Beaver Eradication, Not Heat, Is The Cause Of Our Wildfire Disasters and Drought

Beavers are fucking cute, and this is probably a completely unexpected topic for my website. But major ecological and environmental disasters occurring and threatening to occur are putting our very food supply chains at risk, and the consequences of the choices made by our progenitors can be traced to the roots of these problems we face.

There is a direct connection between wild systems such as what are created and maintained by animal species such as the beaver and the health and quality of our human food supply which, in this time of increased environmental disaster and danger, is more important for our wellbeing and even our survival as a species. Don’t mistake me for a sentimental environmentalist, however. While I love animals, and care about the environment, I also love a good hamburger, but if drought destroys enough of the environment it will be increasingly difficult to raise cattle and crops and food prices will rise precipitously and cause major shortages which will affect many of our lives.

A little known but highly worrisome fact that you are likely not aware is that the floor of the California central valley, where a significant percentage of the food supply in the United States is grown, has fallen by 28 feet over the last century! The ground has sunk this low because of the huge amount of water which has been pumped from the ground to irrigate cropland. This draining of our aquifers has nearly depleted them in less time than the United States has even been a country, and the Central Valley is increasingly encountering water shortage problems which threaten to disrupt major food supply chains, and the water in California’s reservoirs have dropped to levels not seen since the 1970’s, at the same time enormous and uncontrollable wildfires devastate countless acres of our remaining forests.

Before White European Colonialists took over California and destroyed its natural ecosystems, the Central Valley was a giant floodplain full of enormous lakes, forests, and countless number of wild animals. Indigenous Americans lived on the shores of Tulare lake, which was the largest freshwater lake in the country next to the Great Lakes before it was drained for farmland, subsisting on the bountiful populations of fish like wild salmon which used to migrate upriver from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. In contrast to the dusty, drab, and arid basin it is today the California Central valley was as near an Eden paradise as has ever existed on this Earth. Today the Central Valley is flanked by naked foothills, with no natural lakes remaining and all the water courses redirected into sterile, linear channels. It never needed to be this way, though, and the reason that all the water pumped out of our aquifers didn’t simply return there after use is because of the ignorant way in which water has been “managed,” subverting natural processes which could otherwise be leveraged for our benefit.

While climate change is causing its own problems to our environment, drought, and promoting disaster like catastrophic wildfires, there is a broader cause and effect to these problems than just greenhouse gasses. Most collapses of civilization which have occurred throughout recorded history are often regarded as a “mystery.” Great centers of economy and industry such as Ancient Persia, Egypt, and Rome which failed after centuries of existence all share common overexploitation of natural resources and the failure of cropland and farming. All human civilizations require abundant food supplies, and when soil fails and water dries up, humans have no choice but to move on elsewhere. But after having colonized the entire world and driven its natural resources to the brink, contrary to what Elon Musk thinks, when our current systems fail we have nowhere else to go.

Our current problems with water supply, drought, and wildfires are our own making, especially due to bureaucratic agencies like the Forest Service which has for many decades now promoted and enforced policies which actively drain riparian zones and promote drought. Having completely misunderstood natural systems, we have set in motion the very problems which are costing us hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with, devastating industry and families and threatening our future, and it is ridiculous the expense we are having to pay for things which were in the first place provided to us for free, had we preserved rather than wantonly exploited them. Having drained our natural wetlands for farming or just in many cases for no good fucking reason we then damed up and diverted major rivers and water sources to replace that water which was already on the landscape. But although human dams can hold significant quantities of water it is nothing compared to the water reserves which were maintained by millions of little beavers scattered throughout the entirety of the landscape holding back the entirety of these watersheds and promoting natural aquifers.

One research scientist I saw speaking about their research on beaver in California cited a radiocarbon dating sample of a large beaver dam which showed the lowest level of the dam had been started in the ninth century B.C. and had been continually occupied by beavers until they were driven to the brink of extinction in the 1800s. Beavers are natural engineers which slow fresh water runoff from higher elevations, and the construction of their dams and promotion of wetlands causes fresh water to sink into the earth and collect in aquifers and ground water. When beavers are taken out of a habitat the water instead runs off at great speed, even taking soil with it, and has no ability to sink into the landscape. Beavers have often been treated as a pest species, causing minor flooding of properties or roadways which could easily be accommodated, especially considering their benefit to our direct environment, but are typically eradicated even as aquifers in drought stricken areas run dry and homes and farms alike find their wells empty and spitting out mud, and even though beavers occupy habitats that we don’t even use. Even ranchers in Nevada would have lush, verdant meadows and valleys on which to graze their cattle rather than a barren wasteland if they had any appreciation for the natural systems which promote the grass and feed on which they rely (this video documents collaboration between ranchers and conservationists to restore wetlands and preserve water for grazing, which actually promotes the success of cattle operations anyway).

