With climate change reshaping the American West, an industrious mammal could help alleviate some of the worst drought and flood crises to come. The West becomes drier in the dry season and more prone to flooding in the rainy season. Beavers may well be a relatively inexpensive part of resilience efforts. As engineers of natural ecosystems, these largest rodents in North America “increase water storage in ponds and surrounding floodplains, thereby slowing winter flows, increasing water availability from rivers and grasslands and extending stream flow for up to six weeks during dry summer seasons”.
But in Oregon, the state of the beaver, the beaver policy, for lack of a better term, makes reintroduction problematic. Researcher Jeff Baldwin details institutional barriers to using beaver in mitigation initiatives. Public policies are mainly controlled by those who oppose animals. In seventy-five percent of the state, a predator designation means they “can be killed without record or regulation.” The same statute also guarantees that no information is collected on these murders. The evidence for the disappearance of the beaver is therefore anecdotal and “dismissed as such”.
For more than a century, “state governments and the federal government have wavered between promoting and killing the beaver.” For example, Oregon banned trapping in 1899; reversed prohibition in 1918; reinstated prohibition in 1932; then allowed trapping on farmland in 1951. There aren’t many licensed trappers today, but they have a strong lobby. And with the predator list, you don’t even need a permit to kill them in many places.
Meanwhile, reintroduction efforts, in cooperation with landowners, in the 1940s succeeded in boosting beaver populations, a story overlooked by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife professionals that Baldwin questioned.
Prior to all of this, beaver populations across North America were eagerly attacked to supply a European market that had already trapped Europe’s native beaver species. Pre-settlement beaver population estimates in North America range from sixty to three hundred million. Today, the population is estimated between three and six million, mainly in Canada and Alaska.
The diaries of explorers and trappers bear witness to the landscapes of the West constructed in part by beavers. Baldwin writes, “The now channeled and arid valley bottoms of the American West were once difficult to traverse due to multiple channels and extensive riverine floodplains covered in dense vegetation. Could such landscapes, created and maintained by beavers, be brought back?
Examining “the culture of land and wildlife management professionals and policy makers”, Baldwin conducted forty key informant interviews and conducted a “critical review of the literature published by state wildlife management institutions”. wildlife and climate change”.
He identified five institutional barriers to the recolonization and/or reintroduction of beaver. Two were legislative. Beavers are listed as predators – pests of crops and agricultural products – so they can be killed with impunity. And policy recommendations on climate change must be “politically neutral”, which means they are essentially impossible to implement, because neither beaver nor climate change are considered apolitical by many offices and land managers involved. .
The other three obstacles were “positions shared by many wildlife management specialists”. These were: there are already enough beavers; authorized trapping does not affect the population; and reintroductions are ineffective. Baldwin’s research undermines all three claims.
In fact, “the benefits of beaver recolonization” are well established and well documented, but Oregon’s political process thwarts action. Between 2008 and 2017, nine state agencies and task forces released thirteen reports on climate change and wildlife and land adaptation. Baldwin notes that none of these beavers mentioned. To avoid controversy and legislative veto, the reports “generally avoid calls for significant changes”. [Baldwin’s italics]
In Oregon, the Department of Agriculture also “represents the timber industry,” and since reintroducing beavers can lead to “road failures,” the powerful industry is demanding the right to control beavers on their land.
Politics and attitudes do not change as quickly as the climate. The fate of the giant beavers Castoroides, as big as bears, may be a teachable moment here: climate change killed them.
Baldwin concludes that delisting beavers as predators would be a key step in rebuilding the beaver state. Meanwhile, Oregon’s native tribes are already leading the way with their own beaver reintroductions.
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Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Vol. See the article : Londoners urged not to travel as heatwave engulfs Europe. 79 (2017), p. 93–114
