On beavers, interventions and making change for the descendants to come
For much of this walk, I am going to be sharing things as audio files rather than written posts. I am currently sitting in a kitchen in Bowdoin, Maine with a friend who is away for the day and left me the use of her computer. This piece has been whispering to me over the last chunk of days so I am beyond happy to have a chance to do the kind of thinking that my keyboard fingers enjoy.
When our daughter was small, my partner and I decided that we would organize family media time by watching nature documentaries. When we watched something together, we wanted to watch something that all of us enjoyed. One of our family favorites was a half hour movie about beavers called, well, Beavers: The Biggest Dam Movie You Ever Saw. So, so good. The movie has everything including a moment when beaver romance happens; the lights dim and you hear the slap grunt of beavers getting it on.
While we were obsessed by this movie, we talked alot about how beavers shifted ecosystems. On walks in the woods, we assessed the streams we passed, imagining where beaver might want to build a dam. We talked about how a dam turns a stream into a pond and then new species like frogs and salamanders show up. How, we wondered together, did the frogs and the salamanders know that there was now a new pond on the side of the oak trees? We talked about what happens when the beavers die or their children move to other places and then the dam breaks down and the pond seeps back into the soil, leaving a meadow behind.
According to western ecological frameworks, beavers are a keystone species. A keystone species is one whose living makes it possible for all kinds of other species to also settle; an ecosystem expander. So because of the beaver, the frogs and salamanders and cattails and water lilies and skittery bugs all have another place to go… and then when the pond is reabsorbed, there is space for spiders and snakes and bee balm and sunflowers. Humans are definitely NOT keystone species. We evolved too recently, the last in the web of relationships. And sadly, human-centering usually leads to the destruction rather than the support of other species and kin.
Our kin the beaver build dams that control water flow and improve water quality, create habitats for both water-based life and non-forested land kin. And their actions create wetlands which are key to mitigating forest fires. They do this because this is how they express their aliveness. This is what they have learned.
While I’ve been walking, sometimes the phrase “keystone as opposed to conquering species” repeats on a loop in my mind. Walking along Route 1 means walking alongside barreling cars and trucks, where even the most beautiful areas are riddled with plastic and rainbow oil skims on standing water. As I walk, I keep thinking: how do you ensure that an intervention, like a beaver does when kin builds a dam, is something that supports those who come next rather than messing up the future for those not yet born?
An intervention literally means “to come between.” I write more about this in At the Fork in the Road because I’ve been a obsessed with the concept for a while now. It’s one of the central points of our work at the Healing Histories Project, supporting folks doing different kinds of care work to think about how they intervene on harmful systems of care.
Intervening, or coming between something that is potentially or actively harmful, is a practice. It is a practice that depends deeply on discernment. After all, perceiving something as harmful and something actually being harmful are two different things. I think about this as I send care to beloveds who are currently on the Freedom Flotilla bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza or students I know who are part of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University. These are moments of concrete interventions on concrete violence with concrete goals. There are thousands of examples where active violence is taking place and the intervention is focused on ending that violence in clear and concrete ways.
When a beaver chooses where to build its dam, kin is looking for all kinds of things including the presence of young saplings for food, trees able to be turned into building materials, and a shape of stream and stream bed that allows for building a dam deep enough that a pond will emerge behind. There are many other variables and vectors that the beaver senses and knows and that I am not able to perceive, let alone comprehend. Beaver learned from those before, building generational instinct that guides action. I don’t know how beavers perceive choice, although I know that they do.
Listening to how beaver intervenes on a stream’s path for its own purpose means understanding a chosen personal intervention that then creates the conditions for a wider transformation. I can’t stop thinking about that sentence - personal intervention, creating conditions for something wider.
Beaver is older than we are. The oldest known skeleton was found in Germany and dated 10 to 12 million years ago, at least three to five million years before our two legged selves began to emerge. I recently read that remains of the now extinct “giant beaver,” a beaver the size of a Black Bear, were found in the mid-1800s a few blocks from where my family lives in Minneapolis. I know that there are Ojibwe stories of this giant beaver, tales and descriptions from memories older than its disappearance about 10,000 years ago. All of these are parts of the beaver’s memories, part of what has created kin’s capacity to waddle along a stream and pause and say, here. Here is where I build my dam.
