to meet with them about beavers and there was a Nazi flag on the driveway?' I said, well, you know, it'd be an issue of do I still feel safe to meet with the person?
And if yes, I'm meeting with, I mean, I'm going to talk to anyone who's coming to me in good faith about beavers.
That's what we're here to do.
And at that point, I was labeled hate adjacent.
Hate adjacent.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, was the hate adjacency about the hateful Heather or was it about this thought Nazi?
No, it wasn't the thought Nazi.
It was Heather.
Heather was the hateful person.
And I was adjacent to Heather and I was publicly adjacent to Heather and not.
Doing my due diligence by distancing myself once I'd been made aware of this issue.
Fascinating.
Hated Jason.
And after not distancing yourself from somebody who had brought resources to your organization through her advocacy or advocacy and beavers.
Yes.
Okay.
That all about fits.
Doesn't it track?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That does track.
Yeah.
Presumably this blew over quickly and there's been no.
Yeah, as these things do, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So I can still go to a beaver conference and people get up and leave the room.
This is six years later.
Six years later.
Six years later, people will leave the room because they don't want to hear you talking about beavers.
They don't want to be near me because I'm hate adjacent.
So then their adjacency to the hate adjacent.
They would be hate adjacent if they stayed.
I mean, that's my hypothesis.
I don't actually know.
They leave the room.
Right, they leave.
You can't ask them.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I said, We're not going to do that.
We're a nonprofit that works to empower people to partner with beavers.
And then I said that same sentence again and again, and it never really landed.
And I came up and did a podcast with you in the middle of it just to do a little character check.
You still seemed loving and nice, as did Heather.
And I'm glad to have fooled you again.
I still felt good about dying on this hill.
And yeah, so then they called, we were one vote away from full.
Shut down as an organization.
We had to rebrand.
That was a condition of the folks who were trying to destroy it stepping off the board.
So we're now Project Beaver, still legally the Beaver Coalition.
And then they called every funder and contractor and partner that we work with, and they said something to the effect.
And I know this because some of them reported back to me.
You know, I thought you should know that I'm stepping off the board of the Beaver Coalition.
I can't get into the details, but I can tell you that Jacob has a hate problem.
All right.
That story would be unbelievable if Heather and I had not lived various versions of this same nonsense in other quadrants, but it is very real.
And your particular story, I think, shares with the evergreen story the fact that it's so over the top and ridiculous that it's actually evident what it is.
I mean, it can kind of be funny at that point.
I mean, it's not funny when you're living it, but it's about beavers.
Right.
It was supposed to be anyway.
Well, it's still supposed to be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, when you're living it, it's, it's.
Humans getting kicked out of the tribe, it's a very stressful thing.
Oh, it's very stressful.
And the accusations, I mean, at least the accusations are so preposterous that you can check with yourself and it's like, oh, this is so right.
You're hate adjacent for not throwing your friend under the bus.
Correct.
Right.
That's what I kept reminding myself when I'd wake up and feel just like I needed to throw up every morning as soon as I remembered this is going on.
And it's like, no, I'm.
I am not throwing my friend under the bus.
That is a worthy thing.
Right.
I mean, I don't understand the people who do it.
Right.
I don't understand how they look themselves in the mirror in the morning.
I don't understand how they sleep because you've just surrendered something so fundamental to being a decent person.
So at least the preposterousness of these cancellations makes what you have to do clear.
Most people aren't up to it, but what you should do in such a situation is just obvious.
Oh, it's very clarifying.
Yeah.
And, you know, the conversations afterward are very clarifying.
People come up and say, you know, I mean, I don't agree with what happened, but for personal reasons, we can't be associated anymore.
Those are heartbreaking.
People tell you behind the scenes that they agree with you, but they refuse to say so publicly, which then leaves the impression of you've got one person who thinks A and everybody else thinks B. Be even though many of the people who seem to think be are just being quiet because they don't have courage.
I can tell you though, uh, having survived it, it feels like a gift, it is, and you know, you can tell yourself that if you're in the middle of it and it's hard to believe.
But you come out the other side, and the people you're working with, you're focused together on the mission that you thought initially everybody was focused on this, and then half the people leave, and suddenly, I mean, we've been more effective.
What we were trying to do since the cancellation by just orders of magnitude because all the bullshit left.
Why We Left Google00:06:06
Right.
And so I call this the painful upgrade because you lose people, often people you do not expect to lose, but they're people you're better off without.
And, you know, the trial by fire reveals who they are and reveals who you are.
And you do end up initially with this sort of edit down to the people who have the strength of character to be decent to you.
And then you find other people who also have that strength of character.
You know, you have people leaving some room in which you're about to give a talk, right?
You know a lot about those people.
Oh, yeah.
It's a gift.
Yeah, it is a gift.
It is a gift.
And that is something I think, you know, I'm very hesitant to give people the advice, oh, stand up.
It'll be fine.
Because I know very well it may well not be fine.
I mean, Heather and I landed on our feet, but there isn't. room in the world for, you know, lots of people changing careers based on the fact that they stood up to such absurdity.
And I was one vote away from full shutdown and we lost in a one day $100,000 and people pulled out like all of our foundation grants went away.
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Fundraising Galas and Paddle Events00:13:20
You know, we still haven't financially recovered as an organ.
We're more effective, but we're leaner.
Right.
You know, and I mean, that gets into the niche that nonprofits inhabit.
You're selling a product that's not necessarily your mission in the world, right?
Ultimately.
Explain what that means.
Well, I've been fascinated by the fundraising gala.
It's a phenomenon in the nonprofit world.
I don't know if you've ever attended one of these, but they're a gala where people get together and they raise money for a nonprofit.
And as a small nonprofit, you don't have the donor base, especially locally, to put these on, but you're kind of gala curious.
You're like watching because as a nonprofit, one of the struggles is how do you raise money for the daily costs?
It's easier to raise money for a project, but the daily costs of running an organization are hard.
People don't necessarily want to give.
To that.
And fundraising galas often cover those costs.
So an organization will hold an evening of fundraising and then they will be set for the rest of the year.
That's the promise, right?
And yet sometimes it's $20,000 in catering costs and that's event facilitation and venue rental and all these things.
And so I've never been quite sure why are the donors okay with the opulent spending at the event when they're not okay with bookkeeping costs?
Right.
Yeah.
It's a good question.
It's a good question.
So I was recently traveling.
I was in a major American city and I was talking with a fellow who runs a large production company, audiovisual production company for nonprofits.
And he recently purchased a theater.
I was like, that's interesting choice.
I mean, isn't most of your work, you know, videos that go on the internet?
Yes.
But the nonprofit gala is such an important component.
And he was sick of mowing and demobing big teams and lots of logistics from theaters that they bought their own historic theater.
They retrofitted a 180 degree screen on the back of the stage.
And we got talking about this because I've participated in these and that I've been the keynote speaker at a fundraising gala.
And it's like, you know, you're playing a role.
So I was asking him about this.
And he said, well, you know, the fundraising gala is a very important.
thing that has a very specific story arc.
So you're gathering together a group of people called the list, the list capital L. You have a position, nonprofits have a position called a development director, which is code for the person who manages the list year round.
These are your people who are going to keep your organization open.
And the development director's job is interfacing with those folks, learning who they get along with, who they don't, who they prefer to sit at a table with.
In a sense, as far as funding into your organization, that might be the most important position because the product that you're selling is actually the room of these people together.
It's a networking phenomenon.
It's a networking phenomenon.
I was recently talking with Stuart Parker, Los Altos Institute, and he was like, it's all about currency exchange, which I thought was a lovely way of phrasing it.
It's currency exchange.
They're presenting USDs.
And they're getting different currency back.
Social currency.
A social currency.
And so you've got all the tables arranged.
You have a light dinner or finger food, fair, whatever.
Everybody mixes and mingles.
That's kind of the beginning.
Maybe there's a silent auction that they're cruising or not.
And then at some point, you have the keynote speaker.
The ED executive director gets up and does a little housekeeping or somebody else.
Sometimes there's master of ceremonies.
Sometimes they even wear a hat.
And then you have a keynote speaker.
That's the entertainment.
That's the one I find myself in.
Let's get the beaver guy, right?
But it could be like somebody just got back from the Olympics, whatever.
And then, say you're a religious charity or maybe like a school, you'll have an alumni speaker, right?
And then at some point, speakers are done.
You have the film, that screen, house lights down.
We have a film, the end of the film, you know, four minutes, six minutes.
At the end of the film, everyone's kind of gazing at the horizon with mist in their eyes.
I mean, we're here for a good reason, right?
Yeah.
Spotlight, stage, director comes out.
All right, folks, it's been fun.
Now we get to the part of the evening where the serious work begins.
Right?
House lights up.
Everybody can see everybody.
And you have your paddle raise.
And your paddle raise is when people raise the bidding paddle to give money to the organization.
And it's really important that you've seeded money.
You've pre worked out that at whatever level you start this paddle raise, you have donors who are ready to raise.
And you've already established.
You've already established.
Right.
Two at least.
So, paddle raise goes up.
You know, who here?
Let's start the paddle raise at a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars, whatever your organization is raising, right?
And everyone looks around because who's going to give a hundred thousand dollars for nothing?
This is the paddle raise, right?
Yeah.
