Julie Vanderwal: Beavers, Wetlands and the Race to Save Bonaparte Meadows

What if the key to restoring our watersheds isn't a new technology — it's a beaver?

In this episode, I sit down with Julie Vanderwal, Project Manager at the Methow-Okanogan Beaver Project in Washington State, to talk about what it really takes to restore a watershed, why beavers are far more important than most of us realize, and what happens when we lose the wild places that hold everything together.

We talk about how beavers rebuild ecosystems from the ground up, what beaver dam analogs are and why we sometimes need to build fake ones, and what it actually looks like to bring them back to degraded streams.

We also get into Bonaparte Meadows — a rare calcareous fen in Okanogan County that Julie and her partners are racing to protect before a July 31 deadline. It's a place with species in need of habitat protection, thousands of years of stored carbon, and a fragile ecosystem that once lost, cannot be rebuilt.

This conversation changed the way I see the natural world. I hope it does the same for you.

🌿 Support the Bonaparte Meadows campaign: okanoganlandtrust.org
📍 Learn more about the Methow-Okanogan Beaver Project: methowbeaverproject.org

🎙️ Back to 2050 is a podcast about the people building a better world, one bold idea at a time.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We've all heard it. By 2050, there'll be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Irreversible climate tipping points. Mass extinction. But what if we could go back to 2050 and rewrite that script? What if oceans were thriving? Climate stabilizing. Wildlife rebounding. For an hour today, maybe 2050 isn't a deadline. Maybe it's the future we're actively building right now. I'm Jessica Alseed, and this is back to 2050. Spotlighting the people building the future we want to see, one bold move at a time. Ecological restoration is one of those subjects I find endlessly fascinating. And yet, the more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually understand about what it takes to fight for a place, a species, or a landscape before it's gone. Today's guest has dedicated her life to exactly that. Julie Vanderwall is the project manager at the Metto-Okanagan Beaver Project in North Central Washington state, a certified ecological restoration practitioner, native plant nursery owner, and an educator who works at the intersection of science, community, and underground action to restore degraded watersheds, and who will make you see beavers very differently by the end of this conversation. And right now, she's in the middle of an urgent fight to protect Bonaparte Meadows, a rare pristine wetland in Okanagan County, with endangered species, a fundraising deadline, and thousands of years of stored carbon at stake. I'm Jessica Alseed, and this is Back to 2050. Julie, welcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Thank you so much for having me, Jessica. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

I always start with the same question. It's 2050. What does winning look like for ecological restoration?

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Well, that's an I love that question. So winning looks like our creeks are full of beavers again. And when you go for a walk up a tributary from a main stem, so a main stem is like the big river. When you walk up one of the little creeks that feeds those rivers, you come across beaver dam after beaver dam. And in between, the water has slowed down and it has spread out and it has caused all kinds of plant life to flourish. And in amongst all those plants, you're seeing all kinds of wildlife, like different kinds of songbirds, you're seeing mammals that are finding the prey that they need, you're finding amphibians that have a place to lay their eggs and raise their young. And yeah, just this whole complex web of life that's flourishing and enough clean water for everybody.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

You've been doing this work since at least 2010. How did you end up doing conservation and mainly beaver conservation?

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Well, it's just been my my life really since I can ever remember. We I grew up on a property that was two and a half acres, but it could have been two and a half thousand acres. It felt huge as a young child, and there was a creek running through it, and there were, you know, all different kinds of native plants growing. And that was what how we spent our childhoods. My siblings and my cousins and I, we spent a huge chunk of our time just outside playing in the creek and moving the rocks around, trying to slow the flow and see if we could get the water to pool up, playing with the native plants, coming up with our own names for them, but just really learning to love the natural world and just being immersed in it. And so it was never a question of, you know, should I do conservation work? I didn't even know what conservation was, honestly, until I became an adult. It wasn't one of the careers that was pitched to us in high school when we went through our career preparation. But I knew that I wanted to help make the world a healthier place. And that to me essentially is conservation. And so it just made sense. I just wasn't sure how to go about it because the career options weren't clear. And so I looked at the option of studying forestry because that was a career that I knew about that you could do in the outdoors that had to do with native plants, trees, but it really kind of grew from there.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

You while your background is really unusual. You uh you so you you ended up studying environmental technology and child development.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah. And you've taught kids and you run a native plant nursery in your restoration in colleges. So how these how did all these pieces fit together?

