4 ms·

Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?

by josefresco 23d ago

cornstalks 23d ago
TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it: > But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
- repeekad 23d ago
  Which they never will on their own, so surely conservation regulations need to be enforced, too bad the US is moving backwards right now in that regard
  - stouset 23d ago
    Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
    - mulmen 23d ago
      Ignoring externalities remains popular. We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
      - deleted 23d ago
        [deleted]
      - rylando 23d ago
        Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
    - messe 23d ago
      Good? They don't own the commons.
    - nkrisc 23d ago
      The alternative is we drive ourselves ever closer to the brink. It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival. The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
    - fodkodrasz 23d ago
      The modern phrasing of "improve" and "develop" for destroy is pretty upsetting to me. My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
      - cucumber3732842 23d ago
        Everything you do to waste land area by "lightly" touching it further increases sprawl because it increases the land required to do things. Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings. Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
        oatmeal1 23d ago
        High density development leaving as much pristine nature as possible is vastly superior to sprawl for the environment, but the comment you replied to didn't seem to describe a density issue.
        cucumber3732842 23d ago
        Regardless we'd do a lot more pinprick development and develop fewer acres and there'd be less pressure to do greenfield development if not for the rules adopted at the behest of half baked 20th century environmentalism.
        thunderfork 23d ago
        environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
    - AngryData 23d ago
      If you don't want to deal with swampy land full of beavers, don't buy swampy land full of beavers. They should of done a better job purchasing land.
      - stouset 23d ago
        This is the opposite of a useful perspective. Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities. Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further. What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
        AngryData 23d ago
        You act like it is impossible to use land that beavers live on without destroying the beaver dams or removing the beavers, and yet there are plenty of people that do that very thing their entire lives without a problem. I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back. Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem. Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
- cmrdporcupine 23d ago
  Beavers can be incredibly difficult to live alongside of. My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another. Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick). Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours. They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
  - cogogo 23d ago
    Busy beaver problem?
  - xandrius 23d ago
    Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
    - throwway120385 23d ago
      That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
      - dguest 22d ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
  - arthurbrown 23d ago
    What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?
- cucumber3732842 23d ago
  Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability. Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
  - devilbunny 23d ago
    His freeform, not-too-serious libertarianism can easily be mocked, but PJ O’Rourke did have a very good point about well-intentioned but counterproductive environmental legislation like the laws governing wetlands: imagine that, should an Old Master painting be discovered on your property, you were required immediately to cease all other use of the property and protect that Old Master painting against damage or theft, under penalty of law, but without any compensation for the expenses this might incur. You can imagine that any new ones found would simply be burned immediately, not protected. And wetlands laws work a bit like that.
    - cucumber3732842 22d ago
      Regardless of specific political ideology it only takes a room temperature IQ to realize that copy pasting the concept of Royal Forests from Norman England to today is probably gonna cause all the same perverse incentives and hardship and stunt wealth accumulation/progress in the affected areas and so on. What did we spend the last few decades of the 20th century doing? Basically that. The other real fucked up thing is that most of it is state/local implementations of federal rules but that's insane because California has a completely different relationship with swamps and water than the Carolinas. The worst of it will probably get unwound when the courts adopt a "no you idiots, a fractional taking is still a taking pay the F up" doctrine but that might be a century from now. There's sooooo much money tied up in it though.
  - destitude 22d ago
    That's a an oversimplification since beavers don't obviously adhere to property boundaries and the areas that are good for beavers are more then likely to have originally been flooded to begin with before the beavers were killed off.
- evan_ 23d ago
  this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
- destitude 22d ago
  I actively allow beavers to exist. They have two dams on my property.. Previous owners a long time ago actively exterminated them. The county also actively exterminates them instead of simply putting in simple flood/beaver control devices where necessary.
  - dguest 22d ago
    As a pre-teen I had my first encounter with the law when they figured out that I was triggering the town traps to save the beavers. My parents had to haul me down to the station so the police chief could lecture me on vandalizing town property. We had a beautiful set of beaver ponds, but the town won. Now it's just underbrush with a stream running through it. I'll never forget though: don't let your laws get in the way of doing the right thing.
petcat 23d ago
The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.
- lbriner 22d ago
  It is not so much the eco-system, it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check. We like deer but without wolves or large cats, the deer become a pest but we don't like wolves and large cats because we are all taught as children that they are scary and dangerous - although more children die from car accidents and stabbings than wild animals so whatever! So natural predators for small rodents keep their numbers in check but that will be a long time because "won't somebody think of the children"..."and the farmers"
  - bcjdjsndon 22d ago
    > it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check The error you make is that there is only one, global ecosystem, and it sorts itself out. We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals and eventually space travel so just chill... We dont need to do a thing
    - lukas099 22d ago
      > We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals Great, biodiversity will be restored in 100 million years, just in time for my great-great-great-great......grandchildren to enjoy.
      - bcjdjsndon 18d ago
        Lol you wouldn't be here without it though. > biodiversity will be restored Restored? What are the appropriate levels of "diversity"? Some facts humans cannot handle: - lifeforms suffer unimaginable agony every single day. - life is finite - humans are not beyond the natural order, human made global warming is natural, it won't end the planet or even us. - humans think because suffering makes them sad, suffering must be the bad. (Apart from when we don't like the other person or they've transgressed us in some way, were ethically clear to mete out violence)
pvaldes 23d ago
> Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers? My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.
- bcjdjsndon 22d ago
  The latter. You are basically English, and look at us... Not a single wild predator larger than a rat. No bears, wolves, wild dogs, wild cats, not even snakes or spiders or hornets cos we killed them all. I'm just not sure it's possible cos America is so vast and has land borders
jillesvangurp 22d ago
They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry. But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.
- imp0cat 22d ago
  Give it a few more dry years and Europeans will learn to love their beavers, again.
- seobotaicom 22d ago
  Wouldn’t reintroducing beavers be cheaper in the long run if the main problem is maintaining the artificial dams?
pvaldes 22d ago
We need a professional approach there, able to see the whole picture. Amateurism can be really expensive. Sometimes beavers are a big mistake. Hazelnuts and willows can be chopped to the ground and just will return stronger and more dense. Poplars will regrow from the roots at some distance. Argentinian trees they will vanish instead. This happens because temperate South American forests never evolved with beavers. On this places they may done more harm than good.
- lukas099 22d ago
  I would've thought it was obvious we shouldn't introduce beavers to South America if they aren't native there.
  - pvaldes 22d ago
    So obvious, but Argentinian government didn't see it coming. Thousands millions of dollars in damages caused by amateurs with power in Argentinian government. Another example: Beavers are native from Sweden, but beavers on Sweden should be removed.

Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?

cornstalks 23d ago

TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it: > But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.

repeekad 23d ago
Which they never will on their own, so surely conservation regulations need to be enforced, too bad the US is moving backwards right now in that regard
- stouset 23d ago
  Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
  - mulmen 23d ago
    Ignoring externalities remains popular. We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
    - deleted 23d ago
      [deleted]
    - rylando 23d ago
      Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
  - messe 23d ago
    Good? They don't own the commons.
  - nkrisc 23d ago
    The alternative is we drive ourselves ever closer to the brink. It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival. The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
  - fodkodrasz 23d ago
    The modern phrasing of "improve" and "develop" for destroy is pretty upsetting to me. My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
    - cucumber3732842 23d ago
      Everything you do to waste land area by "lightly" touching it further increases sprawl because it increases the land required to do things. Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings. Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
      - oatmeal1 23d ago
        High density development leaving as much pristine nature as possible is vastly superior to sprawl for the environment, but the comment you replied to didn't seem to describe a density issue.
        cucumber3732842 23d ago
        Regardless we'd do a lot more pinprick development and develop fewer acres and there'd be less pressure to do greenfield development if not for the rules adopted at the behest of half baked 20th century environmentalism.
      - thunderfork 23d ago
        environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
  - AngryData 23d ago
    If you don't want to deal with swampy land full of beavers, don't buy swampy land full of beavers. They should of done a better job purchasing land.
    - stouset 23d ago
      This is the opposite of a useful perspective. Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities. Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further. What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
      - AngryData 23d ago
        You act like it is impossible to use land that beavers live on without destroying the beaver dams or removing the beavers, and yet there are plenty of people that do that very thing their entire lives without a problem. I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back. Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem. Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
cmrdporcupine 23d ago
Beavers can be incredibly difficult to live alongside of. My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another. Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick). Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours. They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
- cogogo 23d ago
  Busy beaver problem?
- xandrius 23d ago
  Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
  - throwway120385 23d ago
    That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
    - dguest 22d ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
- arthurbrown 23d ago
  What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?
cucumber3732842 23d ago
Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability. Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
- devilbunny 23d ago
  His freeform, not-too-serious libertarianism can easily be mocked, but PJ O’Rourke did have a very good point about well-intentioned but counterproductive environmental legislation like the laws governing wetlands: imagine that, should an Old Master painting be discovered on your property, you were required immediately to cease all other use of the property and protect that Old Master painting against damage or theft, under penalty of law, but without any compensation for the expenses this might incur. You can imagine that any new ones found would simply be burned immediately, not protected. And wetlands laws work a bit like that.
  - cucumber3732842 22d ago
    Regardless of specific political ideology it only takes a room temperature IQ to realize that copy pasting the concept of Royal Forests from Norman England to today is probably gonna cause all the same perverse incentives and hardship and stunt wealth accumulation/progress in the affected areas and so on. What did we spend the last few decades of the 20th century doing? Basically that. The other real fucked up thing is that most of it is state/local implementations of federal rules but that's insane because California has a completely different relationship with swamps and water than the Carolinas. The worst of it will probably get unwound when the courts adopt a "no you idiots, a fractional taking is still a taking pay the F up" doctrine but that might be a century from now. There's sooooo much money tied up in it though.
- destitude 22d ago
  That's a an oversimplification since beavers don't obviously adhere to property boundaries and the areas that are good for beavers are more then likely to have originally been flooded to begin with before the beavers were killed off.
evan_ 23d ago
this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
destitude 22d ago
I actively allow beavers to exist. They have two dams on my property.. Previous owners a long time ago actively exterminated them. The county also actively exterminates them instead of simply putting in simple flood/beaver control devices where necessary.
- dguest 22d ago
  As a pre-teen I had my first encounter with the law when they figured out that I was triggering the town traps to save the beavers. My parents had to haul me down to the station so the police chief could lecture me on vandalizing town property. We had a beautiful set of beaver ponds, but the town won. Now it's just underbrush with a stream running through it. I'll never forget though: don't let your laws get in the way of doing the right thing.