Who, who, who?
And you've got your two or three people and they put their paddles up.
Everyone sees it, right?
And that's the product you're selling.
And you thank them from, if you're the director, you thank them from the stage by name, round of applause.
I get it.
And so you've established a temporary social network inside of this room.
Yep.
And now somebody donates, and everybody else is looking around the room to see who follows suit.
The pressure is pretty high.
You've been there, you've enjoyed the festivities, you've gotten your networking out of it, and now it's time to pony up.
Yeah.
And the secret is that many donors renege.
Really?
Yeah.
But guess what?
If you're the director of a nonprofit, you're going to keep their secret.
Sure.
Because you want them to show up again.
And you don't want the idea of reneging to spread.
Exactly.
Oh, that makes such terrible sense.
So because I'm obsessively focused on helping beavers and I don't want my product to be a currency exchange event, you know, We're down to the nerdy folks that are just into beavers.
Right.
And don't care that I'm also friends with Heather.
Right.
But you will never show up to an event where there's a whiff of controversy because it just needs to be vaguely good.
Yeah.
It doesn't actually matter what you're doing.
Any organization that's effective enough to be pissing people off will never be effective in the fundraising gala space.
That's interesting.
So it tamps down all intrigue, which means that a lot of work is just simply off the table.
Because it would create some sort of controversy.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I haven't read any of his work, but there's this guy, Pornelli, he is a late science fiction writer and mathematician, I think.
And he coined this term, Pornelli's Law of Bureaucracy.
Or it's not a term that people call it the law of.
It's not a law of in the sense that you think law as soon as I say law.
But what he said was any bureaucracy will eventually be taken over by the administrators.
And you can look at everything from schools to nonprofits to governments.
Anytime humans clump together, right?
And you see this in the environmental nonprofit space, right?
You have edgy people like Paul Watson founding Sea Shepherd or Dave Foreman with Earth First, right?
All the.
All these organizations that are funded by somebody who's kind of leading with their heart, they love this thing, redwood trees or whales or beavers or whatever.
And they start attracting attention, like, let's save this grove of redwoods.
And they get a little bit of momentum behind them.
But at some point, there needs to be some administrative help, right?
And your first hire, whoever that is, they're probably into redwood trees, but not as much as the founder, right?
And they're also into a job.
Right.
Right.
And pretty quickly, you get to the point where there's more people into a job than into, and then pretty quickly, the person leading with their heart is a liability because they're going to say something embarrassing and you're going to lose out on funding because of it.
And you see funders kicked out all the time, like the two guys I mentioned.
Right.
And it's called, you know, you can think about it as like the life cycle of, right.
Right.
Oh, it makes perfect sense.
And it explains why when you encounter these things, any of them, whether it's universities or any other bureaucracy, You walk into it and you try to figure out what the people are doing that actually contributes to the mission.
And often it's very remote.
And for many of the people, it's nothing at all.
And it feels like why this looks like a cryptic jobs program, right?
Disguised as something with a purpose.
And it's very frustrating because, you know, I think all of us naturally believe, hey, there's certain things that should be accomplished in the world.
And wouldn't it be great if there was an organization that was actually dedicated to that?
And then lo and behold, it springs up.
And then you check in on it later and it's like.
What destroys every single thing that's functional?
I was trying to come up with an example of one that hadn't been destroyed.
I was like, you know, Heifer International.
I remember as a kid, we would buy chickens for somebody, you know, and they had this model where it was like, you know, here's these villages we've gone into.
Folks need livestock.
You can buy livestock.
It's a real cow to a real person.
And it was really fun as kids.
We'd like to save up money and then buy chickens for somebody or whatever, bees.
So, I Google have for international and I didn't spend a lot of time on it, but I couldn't find any way to sponsor a cow anymore.
Like the buying livestock was gone.
It's all vaguely, you know, bringing education to underserved communities.
And, you know, it's the same kind of boilerplate that you'd expect.
And I couldn't find their pragmatic niche anywhere.
So, there you go.
I don't actually know of one.
I know of one.
I think I will not name it here.
So, target it destroyed, but it functions as a benevolent dictatorship.
Which makes this not happen.
Right.
Right.
So the point is, an organization that is under one person's direction does not change mission as long as the person stays true to it because it's not, you know, the emergent part of the organization doesn't take it over.
Yeah.
I know of one like that too.
Yeah.
Yep.
Interesting.
Yep.
But as a nonprofit, you're supposed to have a large and diverse board.
And that's the toehold into the dog.
It cannot be a benevolent dictatorship.
Yes.
A diverse board that cannot tolerate.
Diversity of opinion, apparently.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I need to be better about my board.
Yes.
Well, you need to make your adjacency to hate a more distant adjacency, I would hope.
All right.
So this leads us back to the central question that has motivated you.
And just as a recap, I would advise people who are interested in this conversation, maybe after you've heard a few more minutes of it, to go back and listen to our initial discussion.
But the elevator pitch version of it is that beavers were an absolutely dominant feature of the landscape.
at, let's say, the conquering of the Americas by Europeans.
Beavers had shaped the landscape itself in ways that were tied into all sorts of processes such that their near extermination as a result primarily of fur trapping and as a result of land management by people who did not want beavers altering their landscape changed what the U.S., for example, is.
The U.S. was a different place.
And those of us who live here now don't understand how important the beavers were to the ecology of the land that we now live on.
So even when we are out in nature, we are seeing something that has been dramatically altered by the radical reduction in beaver populations.
So do you want to just say anything about what has been changed by the absence of beavers or the near absence of them?
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How Beavers Created Our Waterways00:15:25
Maybe we'll just do a little bit about what beavers are themselves for folks who don't want to go back and hear us talk about it before.
They're vegans and there's 60 pounds of slow-moving protein when they're on land.
But in the water, they're very graceful.
And so beavers build dams to flood land to stay safe from predators.
They've been doing that for millions of years.
Everything else that needs fresh water at some point in this life cycle is co evolved with beavers stewarding waterways of the northern hemisphere, right?
All fresh water was under beaver management.
And, you know, in a river system, while they'd live in the banks and they'd move literally tons of material into the river as they're eating it, they're eating woody debris, like or leaving woody debris, they're eating plants, shrubs, trees.
They strip the cambium off of sticks, and you'll find these little skin sticks.
So, those become these tangled reefs of sticks that are the bottom of the food web for life in these river systems.
And then, as you get into the tributaries, they're building dams, and that water is slowing and spreading and sinking around the recharging aquifers.
And they're creating these functional systems that it's the deepest sort of wealth that you can have on the land, right?
So, it's detaining water that would wash into the river higher up in the watershed.
It's changing the nutrient cycling and thereby altering everything, even the forest around it that isn't right on the shore of one of these beaver ponds is being affected by that change in the distribution of water and nutrients.
Yeah, I mean, you can measure any aspect of it you want, like biomass of insects around nutrient cycling.
That's huge.
A big wetland versus a small incision in the land.
A stream, in the sense of water streaming off the land, is a thing humans have created since we killed beavers.
Like these were in North America, our waterways were basically toe slope to toe slope, these slow moving, complicated, you couldn't even really tell which way the water was going because these were just green, verdant sponges.
In Mayer, the Tekefelma called it the place of the beaver.
And when you read the old trapper journals, they would look down on these valleys and they'd spend sometimes Days trying to figure out how to get across them because they were just these complex beaver marshes.
What that was doing for millions of years in my area was well, it was also collecting all the heavy metals that eroded from the hillsides.
And so this dude, Peterskin Ogden, came through, wiped out all the beavers for that same bay company.
And 20 years later, they found gold in these mud flats that had grown up with grass and they called them the gold fields.
Because if you're mining gold, you run your sediment through a sluice box and basically the heavy metals settle out behind.
The ridges, and you had beaver dams catching gold for millions of years.
Wow!
So, I mean, beavers drove the gold rush even after the beaver rush was over.
But the classic Abe Lincoln style top hat that was an homage to the past, that was like an almost 200 year old style choice that he made.
But these European hats were all the rage, and and yeah, the pilgrims all the way through westward expansion were funding that based on beaver trapping.
Wow.
Millions and millions and millions of animals.
And you just can't really overstate the change that happened on our land after that.
It was a totally different place.
Totally different place.
And what are some of the negative consequences that we modern folks experience due to the absence of beavers?
Well, so beavers were this resource to be extracted, right?
And then for the last hundred or so years, they've been seen sort of as a pest species.
And so we there's a negative connotation to beavers that's not actually true to what they're providing for us, but a lot of folks see beavers negatively.
They mate for life and they have these little tight knit families.
They're a rodent, but they don't produce like rodents.
It's two babies a year and they stick around for two years.
I mean, this is like more case selection, right?
If we're going to talk about parental involvement.
And beavers don't ask permission when they're making land management decisions.
And so many people have noticed that.
We notice that and we get upset.
They cut down trees.
You know, we have this habit of building dams across waterways, which we call a road base.
And then we leave one little hole in it, which we call a culvert, and then the beavers plug it.
Yeah.
And it makes a lake.
And humans get really excited really quickly.
Excited, not a good way.
Not a good way.
Yeah.
So, anyway, there's been this negative connotation.
And so beavers have been, it wasn't just the hats.
