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Government planned it 7 years, beavers built a dam in 2 days and saved $1M
- noja 2y agoUnfair title. How do they know the beavers didn’t take even longer to plan it?
- rareitem 2y agoYes, we must ask the beavers spoke person for more info
- GrzegorzWidla 2y agoI know you’re being facetious but we do know thanks to the article as it says that beavers were (re)introduced to this area in 2020.
- wtcactus 2y agoI think this is the most beautiful example I have ever seen of how inefficient, wasteful and unnecessary is almost all of the government. If the beavers built it in two days, it means that half a dozen men could have easily built it at an extremely low cost in a week. Instead, they were planning it, fighting bureocracy and wasting money for years.
- iancmceachern 2y agoI dont know, this is literally what beavers do. I think you are really selling the beavers short here. I mean they've been evolving and being naturally selected to optimize for this specific activity for eons. You wouldn't expect the government to be better at making honey than bees? Better at swimming and catching fish than a dolphin? Better at making silk than silk worms? If I was going to be #2 at Dam building I'd want to be #2,to beavers.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoYeah. You could argue that nature has been planning this dam for 2.4 million years. (Though, granted, it spent no money doing so.)
- joebob42 2y agoId hope they are better at catching fish than a dolphin, yes.
- iancmceachern 2y agoPersonally? Like with their mouth or hands?
- baerrie 2y agoFriction in government is a good thing, otherwise the will of the few would outweigh the many and catastrophic projects would be allowed all of the time. Yes men could have done it but they wouldn’t maintain it like the beavers and they certainly wouldn’t have done it in a way that fits with natural cycles like the beavers did. This is more of a case for fewer nature altering projects and more restoration of ecosystems
- happyopossum 2y ago> they wouldn’t maintain it like the beavers What makes you think the beavers will maintain this dam? Beavers may maintain this for multiple generations, or they may move on next year due to predator pressure or lack of food.
- iisan7 2y agoTrue if the process of selection favors projects that produce the greatest social value, which is far from certain. Specifically in the case of projects with significant environmental impacts, I suspect you are right -- because Earth doesn't usually get a chance to present its counter-argument.
- jncfhnb 2y agoI challenge you to build a beaver dam in 30 days.
- stickfigure 2y ago"Start with two beavers..."
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- fastasucan 2y ago>If the beavers built it in two days, it means that half a dozen men could have easily built it at an extremely low cost in a week. Not at all.
- etchalon 2y agoBeavers don't have to worry about regulations, don't care how long the dam lasts or what the downstream impacts of it might be.
- HomeDeLaPot 2y agoYo, we decided to build a dam in the creek behind your house. We're not sure what the impact will be on your house and backyard, so watch out. You've got three days, construction has already started.
- HomeDeLaPot 2y agoIt was gonna cost 1 million of your tax dollars to build the levee protecting your house, but we're saving you money by building it out of sticks. We'll send a dude out to throw a few more on every few days.
- qwe----3 2y ago7 years to estimate the impact? I'm guessing it would take a professional an afternoon.
- HomeDeLaPot 2y agoAbout the same time it'd take me to build Twitter.
- II2II 2y agoJudging from the article, the intentions of the beavers aligned with the intentions of people. Yet that is not to say that the requirements are the same. Even if you ignore things like environmental assessments and safety (both during construction and during its lifespan), neither of which are codified by beavers, you still have things like maintenance. Beavers will only maintain a dam for as long as it serves a purpose to them. Once it does not, it is left to decay. Human society just doesn't live like that anymore. There are both short term and long term costs to consider. That wasteful government will likely mitigate some of those costs.
- nrfulton 2y agoMy take-away from this story is almost the opposite of yours. Nature provides a lot of valuable resources, and this story is a beautiful example of how failing to properly steward our natural environment can be extremely expensive. > Instead, they were planning it, fighting bureocracy and wasting money for years. I do not know anything about CZ or about this project, but jumping to "waste" seems excessively pessimistic. It could just be that the agency's budget is finite and this project is low priority in the organization's capital projects prioritization. Just because they first planned this project 7 years ago doesn't mean they have been actively working on it continuously for the last 7 years... This is common even in tiny economic units. E.g., I planned out our family's new furnace setup a couple of years ago, but probably won't actually allocate capital to that upgrade for another few years. In the meantime, I promise I am not spending all day every day thinking about our furnace. Just because a project takes 7 years from start of planning to finished project doesn't mean that there were 7 years of work there :) > If the beavers built it in two days, it means that half a dozen men could have easily built it at an extremely low cost in a week. That really depends on what you mean by "it". I got to watch a beaver dam go up recently. Not the active work, but regular snapshots of the build site, as it were. I will use that as a case study. If the goal here is to literally build a beaver dam, then probably you're correct. The dam I saw go up is small and built out of pretty small trees. Maybe 3-5 inch diameter. Softer wood. I think a small group of humans with very cheap tools could make quick cheap work of felling and moving the trees. As for the dam itself, they'd figure something out. But I am skeptical that most teams would be able to build a like-quality dam out of felled trees and found materials. Beavers are dam good at what they do. More importantly, though, building a more typical modern human dam in that same location would not be cheap or fast. You would easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cutting and blasting a path before you could even get concrete to the worksite. There's no way the entire project would be done in a week. It definitely wouldn't be low cost no matter the schedule. Getting it done in a few weeks would be... probably possible, but a logistical tour de force and astronomically expensive. This is all just talking about the actual work, ignoring government permitting entirely.
