Government planned it 7 years, beavers built a dam in 2 days and saved $1M
voxnews.al
voxnews.al
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.
It’s a prime example of a circular economy and sustainability
The good was produced.
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.
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)
The hat which was made from beaver is more familiar to most people as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_hat , which was made from beaver before the more modern silk versions became popular.
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.
Worked for Idaho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_drop
This article has a video: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/22/idaho-histor...
It's probably not worth it if you want a specific dam location though. For general water retention we already trap and relocate beavers and just let them do their thing in the new place.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsm9_032447.p... - Working with Beavers
Estimated 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. It's hard to understate how deeply landscapes in North America were shaped by beavers
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.
This process can be subverted, but only to great detriment of the whole.
Sadly this process is subverted by party tribalism and bills written in advance by lobbyists.
3) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-o...
(edited, happy?)
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)
How do they know the reasons beavers build dams? Did these reporters fact-check this by asking the beavers?
Correlation does not mean causation.
Naked beaver logic.
Obviously it's a shorthand, but the interesting thing here is that different biologists come up with different implicit reasons. To an evolutionary biologist, the reason for a behaviour is how it grants an evolutionary advantage, so to them the reason for building dams is to create deep water which provides protection from predation.
But behavioural biologists look at what triggers particular behaviours, and we actually know this one thanks to experiments: Beavers hate the sound of running water. If you set up a speaker and have it play running water sounds, beavers will pile sticks on top of it! There's no grand dam-building plan; just mindlessly placing sticks wherever the noise is coming from.
And they were more likely to die because there wasn't a body of water and pile of sticks nearby to hide and live in.
That isn't actually evidence that they don't like the sound. They might like placing sticks where they hear it.
As far as I'm aware, cats don't care at all what colour fur other cats have.
Encountering someone from far enough away that they would be part of a distinct genetic or cultural group was basically unheard of. That's not to say it didn't happen at all, there would be migrations and smaller groups would potentially travel long distances out of necessity, but it simply was not a part of normal life. The idea that a fear of different looking people provided any meaningful benefit in the past simply does not pass the sniff test.
Further, wars were almost always between regional neighbors then as well.
Some types of anti-beaver-damn measures work by eliminating the sounds and vibrations.
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.
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.
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.
Not at all.
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.
> 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.