I mean, beaver populations have been kept at a very low level because they've been seen as a pest species.
In fact, in Oregon, they were actually legally a predator until very recently.
Even they didn't know vegetarian as we are, yeah, they didn't know that, right?
Um, to make it easy to kill them, right?
However, when you have a waterway that's under beaver management and then the beavers are gone, the process that happens to that waterway that's happened across our country and across the northern hemisphere is that that water consolidates and it collapses, and then you get the stream that looks like a ribbon, which is not something that existed, and it goes like this, and the water races out, and all that soil.
That you're standing on when you look down is now dry, right?
And it leaves and it creates a novel niche because the riparian trees, the trees that grow along waterways, were used to really wet feet and they were used to this complex thing.
And now suddenly you have land adjacent to water, but the water is way down there, right?
So you see specialization happening with often imported species like Himalayan blackberry, whatever, where they're taking over that niche because it's a novel niche.
And one example would be in my area, there's this stream called Bear Creek.
It's now a stream.
I use that word on purpose because it used to be a waterway that was branching across.
And now you can draw lines and say, these are the banks, right?
And on the banks, then there's blackberries because it's this dry, strange place that none of the native plants know what to do with.
We got a wildfire, and those blackberries acted like a wick and burned down two cities.
I mean, that's.
The cities of Phoenix and Talent, I don't know how much of the town burnt, but it was a lot of it.
I was out all night with search and rescue, and it sounded like a war zone, propane tanks exploding, all the fire, you know, same with LA, like fire hydrants are dry.
And yet, if beavers had still been in control of that stream, it would have been a buffer to fire rather than a wick.
I mean, because water doesn't burn.
And when you look at wildfire behavior through areas with beaver, the fire, Behavior drops down and often it stops.
Right.
And so there's just one little example of like the downstream consequences, but we're losing wildlife that all requires that beaver stewardship.
We're losing all the benefits to water quality, the quantity of storing water in our watersheds later in the year.
You know, beavers sequester carbon.
So if you're into talking about that, they do it better than any of the schemes that I've seen, right?
These are all billion dollar industries where you can draw a line very specifically in the papers to back it up.
The beavers do it better because it's an involved complex system.
Yep, an evolved complex system that traps water in these systems, humidifying the entire thing.
I mean, presumably when beavers are trapping large amounts of water by conducting it this way and that way, it's increasing how moist the plants are.
If you've ever tried to start a fire, I know you've started many of them, but if you've ever tried to start a fire, the difference between doing it with wet wood versus very dry wood is night and day.
And so the whole habitat is being kept wetter by these animals, which were, you know, filling these valleys.
And it's hard to imagine it.
I now think about all the time I spent, you know, in the wilderness when I was younger.
And it's funny to think, you know, I felt like I was out in nature, but even that was just so radically distorted from what it had once been, which we just can't appreciate.
Yeah.
And I mean, you bring up the humidity, the vegetative transpiration.
When you are measuring riparian by acreage, not by linear feet, it is hard to overstate, let alone the water itself.
And you've got work like Professor Mian Mian, the late professor from Spain, showing that rain clouds follow moisture in.
Sure.
Right.
And so every parking lot you build becomes a dry area that breaks that rain pathway.
And every beaver wetland, it's a stepping stone for that.
And when it's not wind driven, How do those rain clouds come in?
Well, it's often chasing that moisture into the land.
So this brings me to one of the things that I think we should highlight, which is we are making a classic mistake, imagining that we are technologically sophisticated.
That much is true.
And that therefore the way to make the world function better for us is to go in there and change things.
I mean, we will spend a lot of time in Evergreen.
Right.
My progressive training is right.
It's yeah, you go in and you make the parameter better.
Let's fix it, right?
And the problem is, of course, these are complex systems, and anything you do is guaranteed to have unintended consequences.
And it's probably going to fall far short of what you imagined, you know, when you were sitting down there with your fresh sheet of paper.
However, what we have here is many of the problems we have are downstream of a change most of us don't know about.
And the solution to that problem is an elegantly evolved entity that's.
does this by its very nature, right?
Everything from reducing the rate of and intensity of fires to increasing the amount of nutrients available to changing the very weather patterns that make land arable.
So to the extent that you're pulling a huge amount of water out of some giant river and transporting it to farmland, there's a question about how much rain should actually be falling on that farmland and how much is that being affected by the fact that you've exterminated this terraforming climate altering rodent from a habitat you're not even thinking about while you're down on the farm.
So it's an amazing question, right?
is the solution to many problems that we recognize that we face actually staring us in the face in this case because the animal is there.
It hasn't gone extinct.
It's not a giant ground slot.
They still exist.
They're resilient.
They're still here.
And so anyway, I think that that's an amazing question.
Could we solve many of these problems in the most elegant way conceivable, which is to say, bring back something that knows how to take care of it itself?
You don't have to engineer it.
It's already done.
Yeah, for free.
In an evolved, complex way.
In a way that naturally works because it worked for millions of years without.
Before we emerged from the fossil record, beavers have been doing that.
I mean, we emerged and met a fellow mammal who was already building structures out of mud and sticks.
It was already terraforming and making climate better by a byproduct of what it's doing to take care of its own lineage.
And, you know, we used to know that.
Right.
Most of our history as a species, we were living and relying on beaver managed waterways.
And in fact, this archaeologist and Britton Briney found human middens on ancient beaver lodges, as in we were living upstairs.
Really?
Beavers were living downstairs.
And why wouldn't we?
They've just created a moat full of fish.
Right.
Oh, of course.
All the ecological wealth you could ask for is right here.
They create a little Garden of Eden.
It's a Garden of Eden.
Yeah.
And it really is.
If you have never spent time, On, you probably have seen beaver ponds and wetlands and not realized that you were looking at them.
But if you've never really spent time walking out onto a beaver dam and appreciating exactly how much work goes into creating one of these lakes and what it does to the ecology of the surrounding habitat, the huge amount of wildlife that you find at one of these naturally self regulating ponds is just stunning.
Also, I guess, as long as we're talking about this, The fact that these things are persistent.
It's not that, you know, a beaver finds a stream, dams it, creates a stream, creates a pond, you know, and that's the end of the story, right?
The story that you began to tell about the very slow reproduction of these creatures is integrated in.
You know, the animals are looking for habitats that will last because part of what they're passing, it's not that they're passing on the knowledge of how to be a beaver to their offspring and the offspring always disperse.
This is a prized possession, a beaver pond that gets passed down.
A legacy.
A legacy, right.
And so, you know, and actually just even understanding how that fits, that the beaver is passing down its genes, it's passing down its skill set to its offspring, and it's passing down an asset, right?
And that those things travel together through time in this remarkable way that we've just utterly disrupted.
Is, you know, sad.
Yeah.
Now, before we started talking, you were mentioning to me something that I think is a change in your perspective since the last time we spoke.
You were talking to me about how your view of individual beavers has changed based on your interaction with them.
You want to talk about that a bit?
I mean, it's embarrassing to admit to some level because I worked with beavers for eight, nine years and I saw them as, you know, an adult male.
A juvenile female.
And, you know, even some of the words that I learned from your class, conspecific.
Apologies.
Yeah, that's a clinical word for you.
Oh, man.
Individuality in Male and Female Bats00:15:00
And then I met Beverly.
So Beverly was a beaver who is, she's still around, who was caught in a snare or a leg hole trap.
A snap trap.
Snap trap.
This particular trap shut at exactly an eighth of an inch and locked with two auxiliary bonds.
An eighth of an inch between the jaws?
Between the jaws.
So her bone was pulverized.
And she'd been in the trap for.
Over 12 hours when I got her.
She had been trapped because she was in an irrigation ditch.
And the landowner didn't even know that she was being trapped on their land because, you know, ditch companies have easements to maintain their ditch.
But the landowner found Beverly trapped and started calling around and they were going to come shoot her.
And eventually someone got a hold of me.
So I collected her.
She was pregnant.
And we, a local vet, donated his time and we nursed her back to health.
And I spent a lot of time with Beverly because she was getting antibiotics.
And she would lift up her leg every time she saw me coming.
And I'd put the little mason jar of Epsom salt down and she'd stick her wrist down in the.
And then.
Stick her own wrist.
You're not putting her.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And 20 minutes later, you know, when it starts to cool, she'd pull it up and hold it.
And then I'd take the jar away.
Yeah.
And at some point I realized, oh, she's an individual.
And it's embarrassing.
It's like, but individual, like dogs are individuals.
And then, ever since that thought, right, every single beaver I hear, we have a small refugee program as part of what we do.
So, when beavers are being trapped out for some area, and there's lots of ways to live with beavers, but sometimes folks aren't willing to even try stuff.
So, we'll move them.
And so, I meet a number of beavers every year.
Even though this is kind of the last resort thing, we do end up meeting each other.
And they're all so very different once you see it.
I mean, I've had beavers with personalities that are.
Snarky.
I mean, I've had a beaver, we named him Houdini because I put him, so I move beavers in a.
If you go elk hunting, you would be familiar with these game bags.
They're very breathable, very washable cotton bags.
And the folks that taught me to move beavers were like, hey, don't put them in a big open, scary kennel or anything where the wind is on them.
Just put them in a bag and they feel safe.
And that has been my experience.
They feel very safe, just the swaddle thing, right?