petcat 23d ago

The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.

lbriner 22d ago
It is not so much the eco-system, it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check. We like deer but without wolves or large cats, the deer become a pest but we don't like wolves and large cats because we are all taught as children that they are scary and dangerous - although more children die from car accidents and stabbings than wild animals so whatever! So natural predators for small rodents keep their numbers in check but that will be a long time because "won't somebody think of the children"..."and the farmers"
- bcjdjsndon 22d ago
  > it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check The error you make is that there is only one, global ecosystem, and it sorts itself out. We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals and eventually space travel so just chill... We dont need to do a thing
  - lukas099 22d ago
    > We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals Great, biodiversity will be restored in 100 million years, just in time for my great-great-great-great......grandchildren to enjoy.
    - bcjdjsndon 18d ago
      Lol you wouldn't be here without it though. > biodiversity will be restored Restored? What are the appropriate levels of "diversity"? Some facts humans cannot handle: - lifeforms suffer unimaginable agony every single day. - life is finite - humans are not beyond the natural order, human made global warming is natural, it won't end the planet or even us. - humans think because suffering makes them sad, suffering must be the bad. (Apart from when we don't like the other person or they've transgressed us in some way, were ethically clear to mete out violence)

pvaldes 23d ago

> Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers? My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.

bcjdjsndon 22d ago
The latter. You are basically English, and look at us... Not a single wild predator larger than a rat. No bears, wolves, wild dogs, wild cats, not even snakes or spiders or hornets cos we killed them all. I'm just not sure it's possible cos America is so vast and has land borders

jillesvangurp 22d ago

They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry. But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.

imp0cat 22d ago
Give it a few more dry years and Europeans will learn to love their beavers, again.
seobotaicom 22d ago
Wouldn’t reintroducing beavers be cheaper in the long run if the main problem is maintaining the artificial dams?

pvaldes 22d ago

We need a professional approach there, able to see the whole picture. Amateurism can be really expensive. Sometimes beavers are a big mistake. Hazelnuts and willows can be chopped to the ground and just will return stronger and more dense. Poplars will regrow from the roots at some distance. Argentinian trees they will vanish instead. This happens because temperate South American forests never evolved with beavers. On this places they may done more harm than good.

lukas099 22d ago
I would've thought it was obvious we shouldn't introduce beavers to South America if they aren't native there.
- pvaldes 22d ago
  So obvious, but Argentinian government didn't see it coming. Thousands millions of dollars in damages caused by amateurs with power in Argentinian government. Another example: Beavers are native from Sweden, but beavers on Sweden should be removed.