Beavers are known by many names – keystone species, eco-artists, architects, Castor canadensis, furbearers, pests. They are paramount allies in the effort to bolster resilience within ecosystems in the face of the ongoing Climate Crisis, and their creative engineering of dams, ponds, rivers, estuaries, and lakes provide some of the most being-friendly and biologically productive spaces in North America.
Once decimated by colonizers and the European fur trade of the 1800s onwards, beaver families were able to slightly recover to an estimated 6-12 million individuals, which equates to 3-10% of their pre-colonized population. These numbers, last surveyed in 1988, have legally placed the Beaver community as one of ‘least concern’; their population continues to be treated as one that is stable, despite their tremendous and continuous mass-murder allowed, encouraged, and enacted by the United States Forest Service, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and local agencies such as the British Columbia Fish and Wildlife Branch and the Oregon and Washington Fish and Wildlife agencies.
Living as a flyer, a QR code campaign, and a website, you are asked to engage with these resources and download, print, and paste the flyers to lead others to this movement as well. Think of places where those who may be unaware of the issue surrounding conservation and Beavers who would be willing to learn and participate may frequent; on park or trail signs, in town centers, gathering spaces, and any surface asking to hold a flier. My only instruction is do not infringe upon the spaces dedicated to Black Lives Matter, such as downtown Portland. Those spaces are for the BLM movement to thrive, gather, and utilize according to the BLM community leaders. We must leave those spaces for BIPOC lead movements to flourish.
This work serves as a starting point for the shift of our relationship with Beavers in both the effort to mitigate mass extinction and loss due to the Climate Crisis, and in our lives as humans trying to re-remember that we are collaborators with the beings on this earth.