So, I put this beaver in a bag after we caught him in the live trap, and I put him in the passenger seat of my truck and shut the doors and went to go reset the trap.
And halfway through resetting the trap, I hear my horn honking.
And I go over to, I'm by myself out here.
Well, the ditch rider was there.
Luckily, I have a witness to this, but we were both right there.
We go back, and the beaver's out of the bag and he's up on the horn of the truck and he's managed to lock all the doors, like hit the door lock somehow.
Yeah.
And he's leaning.
You're lucky you didn't leave your key in there.
Exactly.
The truck could have been gone.
It would have been gone.
And, you know, we laughed it off as a one-off sort of.
And then, you know, eventually I was able to get in my passenger door.
It doesn't work.
And he was leaning against my drive.
So it was a bit of a negotiation to be like, let me back in.
I rebagged him.
And over the course of driving him to the little halfway house we have, he escaped eight times on me.
Wow.
And none of the other beavers have ever figured this out.
But he would do this kind of big muscular move and just pop the little knot holding the bagged together every time.
So eventually he ended up riding on the console.
And I was just like, You don't get in my feet because I need these for driving.
And he was happy there.
Every beaver is different.
And when you see it and you see that they're like dogs, that they're absolutely distinct personalities, then it makes sense that they're mating for life and they're having these really long term relationships and that they have an amazing non human intelligence about what they're doing.
Well, that often goes with what you've referred to here as case selection.
But the slow reproductive cycle, especially long investment in individual offspring, is generally coupled with there's an awful lot to convey.
And you can imagine in the case of something like beaver, where, you know, in the best case, you're, you know, you're a beaver and you're born into a lodge that has a pond already established and a dam built.
There's the question about you need to know how to maintain this because the parents are going to be gone at some point and it's going to be yours.
And so how would you construct an animal to have the depth of understanding, not just of basically how to be a beaver, but how to be a beaver here in this place, right?
So there's a lot of culture that has to be transmitted to get that to work.
And of course, that's very closely tied to the degree of intelligence, which is, of course, going to make them idiosyncratic.
Right.
Right.
So anyway, and you were saying earlier that you had encountered at least one beaver that seemed to have kind of a sense of humor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't even have a good story to point to.
You can just tell.
I mean, that's when my con-specific biologist wants to hide under the table because I'm like, oh, boy.
You know, he was just funny.
Yeah.
No, you know, I get this.
I mean, look, I love all three of my pets.
Only one of them has a sense of humor.
They all have strong aspects of their personality, but one of them has a sense of humor.
You know, you can just tell that he's sort of calculating like what he can get it away with and he's going to see what your reaction is, that kind of thing.
Exactly.
So anyway, I find this amazing.
And, you know, once again, you've taught me something I didn't know.
Maybe I should have thought to expect it, but I didn't.
And I have to say that that has got to make.
your work all the much more important to you, but also the amount of, you know, dead beavers involved in the work you're doing, just encountering people who couldn't tolerate beavers on their property and have shot them or killed them in other ways.
It's got to add to the level of tragedy that you have to somehow metabolize.
Yeah, that's the ante.
Yeah, you know, it does because you know, I mean, it's a little bit if you're a cat lover and you, you know, you go to the.
The shelter is very rough to just realize, yeah.
A lot of these animals aren't leaving here, and you know, some of them might be unrecoverable, but there are animals here that you know are perfectly lovely, they're just they've been abandoned by somebody, they're too old or whatever.
And so, you know, each one becomes a tragedy to you.
And, um, I mean, last week I moved a beaver, um, who's dead.
I mean, it's right now babies are being born, and um.
The human involved smashed in the den with an excavator, and everything would suggest that mom and babies perished in that.
And the dad was still around, and so I trapped the dad in a live trap off of the site and I moved him.
I did my best, like I dug into the old den.
There's no surviving this.
We left the live traps, hoping that nobody's left.
Um, and when I was a little more impartial, I guess.
It would have been like, well, you know, we have a single male that we'll find another family unit.
Yeah.
But, you know, this guy, he hung out and he wouldn't eat.
Right.
Like we were, we were putting the good veggies and the apples in with him and he just wouldn't eat.
Yeah.
And we, we relocated him three days later because, you know, he was just going to, he was just going to starve in the halfway house and we knew that nobody was there.
I mean, that's just last week.
And those are just, they feel a little more real when you, it's, you get out of your brain.
Saying, oh, it's just a single male and it's a logistics problem because I'm not using, I'm not moving a family unit anymore, you know?
Oh, I get this viscerally.
I remember when I was first starting out working with bats, you know, I got into working with bats because I saw a really great presentation by a biologist named Jay Cho, who had studied tent making bats.
And I was so fascinated by what he was saying that it's like, maybe that's what I should study.
Cool.
And so then I started, you know, researching it and I got a, an opportunity to work in the field with them.
But then I started interacting with these animals as individuals.
And, you know, you would think this is a tiny little animal.
It doesn't have a large brain.
Like, what are the chances that you're going to see those kinds of patterns?
And oh my goodness, the things I saw and what they suggest about, you know, your tragedies aren't different than their tragedies.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
So I remember just the first time I saw a a live mother bat tending her offspring you know, her pre-volunt offspring, which she carries with her or sometimes leaves in the roost, you know and then flies out on a foraging run and then comes back and the baby comes and suckles and she cleans its wings, like you know, just so carefully.
And you just think, you know bats have this terrible reputation right, people think they're creepy and weird, right.
But you watch a bat mother take care of its offspring, it's like oh, I totally get this right, yeah.
And then once I'm slightly hesitant to even tell this story.
It throws other people less than it throws me because I've now gotten very used to bats.
But I was experimenting.
I wanted to see a bat make a tent because nobody had ever seen it.
And a friend of mine, John Cooley, suggested, hey, you know, maybe you should make some infrared illuminators and use bank surveillance cameras, which see in the infrared, which I didn't know.
So this is potentially a great solution because it wouldn't disturb the animals.
It would be dark to them.
but I would be able to see it on a video, which I did ultimately.
I still think I'm the only person who's seen it.
But anyway, I was preparing.
I was building illuminators in my room on Barra, Colorado Island at night.
I was soldering together these infrared LEDs from television remotes that I bought in ungodly numbers.
Ultimately, I thought I was going to start with like three, four of them.
And I was like, oh, that's not nearly enough light.
I ended up with a so you're in Panama City, just behind Tony.
Oh, I got very good at going into Panama City, going to the electronics shop.
He's here again.
Yeah, he's here again.
How many TVs could this guy have?
But anyway, so I was soldering these things together.
Ultimately, it took 247 LEDs to get enough light to actually see, but it worked.
Cool.
Okay.
So anyway, I was experimenting with this and putting the illuminator under tents whose location I knew where there were animals there at night.
And one night I put this thing out under this tent and I was just kind of watching bats do their thing, fly out, forage, come back, all this stuff.
And there was this pair, male and a female, and the male flew out on a foraging run.
And I start detecting, you can't quite see it because the camera is under the tent, but I start seeing another animal circling the tent and the animal in the tent starts freaking out, the female.
And the animal who's flying around like makes a couple of passes at landing.
It's not his tent, so he doesn't know it well enough to land.
He finally lands and well, in scientific speak, we would say that there was a forced copulation.
The male bat rapes this female bat while I'm watching on this infrared camera.
And then he leaves as the other male returns.
And it's like this scene of pandemonium in this tent.
And it's just heartbreaking.
It's like, you know, I didn't even want to know that this was happening.
And of course, it's important to know that it's happening.
And of course, why wouldn't it be, right?
Right.
This is a same dynamic, same evolutionary dynamic.
Oh, the female had called.
She had tried to call her mate back during this thing.
And I think he had arrived, but too late.
And, you know, so anyway, point is you were watching this real time.
Yeah.
It's, yeah.
It's rough.
It's very hard when you understand that actually outside your door, there are animals.
Experiencing the same sorts of tragedies that humans experience.
It's not less important to them, it's not less emotional, they're not more mechanical.
Right, it's the same stuff, without the names you know and without anybody ever knowing.
That's happens.
So anyway.
Yeah, fascinating that that uh, beavers apparently are this individual and have these personality characteristics that you readily recognize.
I don't think it's embarrassing that it took you a while to figure that out.
I mean, isn't it interesting though?
I mean, now in the, In the age of cancellation, we're used to getting canceled over.
Really silly stuff.
But at the time, if you would have gone out and said, I just witnessed rape, that would have had the potential to get you canceled in the realm of like there's this funny pressure.
If you're looking at something with the lens of science, you're never supposed to dip into humanizing or naming or.
Well, that's why you say forced copulation.
And that's why you say con specific.
Yeah, that's why you say these things.
And you know, but there's an argument for it.
But it is important to realize when we say those things that there is a direct translation for a reason.
Yeah, but we do a disservice to the folks who didn't see it.
Yeah.
Because they don't know the translation.
Right.
No, they don't know the translation.
That's true.
I think, well, there's a reason I said both terms here.
Right.
I think it's very important to recognize that there is an objective description of this event.
And then there's the, actually, it's not wrong to anthropomorphize here because.
This is important to these.
Yeah, I guess that's my point.
For the same reason.
Right.
Yeah.
Yes.