I got to spend some time on this trip already talking with folks involved with the Public History Project. They are doing all kinds of things but one project they are focused on is the telling of the last 20,000 years of the Hudson Bay. That doesn’t even begin to describe the amazing work they are doing and the book that will - hopefully - be released sometime in 2024 or 2025. I got to see some of the visuals they are creating for the book and to get a sense of the storytelling they are doing and I sat there, literally weeping. Here is, as all histories are, a telling of the long life of this river-to-ocean relationship including the more recent histories of colonization, enslavement and industrial development. As part of this telling, they talk about beavers. This means they talk about the fur trade and the use of rivers as a means of extraction and the slow destruction of the beaver, this kin-genocide, where the community went from 60 to 400 million precontact to 10 to 15 million now.
According to Western ecology, when two species come together, they tend to interact either as predators or competitors or through mutuality or symbiosis. All kinds of ecologists talk about it in different ways but it all seems to mean: find a way to live together or don’t. This includes the keystone species - the beaver, wolf, sea otter and bees, sunflowers and pin oak and milkweed. It includes predators and it includes the spread of moss.
So, here is one of the questions that I am listening to again and again as I walk. What is it to intervene as beaver does? To intervene as an expression of aliveness that also creates the conditions for those who are to come? To intervene not as a form of conquest but as a form of care, even when sometimes the intervention demands closing down a highway or coming up to someone and saying stop? What is it to live in this way, where sometimes the intervention, the coming between is about your own thoughts and sometimes it is about intervening on unnecessary actions?
I barely understand what I am writing. I am one week in and I am embarrassed by how much my desire to control, well, EVERYTHING is scrabbling for brain and muscle time. I am skin-crawling and itchy about how hard it is to trust, to let go, and to just be awake to what is alive in any given moment. Control. Fix. Plan. My skin radar is cranked up high and I keep looking left and right for someone else to take care of things. This, I notice, is what evolves after generations of creating interventions focused just on the safety and comfort of the person doing the intervention. Of attempting to control the environment in order to have more or to lock down the fence around a parcel of land rather than letting your body just be one body among many kin.
As Kerry Hardy was taking me through some of the histories that center around the mouth of the Hudson, he reflected on how native villages often set up right before the freshwater of a river met the salt water from the ocean. These were places where lots of kin gathered and where the fish that spawned upriver gathered in huge communities. These systems had, of course, been managed and loved for centuries but then, he said, the European settlers came in and built their towns on top of the indigenous villages and then put a dam on the river in order to set up a mill or because they believed a fish pond would increase their food. And the ecosystem was destroyed and the settlers moved further upstream or overtook other villages in the same way.
Dams have been a big part of colonization in the United States. Over time, much larger dams were built to reroute rivers and streams from one area to another, to stockpile water for one community, and to create electric power for, well, more industry and labor. These dams do the opposite of what the beaver does: they cause ecosystems to decrease in complexity, the water quality to go down so that algae blooms are common, and there is a buildup of sediment that impacts the breeding grounds of fish and other kin.
No, humans are not a keystone species. Not this kind of human, at least.
Before I began this walk, I spent a morning at the Penobscot River in Old Town. There, across from land the Penobscot Nation has lived on for centuries pre-contact, the river is getting free again. The dams built on the river for hydroelectric power have been taken down with 2,000 miles of river opened up to the ocean. The shad and salmon are running again and when you visit that river, you can feel how awake it is.
What is it to intervene as beaver does, I will ask again and again. To intervene as an expression of aliveness that also creates the conditions for those who are to come. To intervene not as a form of conquest but as a form of care.
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I wrote a book-of-sorts about this walk. It’s one of the ways I am raising money for my steps, but it is also available for free. Called, At the Fork in the Road, it’s a reflection of what has gone into this walk - the answer to that question: why are you walking? You can get it here.