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Well, I ended up studying environmental technology because the opportunity presented itself. So I had hoped to study forestry, but I wasn't able to go to the university that I was accepted to. I just didn't have the finances or the really the plan for how to go about making it happen financially. And so I went to the local community college, started taking some general education that I would need to get out of the way no matter what. And then this opportunity came up for a new program that was being offered by the British Columbia Institute of Technology. It was in the environmental engineering department and environmental technology. And so I applied for the program. And I when I learned about it, I just thought, oh my goodness, this is this is it. This is so great because it includes soil science and hydrogeology and air quality and applied ecology. These are all things I would love to learn about. And once you got accepted into this program through this pilot project, your tuition was covered. So it was perfect. It was a great entry to doing the work that I do now, even though I didn't know what that path was going to look like. So as part of my program, I needed to do an internship. And my first internship was with an environmental consulting business. And I thought that environmental consultants were all out there to help make the world a better place. And that's what I wanted to do. So I ended up working for this consulting firm that primarily wrote environmental impact statements for mining companies. And that was a real eye-opener for me because I didn't feel like the main goal was to make the world a better place. It seemed like the main goal was to do the things that were needed so that the mining company could mine. And that was pretty disillusioning for me, honestly. And I thought, what am I gonna do? Like this isn't it at all. I thought, I just want to work with people. I want to help people see the natural world through a different lens. And that would be more meaningful than sitting at a desk creating the reports that are necessary for a mining company to be able to mine. So I found out about an outdoor school in Northern California that incorporated music into every part of their program. I called the director every two weeks or so, just asking, hey, do you have any openings? I really want to work at your outdoor school. It sounds very neat. And I just kept calling until eventually there was an opening and I was hired as an intern and then eventually as a naturalist. And so that was the intersection of environmental science and education where I landed at the beginning when I was, you know, 19, 20 years old. And that that showed me that you can find places where you can be studying and learning about the natural world and inviting the community to be a part of that. How did you get into beavers? So, why do we need beavers is a really excellent starting place. Because if we're not familiar with the work that they do, they might just seem like any other wildlife species. They're just kind of out there doing their thing. But they're a keystone wildlife species. And that means that when a beaver is active in an area, it changes everything in a way that affects the whole web of life. So beavers are necessary in order for amphibians to be able to lay their eggs, they need wetlands. Beavers make wetlands in order for birds to be able to have the wetland habitat that they need. In order for streams to be healthy and be able to recharge the groundwater, we have to have slower moving water. Beavers slow the water down. So by building their dams, they create this whole plethora of benefits. And the thing is, it's not that beavers are altruists that are out there going, how can I make the world a better place? Beavers are building dams for themselves. They need dams. Why? Because they're prey, right? There's all kinds of predators that would love to eat a beaver. Cougars, bobcats, you know, all kinds of predators, wolves. And so in order to survive, they have to have water deep enough to hide under. So they build their dams, they create deep water. Now they can go underwater, and the lodges that they build to live in have an underwater entrance. And so they can safely get in and out of their lodge. They can hold their breath underwater for long periods of time. They can stay safe. So they do it as a survival mechanism. But it just so happens that it changes the whole watershed when they do that. And when beavers go away, it degrades the whole watershed. Because now the water is just like a fire hose. When there's lots of water, it just flows down the hill and out to the river and out to the ocean and it's gone. And when that water's gone, it's gone. It's in the ocean. It's not like it disappears from the planet, but it is no longer in that watershed. Now our watersheds have evolved to need beavers. Like this whole system is based on being able to slow the flow. So we need beavers to slow the water down when it's plentiful so that we can have water later when it's not.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

How did you start working with beavers?