Landowners Leasing Property to Beavers00:15:30
All right.
Let's move on to the question of what might be done.
If we have on the table the idea that beavers potentially hold the solution to many problems that we regard as important, things like fire regime, fires that are more common, that burn more intensely, that destroy human lives and homes.
Solution to problems like that, solution to making, to solving the ecological crisis that we have created is at least potentially addressed at some substantial level by the reintroduction of beavers.
There's a problem with reintroducing beavers, which is everybody's first reaction.
Even my first reaction would be if I was buying a piece of land on which there were beavers.
If those beavers were remote from where I was doing my activity, I would think that was freaking fantastic, right.
And if they were a threat to my they're flooding brett habitat right.
If they were, if they were a danger to my house or my driveway, I wouldn't be, you know, I wouldn't want to see them killed, but I would be right.
I would think I would think twice about the wisdom of allowing that to continue.
Yep so, in light of all that, what can be done to a educate people whose initial reaction is beavers that's bad news.
And B, what can be done to make the relationship between beavers and people one that is peaceable enough?
Well, I feel like I've got something, but I'm also conscious of I'm coming to this as the progressive that's got something.
And yet I've been working with beavers and people for over a decade.
And if you're a farmer and you've got any kind of crop, say you're farming fescue.
Right, for seed, it's going to go, it's going to create lawns across America.
And beavers move into what used to be a waterway, but now it's collapsed into this little ditchy stream that runs typically even along property boundaries because humans just put it somewhere.
The beavers start very quickly creating the whole system we've been talking about.
Well, when they do that, they destroy your crop, right?
And as it floods out, well, suddenly I don't have an acre of fescue.
Productivity.
Now I've lost two acres of fescue productivity.
And, you know, all the virtues we just extolled and the rationale behind it doesn't matter if you're trying to make a mortgage payment.
And you've just lost more and more ground that is ground that pays.
So I would just point out for our listeners who are well familiar with this discussion this is a class of collective action problem.
Yep.
We would all benefit from widespread.
Beaver activity, but that doesn't do anything for the farmer who's losing acres of their productivity to the fact that the beavers have decided to set up shop adjacent to their property.
Yeah.
And you talk to any of those folks and they're like, that's great that you all want that.
Yeah.
But no one's showing up to help me.
Right.
I'm the one stuck with all the cost.
And you just want me to bear that for the good of society and the world.
And until you've been in this person's shoes, you're in no position to judge.
You're in no position to judge.
It's a collective action problem and collective action problems are.
Genuinely difficult to solve.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you've got different aspects of it, in that, whatever the beavers are doing, there's a whole suite of tools.
Like the apes have been able to outsmart the rodents pretty well on this.
We can put in a thing called a pond leveler that'll maintain the dam at a certain height.
It's basically hiding the leak where the beavers don't think to look for it.
So, wait, wait.
That's going to require some unpacking.
You can manage the level of the pond.
Then it doesn't flood the field.
So you can protect the field.
So you could have the beavers and the field.
Okay.
Now, you do this by draining water from the pond above a certain level, like the little, I don't even know what you call it, but the thing in many sinks that if you close the drain, you get to the overflow and it goes down the drain.
Yep.
Okay.
Do not exceed line.
The do not exceed line.
Okay.
So you do that to a piece of beaver pond to a beaver pond.
You put some sort of regulator that, you know, takes in water as it overtops and then drains it out, presumably the dam.
Yep.
Okay.
Yep.
Makes sense, except you're dealing with a living system managed by pond makers.
What do they think if you just put in a standard pond leveler?
Well, that's where, you know, if you get greedy and you try to take away all their habitat.
They might not outsmart the pond leveler, but they realize their dam isn't working because your pond leveler is the leak.
You're hiding the leak way out in their pond where they don't think to look for it, you know, and the water's leaving.
So if you just put a pipe through their dam above a certain level, right, what would they do?
Typically, they would find the inlet because they'd swim past it and they'd feel water rushing out and they'd plug it immediately.
Okay.
So a typical pond leveler is a pipe and then it has a big cage around it.
Where the water goes in.
So that's typically like 40 feet out into the beaver pond.
And then the pipe itself is your do not exceed line.
So wherever you set that in the beaver dam, that's the level you're controlling the water at.
If you make it too low, you get greedy.
And you say, basically, you have no habitat, beavers.
The beavers will just build a downstream dam and back flood everything.
Of course.
So they figured that out.
Yeah.
So a lot of the work I do is helping.
It's like marriage counseling.
It's like, well, I hear your needs and the beaver has these needs.
And so let's.
Kind of come to an agreement, and I'll often point out like, here's their underwater entrance.
So, if we go lower with the water level than their entrance, that's a big deal for them, right?
Reveal that'll trigger your downstream dam, yeah.
Yep.
Um, and if you can come to a happy medium, these things can be in work for decades, right?
Um, beavers have learned how to outsmart some of these.
So, I recently invented a new one that I'm into, and it's um, it's like the first reusable one that doesn't involve mesh, and um.
But that aside, there's this tool, right, that works.
And we've been using these for over 20 years.
However, when we put that tool in, we diminish the thing that everybody wants.
Like we're actually artificially constraining the good work that beavers are doing.
So the beavers are not dead, but their good work is being constrained.
And so I've, and we've been talking about how beavers are contributing all of this wealth, this ecological wealth.
And if you're a landowner, Beavers are just creating true wealth on your land, but you don't see it that way.
Often, landowners see it as an encumbrance, like you're creating a wetland on my property.
There's a real estate agent in my area, and she insists if she's going to list your property that you trap all the beavers first.
It's like on her list, like clean the, you know, wash the carpets, trap the beavers.
Yeah.
You know, it's seen like it's not seen that you have wealth on the land.
It's seen that there's a pest infestation.
Yeah.
And so, there's this issue where for most of our history as a species, we've seen it as wealth, and now we think of it as pests.
And you can talk, talk, talk, talk about how it's great, but the people who are dealing with it are still dealing with plug culverts and flooded croplands.
And yet you've got a lot of people who would love to see more beavers and they don't have land.
Right.
Right.
So what i'm trying and to my knowledge this is the first time it's been tried anywhere in the northern Hemisphere where beavers are I was just presenting on this idea in Scotland last fall and no one's tried it um is simply, could we sponsor a beaver family to live and work on that piece of land?
So say, you're a farmer right, you've got two acres being flooded out.
I come to you as a non-profit and I say hey, We think beavers are really groovy for all these reasons.
We get that they're causing you a headache.
Could we pay you to host the beavers?
And it's an idea I've been exploring for a number of years.
I ran a little survey out to market research, see if there was any there, there, because it's like peer to peer subsidy, basically.
And the signal I got back was oh, people would love to sponsor beaver families.
I was also asking them, you know, How much would you spend per acre of land the beavers were flooding?
And you're asking the farmers this no, no, the potential sponsors.
Like, I wanted to see is there a market for people that would people actually want to sponsor?
Would people donate if they had the opportunity to keep a beaver family alive and doing all this good work?
Yeah, and would a farmer accept a donation from somebody they've never met to flood their farmland and create a crop that was sort of non consensual?
Yeah, right, right.
There's two questions.
Um.
And what I got back from the little market research was a resounding yes from the farmers if it was paying more than my crop makes.
And yes from people.
Like, we would love to sponsor beavers.
They didn't like it when I started talking about how many acres.
And it was just like, just tell me about the families.
Right.
And so we're trying this approach.
But isn't it going to be ungodly expensive to take an acre of farmland for productivity?
So.
I was the we've tried this now once again.
This is fully in pilot mode, but we've been kind of very slow and systematic in developing it.
Um, it's been in the hopper a couple years now.
And I met with a farmer whose fescue crop was flooding, and I asked them what their profit margin was for that acreage.
And that landowner was making $162 an acre per year.
What?
Yeah.
Per acre?
Per acre.
Oh my God.
So an acre of land was generating $162.
And I thought, well, I think I can compete with that.
You know, I came from the restoration industrial world, the complex that's been built out around things like mitigation wetlands.
And the number you start with, if you're going to go build a mitigation bank wetland, you know, somebody's developing a real wetland and you build this fake one and there's this shell game, you start at a million.
You're talking about those.
Awkward little ponds.
Yeah, the little ponds, and they're fenced in and full of weeds, and they're not an involved complex system.
Yeah, but they've officially replaced the one that you took away.
Yeah, those projects often start at a million dollars an acre.
And here I am with a farmer telling me at 162, the minute you cross that threshold, I'm making more off of beavers managing my land.
Wow.
So we came up with a simple, Three page agreements, kind of one of these high trust, low risk landowner agreements.
And we're basically leasing land for the beavers.
And I asked the landowner to name the beavers.
They named them the Nawsons, as in gnawing on a stick.
And the Nawson family, because they're party to the lease, you know, we need them, they're on the lease.
And we're basically saying, hey, you agree not to kill the Nawson's.
If you want to lower one of the dams, you work with us so we can do it well.
And in trade, we're going to give you $1,000 a year to host the Nawson family on your land, plus $500 an acre that they flood per year.
So the Nawson's are costing us $2,000 a year.
And for that, we're getting.
Two acres of an evolved complex system, you know, under management in the way that it needs to be under management.