- caseyy 2y agoIt’s true that our governments are quite inefficient. Large cities were built from scratch in China in fewer than 7 years.
- david_allison 2y agoAny reliable sources on this?
- kseistrup 2y agoThere's a Czech source that some seems to refer to: https://english.radio.cz/beavers-build-planned-dams-protected-landscape-area-while-local-officials-still-8841536 https://english.radio.cz/beavers-build-planned-dams-protecte...
- mystified5016 2y agoThis is a much better article, thanks!
- teekert 2y agoI suddenly found myself to be a consultant, part of the assignment was to construct a governance model. I found it such a vague unsticky term that I developed the mantra: “Governance: How decisions are being made”. And it opened my eyes because in so many places there is no process for how decisions are being made, and they are just not being made. Yeah I know, but I’m just a molecular biologist, it’s easy to see how a bacterium decides to move up a food gradient. But Humans… oh boy.
- Galatians4_16 2y agoEnabling people to make individual decisions, ensures the soundest decisions to be made in aggregate. (1) This is not unlike the spontaneous order occuring in all natural systems. This process can be subverted, but only to great detriment of the whole. 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNQ3GccCAI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNQ3GccCAI0
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- teekert 2y agoAs a biologist I really like the idea and feel it to be true. I'd say it is even a guiding principle in my life. But most people don't like it as it is very Ayn Rand/Margaret Thatcher-ish: "There is no such thing as society!", "Society is made up of individuals exercising their rational self-interest."
- Galatians4_16 2y agoI think the original purpose of g̶o̶v̶e̶r̶n̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ *parliament was to discuss problems thoroughly (3) before deciding what to do. Sadly this process is subverted by party tribalism and bills written in advance by lobbyists. 3) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-on-proposing-solutions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-o... (edited, happy?)
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- dyauspitr 2y agoIs there a way to direct or coax beavers into building exactly where you want?
- pavel_lishin 2y agoSort of! Beavers build dams as an instinctive response to the sound of running water. If you have pet beavers in your house, and down put a phone playing the sound of running water, they'll start dragging stuff over to where the phone is.
- teruakohatu 2y agoHow common are beavers as indoor pets ?
- thatguy0900 2y agoIn the US at least I don't think it's legal anywhere without a permit. I've seen videos like op has posted, it's usually rescue animals being looked after not actual housepets
- frugalmail 2y agoNever going to be common if their fate is to be like Peanut the Squirrel or Fred the Raccoon out of NY.
- basementcat 2y agoRelevant video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-ImdlZtOU80 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-ImdlZtOU80
- HappMacDonald 2y agoAdorable critter with strong opinions on the arrangement of blankets and stuffies in a hallway. Side-recommended videos also lead me to Ze Frank's "True facts about Beavers" which is always a hoot. :)
- anotherhue 2y agoAre these undocumented beavers?
- karaterobot 2y agoYeah, but the beavers didn't do environmental impact studies, and don't care about safety. They also made a temporary dam, and have no legal liability if it breaks apart. People could pile logs together in two days if that's all they had to do, but if you believe in environmental and safety regulations, the consequence is that it adds cost and takes longer to build stuff.
- ggm 2y agoThe dam you get for $1m is also a temporary, or very small dam. Real construction costs for a permanent structure at scale exceed this by one or two orders of magnitude. If the dam required was a $1m dam, then getting beavers to make it is an entirely sensible decision or outcome, even if not decided.
- karaterobot 2y agoThat's another thing: nobody got the beavers to make this dam, they just happened to do it coincidentally. You might as well say that waiting for a landslide to block the river is better than hiring human engineers and builders. In most cases, a landslide is not going to come along at just the right spot, but if does, you can say "see? we saved money"
- ggm 2y agoYes, but also .. kinda-no. Rewilding is a thing. You get to put beavers to work inside a specified area. Exactly where, thats on them. Which is a bit of a bummer for planning and risk assessment but you go for net-upside overall, and the specific farmer rage bait outcome settles with some of the $1m you saved. I have concerns with the economics behind rewilding, and green upside monetising. A lot of carbon credits monetize things which were going to happen anyway, and don't reflect real re-wilding or carbon sink activity. Like, if you had been clearing land for decades, and left it alone, you get to claim amazing carbon sink benefits from the wood which grows, even on the land you never intended trying to make productive. Somehow, that feels wrong. Beavers are also cost avoidance on other people than the land holder. Overground water flows generally don't stop at the farm boundary. Somebody 100km away doesn't get flooded, and its a benefit, but to them, or their insurer, or their town council, or .. who exactly isn't clear. "I didn't have to remediate all this flood damage" has undefined, but treated as uncountable/low dollar value where 'I did spend $200m remediating' has very clear value. (I want to say negative but there's bad economics coming back in. A giant flood potlach is jobs, and spend, and boosts the rural economy. Albiet at the expense of somewhere else not getting that spend. Money is wierd. we need more wars! they're good for the economy.. kinda)
- black_puppydog 2y agoUndocumented beavers destroy $1M of GDP doing construction without permit.
