8 ms·

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

repeekad 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d ago
      [deleted]
    - rylando 13d ago
      Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
  - messe 13d ago
    Good? They don't own the commons.
  - nkrisc 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d ago
        environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
  - AngryData 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d ago
  Busy beaver problem?
- xandrius 13d ago
  Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
  - throwway120385 13d ago
    That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
    - dguest 13d ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
- arthurbrown 13d ago
  What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?
cucumber3732842 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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_ 13d ago
this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
destitude 13d 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 13d 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.

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 13d 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 13d 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 13d ago
    [deleted]
  - rylando 13d ago
    Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
- messe 13d ago
  Good? They don't own the commons.
- nkrisc 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d ago
      environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
- AngryData 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d ago
Busy beaver problem?
xandrius 13d ago
Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
- throwway120385 13d ago
  That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
  - dguest 13d ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
arthurbrown 13d ago
What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?

cucumber3732842 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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_ 13d ago

this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers

destitude 13d 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 13d 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.