And not only are we getting all the benefits of that, but instead of this being a black hole in the beaver population where beavers are getting trapped every single year at this property, well, two to four dispersing beavers are going out of this property every year, you know.
So we've got a net producer.
It's a net producer.
So you've got all the local benefits and you've got the curve coming out, and it's for budget dust compared to what we spend.
And yet, there is no program to do this.
There's no official anything.
All right.
I just, you've said it very clearly.
I just want to recap it because it's so beautiful, right?
You could spend, what did you say, a million dollars creating a phony, artificial, gross wetland that doesn't work because it's not an evolved system.
It's just a series of check marks.
You could take the tiniest fraction of that for a couple thousand dollars.
You can host a beaver family to do a much better job of creating a wetland than any human is ever going to do.
And this has never been done.
And nobody's angry at you because the people who were making money from the farmland are making more money from being stewards of the land using beavers.
I mean, it's beautiful.
I love that you think that because when I came up with this, I was like, I need someone to test the game theory on this.
And I was like, I need to shop this with Brett.
I mean, look.
It feels like it will work.
I think the game theory is scalable.
The game theory is not the problem.
The thing, the place that I would have said, hey, I think that idea is probably not going to work is that I would have imagined that the amount that you would have to pony up to take an acre of farmland out of production would have been orders of magnitude higher.
Now, I'm sure there are crops for which it is.
Sure.
But, you know, how many acres of farmland are producing the most marginal of profits and actually costing us environmentally because you're Washing topsoil into the stream, you're putting pesticides on it.
Um, so I don't know.
This, those with those numbers, it obviously makes sense.
The numbers are pretty crazy, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you and you could just take one of those million dollar phony wetlands.
I mean, how many acres of farmland could you turn over to beavers and everybody wins except the uh, the phony wetland makers?
Well, so one of the things in this.
Three page agreement, which would need to be built out into a bigger thing if we ever did this.
But the farmers I've talked to are completely happy if Project Beaver wants to make money selling credits off the work that's being done on their land.
Unintended Consequences of Interventions00:14:32
So one of the things they do is they agree to let us play in the carbon market or the wetland market if we so choose.
We're too small and those markets are too captured.
Right.
To just imagine that they'd be ruthless and protected.
Ruthlessly captured.
But the thing is, my product.
Is going to out compete all of their products.
In that, if I have 20 acres under beaver management as a little nonprofit, those acres, it doesn't matter what you measure, the beavers are doing it better.
Of course.
So maybe someday there's some way where the powers that be will acknowledge, hey, beaver stewardship is actually a higher version.
Yeah.
Well, this is where you're up against what happens to the bureaucracies.
Right.
All of the bureaucracies, whether they're federal or state or NGO, that say they care about ecological restoration, but have become a critical.
Jobs program for people who want to virtue signal but aren't really that interested in getting the job done.
Corneli's Law.
Right.
Yeah.
That you can't be allowed to succeed because of all the little fiefdoms that this would interfere with.
But the glorious thing is we don't even need them and we don't need the government.
We don't.
It's literally humans donating the USD tokens to something that.
I have yet to find a better use of funds if you want to do anything good for the environment.
Yes.
Now, I should just point out, when you say USD tokens, you're using a clever euphemism for dollars.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sorry.
I feel somewhat autistic when I try to think about it.
No, I don't really understand.
I get it.
I just, all of us folks who are so worried that the cage is going to be composed of a central bank digital currency are like, oh, my God, you didn't.
Is he in on it?
Yeah.
But yeah, no, I love it.
It doesn't require any of that architecture to.
Participate.
On the other hand, if that architecture wasn't so damn corrupt, the tiniest fraction of the budget on these stupid wet wetlands could just produce yeah, or a little tiny item on the farm bill right, you know?
No, it makes perfect sense.
And I will tell you just in passing, I have to say it, i've been wondering about those stupid little wetlands for like my entire adult life.
I see it and I think that's the worst piece of real estate i've ever seen.
Right you, you've put in a wetland, apparently to attract birds, and it's like in the middle of one of those, you know, a clover leaf on ramp to a something, and it's like, how little do you understand about nature to think that that is going to work or is a good idea?
And it gives essentially almost no aesthetic benefit.
Right, it's like okay, so you've got an artificial pond that would otherwise, you know, be rocks or concrete or something.
It's a little better, but it's not Enough better to justify what it obviously takes to produce it.
Well, and you know, habitat is the product of a process.
Yes.
And you have no process there.
You've built this sort of thing that looks like a wetland because you went out and measured a real wetland and you're like, it's wet.
It's wet and it's kind of flat and bumpy.
Yeah.
And like it has these plants.
So we're going to grow these plants in a nursery and shove them in there and give them drip tape.
It's Potemkin nature.
I mean, like almost literally, right?
It has the look of a wetland enough. to satisfy some very superficial desire for nature.
Right.
But it's so shallow.
Yeah.
Right.
So I'm thrilled about this and I'm very hopeful that people across the political spectrum, you called yourself a progressive before.
I don't think you were speaking politically.
I think you were referring to what we often talk about here where when people think they're going to solve a problem, they don't anticipate the unintended consequences.
And so you're aware that you're talking about solving a problem.
No, in this sense, I'm coming into it very conservatively.
Yeah.
Right.
In the other sense of the word conservative, literally, like this is a complex, evolved system.
Right.
But I think you're actually protected from the caution that you issue about wide-eyed progressivism because you're not instituting a novel solution.
It's true.
There are novel aspects to what you're doing, but the part that has to actually function as it interfaces a complex system evolved to do exactly that job.
The only thing the humans are doing is drawing a line around the evolved complex system and saying, here, this many acres.
Well, all right.
So years ago, I, as a graduate student, I started, you know, now I was interfacing with all of these biologists in different areas of the field.
And I was realizing that there was this unfortunate aspect to the way people ended up in ecology.
In my opinion, ecology contains some of the most interesting questions in biology, but the work in ecology is atrocious, right?
The trying to answer those questions is done poorly with the wrong assumptions.
And so it's a very disappointing field, even if the questions are in principle very interesting ones.
and important.
So the, what was I going to tell you?
In grad school, meeting people.
Oh, yeah.
Ecology.
What I realized was that there was something that brought people into ecology unlike the other fields.
And what it was, was a desire to make the world better, which I think is totally honorable and I like it.
Right.
But it's not a proper scientific motivation.
And when you get there, If you were actually doing the scientific part right, what you would realize is ecology contains hugely important questions that are almost immaterial to conserving things.
Right?
Right.
What you need to do to conserve things is protect them and allow them to do what they are built to do without your needing to understand it on their own already.
Yep.
Right?
So protecting habitat, recognizing the difference between a habitat that looks intact and one that's actually intact.
and figuring out what the minimum necessary parameters are to keep the habitat actually functioning.
Yep.
So you have seen, I know you have, empty forests, especially empty tropical forests.
You know, you go by it on the boat, looks perfectly healthy because all the trees are there, right?
Instagram worthy.
Instagram worthy, and yet there's nothing in it, right?
And so you can't do that.
What you need to do is actually figure out, you know, what is it that causes the animals to be emptied? from a forest, which then causes the processes that maintain the forest to be degraded.
And once you figure that out, what you're doing is you're protecting habitat.
When something goes extinct, it's telling you that you failed at that job, right?
So anyway, point being, the project you're talking about is the right kind of intervention.
It's like imagining that the intervention for your health involves eating real food grown in a safe way.
That's not an intervention, really.
It's the removal of all of the interventions that got in the way of that process.
Likewise, you know, putting beavers somewhere or encouraging them seems like an intervention.
And at one level, it is.
On the other hand, it's basically you interrupting the processes that eliminated the beavers in the first place.
Well, and any of the ancestors of any of the people that we're talking about owning land and stewarding land now, you go far enough back and they would recognize that you want that ecological wealth on your land.
Right.
just like they would recognize you want to eat real food.
Well, actually, to switch subjects entirely for a moment, there's a tragedy, I think, that's unfolding with young people, people my kids' age there, in their early 20s, where they are being sold an idea of what their romantic life should be, for example.
And they have no, it's long enough ago that romantic lives worked properly.
that they don't even understand what they have given up in exchange for the freedoms that they've obviously gotten.
Right.
And so if you don't know, if you can't, you know, if you could take a five minute tour in your alternative life, if you didn't do that and did do this instead, you might think, oh, there's no comparison.
I'm happier.
I'm safer.
It's better in every way.
But if you can't take that five minute tour, you can spend your entire life doing what seems like the rational thing.
and basically harming yourself.
And it seems to me, you know, the person who understands the beavers as a destroyer of their wealth and doesn't understand, well, actually, you know, the quality of your day-to-day existence, the health of your land, you know, the desirability of it to others, all of those aspects would be enhanced if you had the natural relationship.
But because it's been hundreds of years since that relationship existed, we don't even have the cultural knowledge that that's true.
We see these as nothing but pests.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting when the Hudson Bay Company came to North America and there were other companies too.
They showed up with a bunch of trinkets and they showed up and said, hey, folks, if you bring in beavers, we'll give you these trinkets.
These are really cool trinkets.
And there was a split.
Those human populations that were in water-rich areas.
We were much more likely to accept the trinkets and start trapping beavers.