- ggm 2y agoWant to laugh, but this is classic bad economics take. SMBC-Comics could do this one. The $1m can be spent fixing potholes. Massive waste of time, but if the next $1m is used to make potholes, a self-sustaining cycle of making and filling potholes can boost the local economy for just a small dribble of $1m per year input, to the alternating cycle.
- HideousKojima 2y agoAnd they create hundreds of jobs in the process!
- tantalor 2y agoAKA broken window fallacy
- frugalmail 2y agoWhat animals can we use to fill potholes?
- Terretta 2y agoActively or passively?
- moi2388 2y agoMoles, obviously. They make heaps, precisely filling the potholes, but they do this by tunnelling, weakening the ground and over time creating more potholes. It’s a prime example of a circular economy and sustainability
- defrost 2y agoLoch Ness Monster is a good one; see: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/24/pictures-potholes-art-uk-road-safety-toys/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/24/pictures-pothole...
- quanto 2y agoThe real surprise is that the quoted budget was only $1.2m. Fixing potholes in my neighborhood is quoted more than that.
- darth_avocado 2y agoSan Francisco and Czech Republic budgets are hard to compare 1:1 without accounting for PPP.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoIt's quite cheap to buy beavers.
- Iwan-Zotow 2y agoCiting Naked Gun: Nice Beaver!
- zugi 2y ago> The reason they build dams is to create deep water that gives them protection from predators. How do they know the reasons beavers build dams? Did these reporters fact-check this by asking the beavers?
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoThey wanted an outdoor pool but didn't want to pay contractors
- ncallaway 2y agoBecause we can make a reasonable inference based on the consequences of their actions
- whatshisface 2y agoBeavers build dams to corner the stick and bark supply while driving up the price.
- FloorEgg 2y agoThis is what I think every time I see a headline claiming a company stock, or the market as a whole, went up or down because of a single reason. Did the people writing the article ask all the people who bought or sold, or decided not to buy or sell, the stock(s)? Of course not. Correlation does not mean causation. Naked beaver logic.
- tantalor 2y agoThe reason beavers build dams is because that's what beavers do.
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- Qwertious 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- stainablesteel 2y agointer species competition is really ramping up, I wonder if the Europeans will continue to survive this century
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- xeonmc 2y agoand even more quickly fall apart
- westurner 2y agoAccording to "Leave It to Beavers" (2018) PBS Nature [53m], beavers are attracted to the sound of running water played back from a cassette tape. [1] [1] https://g.co/kgs/5yA9R5 https://g.co/kgs/5yA9R5
- culi 2y agoEstimated beaver populations was around 200 million before "beaver hats" became a craze of Europeans that led to populations being hunted down to less than 10 million. We have no idea how radically different the landscape actually was when beavers roamed. Now that we're finally allowing numbers to rebound we're realizing how much of our infrastructure is built around the assumption of a beaver-less landscape
- brailsafe 2y ago> realizing how much of our infrastructure is built around the assumption of a beaver-less landscape That goes for both kinds of beavers. Europe is often a bit better, but access to public toilets in Canada where they went to feed their hat frenzy, is appalling; those without beavs can deal with it a little easier, but more toilets would still be helpful.
- throweep 2y agoYou can always count on Europeans to do what they are best at
- acomjean 2y agoMy brothers house is near a stream. Beavers showed up about 10 years ago. The change wasn’t bad and pretty minor, but it did change things. He did protect some of his trees. They’re pretty voracious. The town made him move the “hobit hole” shed he got his daughters but the Beavers get free rein. (As did the golf club in the back, but that’s another story)
- soco 2y agoThey only time I've seen a beaver hat was in old times comics with Davy Crockett (fun times)... when was that European fashion craze?
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoAccording to the Wikipedia article, 1550-1850.
- FiatLuxDave 2y ago
- bewestphal 2y agoBeavers get it. You can just do things.
- brailsafe 2y agoIt's a slippery slope, considering that they're also known for building houses without getting shadow assessments done, going through years of permitting approvals, or ensuring it matches the character of the neighborhood. Criminals.
- loganc2342 2y agoAnd do you know how much traffic those houses will cause?!
- brailsafe 2y agoWhat about the parking!? My human rights!!
- moi2388 2y agoGiven that they were busy beavers, I’m surprised they finished so quickly
- ambyra 2y agoI love beavers!! They don’t just build the dams, but the also change the rivers into special types of ponds that their favorite food grows in (green leafy shoots). So they don’t just build a house but also a farm! So cool!!!
- stevefan1999 2y agoHow busy are those beavers such that they can build a dam in 2 days?