Beaver used to inhabit nearly every single ecological environment across the entirety of North America, from Northerly reaches of Canada to the Eastern Seaboard to California to Northern Mexico. When the fur trade of the eighteen-hundreds wiped them out we began to immediately see the rapid decline of ecosystems across the continent and, most relevant to our own wellbeing, the decline of fresh water resources such as what would eventually cause such severe challenges to farming, food production, and preservation of our environment. Beaver maintenance and promotion of riparian zones also creates buffers against wildfire—instead of having dusty firebreak roads which do nothing to stop fire during a blazing mid-summer inferno, gullies and plains which are soaked with water because of beaver dams keep wildfires from consuming unfathomable amounts of acreage, containing wildfires while also providing refuge for plant and animal species during such calamities. Other areas of the world like the Amazon rainforest do have plenty of water but also do not have beaver. In fact, such areas of the world experienced far more erosion over time due to the absence of beavers and this caused the formation of enormous floodplains which slow down water by virtue of their extremely level gradients. Ecosystems which used to have beaver but do no longer will also eventually reach a state of equilibrium where erosion tears down steep terrain and creates large, flat, extended floodplains and watersheds which will eventually slow down water passage, but this process takes thousands of years, and our emergency is now. The presence of beaver prevented excessive erosion in the first place, and held back elevation, and since the very land on which we live was shaped by these animals it is impossible to fix this problem in our lifetime without them.

Many wildlife managers stupidly regard beaver as “nuisance” creatures, as if they hadn’t successfully inhabited this part of the world for hundreds of thousands of years and as if we are not entirely capable of building bridges or diverting roads to accommodate a potential ally in valuable water storage. They regard beaver ponds as impediments to fish populations as if they hadn’t coexisted in the first place until the arrival of European settlers, and even though there has never been any reason to believe that fish cannot and do not easily surmount beaver dams and that research has shown what should have been obvious—that beaver dams promote fish populations. Entire beaver populations holding back millions of gallons of fresh water which could be supporting farmers are also killed or relocated (usually just killed) so that Baby Boomers can build crappy vacation cabins which then burn down anyway in extreme forest fires amplified by the very removal of these wet riparian firebreak zones in the first place. Beavers directly promote healthy forests which can support responsible logging and other forestry activities by increasing the water table. If farmers practiced strategic water use to conserve water and beavers controlled as much watershed regions as they did in their traditional rage, aquifers would have never fully drained and it would refill and restore water resources for towns, small cities, and farms, and would eliminate the need to continue constructing expensive and damaging dams, and the only reason that beavers do not rebound on their own is because bureaucratic “wildlife managers” and “forest managers” and ignorant farmers and ranchers constantly wipe them out and purposefully keep their populations depressed, even at the expense of lush and productive grazing range. Government agencies like the Forest Service and the BLM need to be reformed to promote watershed and aquifer health rather than drain them by destroying natural ecosystems on purpose if we are to save our forests and fresh water or risk further water and lumber shortages.

Like many of the problems which we face, there was never a reason to have had to go through these problems in the first place. There is no benefit to having Tulare lake drained—it’s just more farmland to grow more feed crops for livestock, which can be done elsewhere, and if the lake were there it would actively contribute to aquifer levels, snowpack, and overall precipitation of the region, acting like a water battery to preserve scarce fresh water during times of need. Beaver populations would support the return of such natural waterways, acting as free, natural, fresh water preservation engineers that we need only pay with protection. These problems are only a result of our careless exploitation of the planet and absence of gratitude for the things we have been given. We can live in harmony with the environment while also taking care of ourselves. There is no need to decide between one or the other, and in fact it is looking increasingly likely that our failure to care fo the planet will also cause our own demise. To avoid this, to reduce drought, wildfire, and other ecological disasters, we must restore what we took. It’s not even that hard to do. Nature does it on her own, and the least we have to do is simply stop getting in the way.

It’s a little unrelated, but in my new book The Perfect Child I talk about the importance of teaching children farming and gardening as well as integration and protection of natural systems, and you can read the first three chapters here. Or you can read about the problems in our Policing System, or how to find success in our tight economy.