Those human populations, like the Blackfeet, who were in drought prone areas, had a mythic structure in place warning them not to mess with the beavers.
Oh, that's fascinating.
And they wouldn't trap the beavers.
They weren't above killing some other trapper who's got a bunch of beaver pelts and turning in his pelts naturally, but you didn't actually trap the beavers, right?
And it's like, I may have mentioned this last time I was here, one of the early texts out of Iran beavers were the water dogs.
And, you know, there's this cycle of reincarnation.
And so, if you're a good human, well, maybe someday you get to be a dog.
And if you're a really good dog, maybe someday you get to be a water dog.
Really?
Yeah.
And the water dogs were so sacred that if you were to kill a water dog, you had to pay this fine.
You had to do community service.
In this case, it was like you had to go kill a bunch of snakes, which they're disrupting some other complex system, guaranteed.
But, you know, community service and fine.
Yeah.
And the problem was that you would anger the gods and drought and crop failure would follow.
Gee, I wonder what that mechanism was.
Yes, exactly.
So, you know, we've lost that mythic and cultural.
This is just what you're pointing to, right?
It was there.
It was one of the things we thought to write down first in Iran.
It was that important.
Right.
Oh, of course.
I mean, and, you know, I think I've mentioned to you that I've been doing a lot of work at sort of the interface between the materialist scientific worldview and the religious worldview.
And those myths are.
Architected by whatever force, to contain the counterintuitive wisdom that you need and to embody it in stories that, even when there's no human penalty, encodes a penalty within you that will cause you not to do the thing that unhooks.
You know, that kills.
The trinket is there, but you're still not going to do it right.
You still wouldn't do it because the mythological structure is bigger and more important, and you know it's wonderful when you have a myth that is so readily readable in the modern context.
And it's like, oh, well, we see exactly what we've done.
Yeah.
Where are the beaver wetlands in Iran?
Yeah, exactly.
We did the thing.
Yeah.
All right.
That's really interesting.
Before we close this out, you mentioned to me that you were thinking about Fourth Frontier stuff.
And I was surprised to hear you mention the Fourth Frontier, but do you want to draw a connection here between your beaver work and Fourth frontier, or do you want me to lay out what that is?
Well, let me lay out what I remember from 2009.
2009, my god, a lifetime ago.
You can edit great, and then because I came to this approach from remembering your lectures on the fourth frontier.
So, from what I remember, and this will be however successful it is, I think you'll be fine.
There are three frontiers that humans have evolved to feel.
We feel sparkly and successful in our brains when we feel like we're pursuing a frontier.
And there are three frontiers that, over our lineages as humans, have been the sparkliest frontiers to pursue, and really kind of the main and only frontiers.
And those are land, the conquest of more land, but more like land for the taking.
Yeah.
You know, land that you can move into.
This is the pressure that helped us develop clothing, right?
To move into these habitats that we were uncomfortable, now we're comfortable enough to land.
The second is technology.
Everything from farming to then, oh, look, we can pull nitrogen out of the air.
Now our farming is way more successful to the technology that we think of today.
You can make rich building a data center, son.
I think I'll put that off, but okay.
Right?
So, this idea of a frontier.
And then the third is well, you get stagnation in either of those, you get economic stagnation, and it's we'll go take their stuff.
Yeah, you're doing very good.
Profiting from Sustainable Growth Models00:07:25
Let me just fill that in.
So the frontier is a place that allows you to generate more wealth.
Geographic frontier, hey, we found a continent nobody's seen before.
Obviously, that's a huge increase in the number of people from our lineage who can exist.
So that's a giant geographic frontier where the term obviously comes from.
Technological frontier, you go from hunting and gathering to farming the very same piece of habitat.
The number of people who can live on it jumps.
That's a technological frontier.
And then the third one isn't a real frontier, but from the population's point of view, it is.
You get the same burst of growth if you can figure out a justification for attacking those people and taking their land or their stuff.
And so we see that pattern in history again and again and again.
It's a theft of niche frontier, effectively.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so the idea that I remember you putting forward is, okay, this is reality.
Deal with it.
And.
What if a fourth frontier were possible?
What if there were a thing, an activity, a thing that humans can apply their brains to, a puzzle that we are rewarded with wealth from, the perception that our lineage will do better, that is just as satisfying, but it doesn't end in all the things that extractive land use, you know, you never know if the technology is going to stagnate and war result in.
Right.
This idea of is there something else that, because it's a thing that we just, we're obsessively captivated by this feeling, could you turn somebody onto that same feeling that would reward them in the same way?
Yeah, that would satisfy our desire for that growth.
It's a life well lived.
You've done better than your parents, kind of that feeling.
Yeah, or I would point to it's not. true fourth frontier, but the same idea.
If you look at a classic Japanese corporation where you come in at a particular level and if you do the job correctly, you climb at a particular rate.
And the point is, even if the company is not growing, from the point of view of you as an employee, it feels like growth.
Your liberty gets bigger every year.
And so the point is, it satisfies that human desire for Uh, things to get better, and so the question of the fourth frontier, you know, and there'll be lots of conspiracy theorists who think that I'm arguing for some dictatorial way of organizing humans.
There he goes again, yeah, exactly.
But the real question is no panacea.
Well, that's just the thing it has to be for a fourth frontier to be to exist in a meaningful sense, it has to be self sustaining and desirable enough that people want it.
You can't impose stuff on people, yep, and it can't even smell fake.
Right.
It has to be authentic and it, you know, effectively it has to create such a good deal for people who participate in it that people want to opt in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's been rattling around my head.
And the result that I feel like we should go for is a growth of wealth.
And the growth of wealth, rather than than taking from the land?
How could you have a game where the land, you know, it's this idea of regenerative agriculture in a sense.
Like how do you have a game where the land is, you're profiting more and the land is profiting more at the same time?
And that's where I then came to this idea of, well, could we, could the game be, Evolve complex systems like that.
The game is to grow, evolve complex systems, and it's and it's fun because it's like square meters under beaver management is a really easy, um, or or or uh, or families of beavers doing work, it's a really easy thing to track.
And um, and if you have if you have a system where folks are rewarded for.
Tolerating beavers on their land such that it's the most profitable piece.
I mean, I grew up rural.
Nothing spreads through a community like, oh, they've got a new way to make money off the land.
Everyone's always trying to figure it out.
Sure.
Right.
I mean, we survived the green rush.
Everyone put in greenhouses, cut down trees, and grew cannabis for freaking eight years because it was like the thing that you could just make a little money at.
Yeah.
And so if you could set that piece in motion and all the people, the collective action problem, all the people who realize that they would benefit from beavers and want to feel that there's beavers and have extra dollars that they want to be effectively spent.
Right.
Could be the engine driving a game where you're just seeing a growth of wealth tied to it.
It's like retraining humans to recognize the thing that we've lost.
Using the thing that we're used to now, the dollar being the stand in for wealth, but using that to retrain humans to growing wealth.
It's not perfect for the fourth frontier, but it is inspired by that lecture and it feels like it fits in that model.
There's the farmers making more tokenized money, they're making more dollars, but they're actually growing wealth on their land too.
The people donating their devaluing currency are seeing it currency converted over into something that's real wealth that's growing wealth collectively too.
And so it's reliant on folks wanting to play that game, but everyone's seeing a benefit.
Well, I think it is liable to be the hard part is seeing it at first before it's been demonstrated in a way that is visible.
Actually, no one's tried this.
Right.
So once it has been demonstrated, you can imagine, you know, a particular municipality and the surrounding habitat.
You can imagine somebody saying, hey, actually, that sounds pretty good to us and trying it.
And then the town not burning down in some fire that burns down surrounding towns because it solved its hydrology problem.
You can imagine.
real estate prices going up in a place where people are doing this because there's more wildlife.
It feels better to be there.
Scottish Clearances and Grazed Lands00:12:13
You know, droughts aren't severe, whatever it is.
So I think it would catch on if it got over the initial phase of demonstrating itself so that people could actually look at it.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Because, you know, I had an excellent professor, Heather and I both learned from a guy named George Esterbrook at Michigan.
And he was a a very different thinker.
He thought differently about a lot of things.
And he taught this, what he called practical botany, which was a program in which he actually told you how to do things.
And he taught you how to make wine with yeast and fruit juice and, you know, how to deal with various plants and how to think about the landscaping around your house.
And one of the things that, you know, his point was, was your lawn.
Why do you have it?
Right?
I was like, oh, because nice.
He's like, it's not really nice.
It's good for one thing.
If you want to walk on it or lie on it, it's the right plant.
And if you don't, it's kind of a waste of your space.
There's a lot of other stuff you could do that's nicer.
Right.
So I thought that was pretty interesting.
And he went into sort of why we have these lawns.
Yeah.
Right.
And it's like, oh, this comes back to some English idea about, you know, conquering nature and formalizing the garden so that it feels very much under control.
You know, the box hedges and these sorts of things.
Anyway.
So all right.
And our eye likes to rest on something that looks recently grazed by a big ungulate because that hadn't occurred to me.
Oh, yeah.
Think about it a well grazed area, you know, somewhere there's meat.
Right.
Okay.
Well, maybe that makes sense to me.
It's not my idea, but I like it.
This idea of the meadow or the grazed.
Well, I always like, I mean, I grew up hiking in Yosemite.
