When beavers go extinct

A single squirrel can plant north of 10,000 acorns every year. Roughly 30% of those acorns are never recovered and lead to the stands of oak, chestnut, and beech forests we see today.

In today's newsletter:

• 🔥 The Big Idea: What happens when beavers go (nearly) extinct?

• 🌱 Heirloom seeds for your garden

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☠ What happens when beavers go (nearly) extinct?

I was six or seven years old, sitting at my tiny elementary school desk and struggling to keep my attention fixed on the projector as my teacher droned on about some random biology concept.

I heard my teacher say, "Great White Shark" through the thick cloud of my preoccupied thoughts. My mind came back into the real world, hoping she would uncover the secret to vanquishing my greatest fear.

Instead, the next words she uttered were "Keystone Species". Definitely not vanquishing material, but I was no longer drifting off.

For reasons I couldn't understand as a 7-year-old, researchers considered the Great White a critical contributor to Earth's oceans.

From sharks, my teacher went to elephants, rhinos, and otters — all keystone species in their own regard. Finally, she settled on the last slide, titled "Ecosystem Engineer". The definition went something like this: "Ecosystem engineers significantly modify their environment to create new habitats for a much larger number of species to survive."

Below the title and definition was a picture of the least cool animal in North America: a rotund, buck-toothed beaver.

Besides showing me that nature's engineers look frighteningly like human engineers, that lesson planted the seeds for a more powerful realization in my twenties:

We have an instruction manual telling us exactly how to produce food, capture water, and recycle surplus while enabling more than one species to survive.

We don't have to look far for that instruction manual, because it's all around us. Biomimicry, or modeling systems off of naturally occurring processes, tells us all we need to know if we're willing to pay attention.

The beaver is the perfect vehicle for a conversation on biomimicry. But first, North America's biggest rodent deserves a similarly large apology.

The Hunt for Hats

If beavers were capable of revolution, they would have fought the English long before our American founders. Fortunately for the colonizers, the beaver's best weapon is its gargantuan incisors, not a rifle.

The beaver's story in America begins before Europeans arrived in the New World. Beaver pelts were present for everything from Viking raids to the advent of Kings and Queens.

But in the 16th century, Great Britain burned through its once-plentiful population of beavers. The country trapped the animal into total extinction. Into the 17th century, the rest of Europe followed suit. Fashion trends across the continent drove the rodent's populations down to the hundreds.

When England's King Charles assumed his reign in the 1600s, the beaver top hat became a status symbol. Hats indicated professions, wealth, and social rank. High-quality beaver hats were the pinnacle. But there weren't any beavers left.

As demand dried Europe of its cherished rodent fur, voyagers to the New World returned with the promise of a new source: The North American beaver. Thus, the North American fur trade was born. Native Americans trapped beavers and exchanged pelts for European imports like kettles, weapons, and iron.

The Consequences of Consumption

Many estimates suggest the North American beaver population in the early 1500s exceeded 400 million. By 1900, only 100,000 remained.

Doing some quick math, that's a decrease of 99.99975% because the French and British were keen on a certain style of headwear.

Returning to our conversation on biomimicry, we can use the beaver as an example of what happens when we don't use nature as an instruction manual.

As settlers spread west, they drained beaver ponds and started farming the carbon-rich deposits underneath. From the beginning of the fur trade to the 1900s, we decreased the United States' wetland surface area from ~10% to less than 5%. Simultaneously, we began to shrink topsoil one hundred times faster than normal.

In other words, we removed the barriers to fast-flowing water (beaver dams) and discovered the power of erosion. Our aquifers are still dealing with the repercussions. With beaver ponds, more than 50% of rainfall recharges aquifers. Without beaver ponds (and with the presence of suburban infrastructure), less than 15% of rainfall recharges aquifers.

But there's still a lot of good news here, even if it sounds a bit pessimistic. If we want to change our results, all we need to do is change our behavior.

If we want to reverse the trends we see throughout agriculture, we need to become another one of Nature's ecosystem engineers. We can say goodbye to topsoil erosion, groundwater depletion, and nutrient deficiencies.

Using biomimicry isn't complicated. It means you've decided to open your eyes a touch to see what's happening all around you. With armies of computers, domesticated livestock, and other human inventions at our fingertips, we are uniquely positioned to mimic natural systems on a large scale.

What are some examples?

On the ranch, it means:

• Before we feed a cow a combination of soy and corn, we stop to ask ourselves, "How does this animal's cousin, the Bison, get its food?" Our answer, of course, is something similar to mob grazing.

• Before we isolate chickens from our herd animals, we stop to ask, "What if we copied the birds on a savannah and let these chickens get the bugs from cow dung?" Again, our answer is healthier chickens, healthier pastures, and less money spent on feed.

On the farm, it means:

• Before we grow hundreds of acres of the same crop, we stop to ask, "Where in the world does this occur naturally? What if this was just one crop in a diverse polyculture?" In this case, we'd see that planting multiple different species together increases the yield of the entire system.

And everywhere in between, it means we remember to ask what a beaver would do.

A Simple Change of Perspective

There's a reason for each piece of Nature's puzzle, however small it may be.

Humans like to isolate components — a weed is just a bad plant, or a beaver is just a big water rodent with a fat tail. When we choose to isolate, we close our eyes to reality.

We fail to recognize that most weeds are soil's medicine, fixing bacterial imbalances so other plants can get the nitrogen they need to grow. Instead, we spray herbicide.

In the same vein, we fail to recognize that the ugly beaver is an entire ecosystem's physician. It creates ponds for fish, prevents erosion and runoff, filters toxins from freshwater, and recharges underground aquifers — that's without considering the exponential impact of all the other species it supports. Instead, we trap.

Ecosystems are not independent. They're large networks in a great balancing act.

Humans are just one node in the global biome, but we are a node that has an outsized impact. Part of our human experience on this giant floating space rock is choosing whether we want to be an ecosystem engineer or its deadliest exterminator.

See you next week, fellow Earthlings.

That's it for this week's newsletter.

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