I have been thinking a lot lately about something Ben Goldfarb writes about in Eager. There are two different measures of how many beavers can exist. There is biological carrying capacity, which is the number of animals a given habitat can sustain. Then there is cultural carrying capacity, which is how many beavers humans can tolerate.
It seems that our community has a very low cultural carrying capacity, right? We saw that with our Glenview beavers--they cut down some trees and the HOA responded by planning to trap and kill them instead of wrapping the trees with wire.
The only thing that is going to solve this problem is by launching a public awareness campaign so that people come to understand the immense benefits that beavers bring to our ecosystems, and also know about the ways to effectively remediate flooding problems and tree cutting problems that beavers can cause.
It is no exaggeration to say that creating more wetlands and allowing more beavers to live in our lakes, rivers, and streams would help us solve the climate crisis. So we need to continue to educate the public and our state and local leaders.