I like an unruly meadow.
I like a diverse meadow.
Grass has always seemed weird to me, but.
That's too big a tangent to get onto this.
There's a whole world of Yosemite, and maybe we just need to get into it a little bit.
Okay, so you got John Muir, Scottish, right?
He comes over from Scotland.
Scotland's gone through the hiring and clearances.
So you had like the early versions of what it meant to be colonized were practiced on Scotland and Ireland and Wales, right?
And you had martial clans.
And you had British come in and say, basically, like, you know, who's your leader?
Well, I don't know.
There's multiple people here.
And well, or they pick a yes man.
And it was called the baronetization of Scotland.
They bring this guy up as a baron and he gets a castle, right?
And here's the tax structure that keeps your castle going.
And, you know, you want to keep your castle.
So better say yes.
Better say yes.
And you better do what we say when we ask for it, right?
You know?
But the key thing is you're taking someone within the community and raising them to an aristocracy class.
And then it's the trinkets again.
They don't want to let go of the castle.
Sure.
Right.
So down the line, you have kings who realized, like, they're Scottish.
They're just too much of a pain in the butt.
And I just know this because I was recently at a beaver conference in Scotland and we camped for five weeks, the whole family.
We went over.
I've got four kids.
We put up a tent for five weeks.
Scotland has this crazy right to roam law.
So you can, there's no public land, but you can put your tent anywhere on an estate.
And I think it's how they keep people from rebelling, you know, because.
It's like, yeah, there's wide open space.
It's not owned by you, but you know, you can, which was fantastic.
As the person who came from rural America, where you get shot for crossing a fence line, it was crazy.
Yeah, it's wild.
Open a fence, go put your tent.
Yeah.
So we were camping, having all these conversations at laundromats and such.
And this is such a visceral history for the people I was meeting.
So there's a baronetization.
If you're a McRae or a Wallace or a McDonald, you get a crest at this point.
This is when the crest gets awarded to you, right?
Mm hmm.
With the castle.
And then at some point, the British king is like, these Scottish guys are just too much.
We need to do a little ethnic cleansing.
But how are we going to do it?
Well, they came up with the British Highlanders.
So we're going to go use them as cannon fodder.
And that, so outlawed traditional dress, traditional music, and traditional weaponry.
And if you're a young man that grew up in a martial clan and you want to sing and fight and wear your kilt, well, you could join the British Highlanders.
We've got all that there for you.
Right.
And the problem with that plan was that the British Highlanders started pulling off victories where they were supposed to all die.
And so then the king was like, okay, I guess I've got something here.
And this story I'm telling you is the story that's told to me at laundromats.
Okay.
So it's just a caveat, right?
But it's true in the sense, it might be perfectly true, but it's true in the sense of the working class of Scotland.
This is the story they tell when an American shows up and wants to wash laundry with them.
Or whatever, I heard it multiple times.
So, I think King of England, it's like I got something here.
We're actually going to celebrate these guys.
So he gets a hold of the barons.
He says, Okay, collect your three most fierce warriors and we're going to do a parade at Sterling Castle.
And I'm going to show up and it's going to be this thing.
But you need to send in your swaths of your plaid to go on record.
And so that's when, you know, before that, yeah, everybody kind of wore the same pattern, but it changed with weavers over time.
And that's when everything got really standardized like this clan that's this plaid.
For this parade, King shows up.
He wears a kilt.
He's in Scotland.
Everyone's amazed.
He wears pink tights because real men don't show their legs.
But they do wear pink tights.
I did not know that.
And they parade around Stirling Castle, right?
Jump forward.
The next thing that people tell you the Highland Clearances.
Highland Clearances were when you needed disposable, cheap labor down in the Industrial Revolution, kicking off in London, Liverpool, and everywhere.
Get a hold of all the barons and say, okay, you need to clear all the people off the land.
And so if you were a McRae, you were cleared by a McRae in the castle.
It was your own clan clearing you.
It was a betrayal at a deep level.
It wasn't Britain that cleared the land.
And that's when the sheep and that's when the fences came in.
Because until that point, people were seen as belonging to the land, just like any other wildlife.
And so if you were elevated to this Lord, blah, blah, blah, there was still an understanding that people had an inherent right to be on the land.
And the clearances were the uprooting of the humans from the land.
And I mean, you talk to Scottish folks and they talk about it like Irish folks about the potato famine.
I mean, this thing happened a very long time ago and it's like viscerally there, right?
And that's when the idea of a landscape came into our vernacular.
And this idea of a landscape, you know, landscape in the Dutch painting sense where you've got a, this was another thing I was talking to Stuart Parker about.
The landscape is a very specific idea.
It's a vista, it's a panorama that you rest your eyes on and you feel a sense of peace.
And there's important components like well grazed meadow and human habitation in disrepair, which back to our fourth frontier, what does that tell you?
That's like, oh, there's nobody here.
Right?
I like it.
Yeah.
And that's what, that's the Scotland we go back to as tourists to go see the ruins in the beautiful vistas, right?
And the thing that I heard back from Totoro.
Tied up with Scotland, the thing I heard back when I was talking with folks was, oh, yeah, you crazy tourists.
You know, you come back and you're like, oh, you know, I've got Wallace.
Big deal.
You go to the, you know, McCray Castle and you buy the crest, you spend money on the entrance fee and you buy all the kilt stuff.
You're buying the paraphernalia that drove your family off the land.
Like you are the diaspora.
You were forced off the land and now you're going and you're spending your tokens.
With the yes man in the castle.
Okay.
So, anyway, John Muir came from Scotland.
He's a Scottish guy.
And he sat at the edge of Yosemite, fire adapted landscape where humans are burning on a regular cycle.
And there's beautiful wildflower meadows, very little brush, big trees, right?
Beavers have managed water for millions of years.
Predictably, everything co evolved.
Well, here, humans were managed, especially in the dry places, humans were managing fire predictably for long enough that everything evolved to that.
He's like, this would be a better vista if the humans weren't here.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, humans were forced out, and then we got a national park.
And then the national park, you know, had a brush, and the meadows were falling apart.
But the meadows were falling apart because the keystone element of humans and fire had been taken out.
That's interesting.
Humans were playing the role.
Humans were playing the role.
And you can look, Yosemite's meadows have just over time since it was made a national park because it's like a beaver dam.
All right.
You're breaking my heart.
No, that's all right.
You had to bring it up.
I did have to bring it up.
Well, no, this is your role.
You keep educating me about stuff that I thought I knew something about.
But all right.
So let's close the loop on this here.
You have some sort of British or maybe more broadly European impulse to take nature and tame it.
And that gets built into the aesthetic of, you know, the colonists and the settlers and the population that grows has picked up this ideal that, you know, the well-manicured property is, you know, beautiful.
Yep.
But that happened in a context where there was, so much nature, right?
You were surrounded by nature.
So the well-manicured garden was in contrast to nature, which you were not starved for because it was everywhere, right?
At some point, the population gets big enough and successful enough and technological enough that nature is now utterly remote and we are starved for it, even if we don't know that we are.
And so the point is, in that context, you know, just as the passenger pigeons were killed off because they seemed inexhaustible.
Right?
The land being managed by beavers, there were so many of them that eliminating the ones that were in your way didn't seem like a big deal.
Inexhaustible.
And yet, you know, when's the last time you saw one?
You've seen them, you know, this week.
But, you know, even me who goes looking for stuff like this, it's been years since I've seen one.
So anyway, the point is in this sort of nature starved moment, The idea that the thing that might attract your attention, that might feel healthy and invigorating to you, wouldn't be the well-manicured garden because they're everywhere.
It would be the surprising patch of nature that's alive for reasons you may not entirely intuit when you see it.
So I do think it's a contagious idea for that reason.
And then even just a few examples where people had made this leap would cause a change in how people began to see this process and whether it might be something that they want.
So I'm hopeful about that.
I love to hear that you're hopeful about that.
Great.
Yeah.
An Evergreen Reaction to Sadness00:02:02
All right.
Well, this has been a fascinating discussion.
I hope people have once again had their eyes opened to what we are missing for lack of beaver management of habitats all around us.
And maybe this will reach somebody in a position to help catalyze this.
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
We're playing and it seems like a good game to be working on.
So if folks are interested.
Reach out.
Where can they find you?
ProjectBeaver.org.
And I'm incompetent at social media, so go through the website.
You're too competent for social media.
Probably how that works.
You pointed out to me a number of times that the Instagram leaves something to be desired.
All right.
Maybe we'll fix that.
All right.
Well, it's been a pleasure, Jacob Shockey.
I always love seeing you, and it's great to see what you've become and what you're becoming and how you're managing your family life and how seriously you take.
Your stewardship of the world around you.
So thank you.
Well, thank you.
And thank you for all that you did for me as a student.
And, you know, when you started doing live streams and such, my first reaction was well, when you got kicked out of Evergreen, my reaction was sadness because I knew how important the work that you and Heather did was.
And I was like, they're taking something really important away.
And then to see you just grow it to a broader audience.
And I feel like you're still doing the same thing, but you've been able to scale it.
And so you changed how I see things.
And so, congratulations and thank you for still doing that good work.
That's lovely to hear.
Yeah, maybe it is that we're doing the same thing, just a little more hate adjacent.