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Well, um, I've always been interested in beavers. You know, growing up in Canada, it's our national animal. So a very familiar animal, and I've always been very curious about the way that they work. But it wasn't until 2010 when I was hired by a nonprofit organization that was starting a restoration program and an education program, and they were looking for somebody to start both of those programs concurrently, which was perfect for me because I'm I'm always at that intersection of restoration and education or conservation and education. And so we had the opportunity to work on a site that used to have beavers on it. And there were no longer beavers on the site. Well, there were actually at the very uh downstream end, there was some beaver activity, but the rest of the whole site, no, there was no beaver activity, and the channel had been cut down deeply into the floodplain. So where the water used to be here and spilling out onto the floodplain and creating wetlands, now the stream channel, the bottom of the stream was cut way down low, and that water had no way of getting up onto the floodplain. And so we knew that without beavers, without anything to stop the flow of water or slow the flow of water, um, the site wasn't going to spontaneously heal. It would take many, many hundreds or thousands of years for that process to occur. And so to jumpstart restoration, we put structure in the streams to slow the flow. And so it just became really evident looking at that site. We need beavers here. And there's no way beavers can survive right now on most of the site because there's very little vegetation for them to work with, either eating or building with. And the water is basically moving through this trench now, like, like I said, like a fire hose. And it moves so fast that if they tried to build a dam in there, it would just blow out. So we have to make some changes before the site can support beavers. And so it just was obvious. It was like, okay, this is all about beavers, and let's see what we can do to try to make this site hospitable to them again. And and I had never heard of a beaver dam analog at that point. And we spent a couple of years just growing, like growing our understanding of the site and doing monthly photo points and bringing different people in, like, what should we do? And we developed this whole plan to put large wood in the stream, which is a really good starting place. And pilings, we were calling them, which is where you take a post and just like pound it into the stream bed, just kind of here and there to help catch debris. And that was when one of our colleagues sent us a paper that was published by Michael Pollack, who works for NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. And he he published a paper about beaver dam analogs and he described how they help re-establish natural processes and how you can create habitat for beavers again. We read that paper and we were just all floored. Like, this is it. This is what we need to do. That's what we're doing. Yeah. Yeah. We we gotta pivot. This is and so then I called him up on the phone, like, hey, can you tell me how to build these beaverdam analogs? Because we want to do this. And like we were about to do construction in the stream. We were like ready to go. We had all the permits and we had written them to be really open-ended, like the saying things like, you know, this will let the stream choose where to place the large wood and things like that. So it was quite an open-ended permit. We were able to install beaver dam analogs just a few weeks after, like it all happened really fast. We pivoted, changed our whole plan. And we were able to just try them, you know, see how they work. And they and they worked really well. Explain to me what's a beaver dam analog. So analog is a word that we sometimes use just to mean that we're trying to copy something. We're creating an analog of it. So a beaver dam analog is a copy, basically, of a beaver dam. It's a it's a human's effort to do the work of a beaver. And we're not nearly as good at it as beavers. But there are places where the sites are so degraded that they can't support beavers coming back yet. And those are the best places to use fake beaver dams, beaver dam analogs, because we can restore a site till it gets to the point where it can now support beaver again. And then beaver will often discover that and just come back naturally. But if not, we can translocate beavers from places where there's conflict with human that humans that just hasn't been able to get resolved.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

How did you get the beavers to did you had to get the beavers to use them? Did you have to relocate beavers?

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Well, so there's I've worked on you know different sites over time. That that very first project we did, we put in a handful of beaver dam analogs, and then we weren't able to keep working on that site any longer. The landowner chose not to renew our landowner agreement. And so we moved up upstream about two river miles to a different site that was larger, more degraded, needed all the same things. And we put together a plan to put in a lot of beaver dam analogs, like all together throughout that project area. And so we installed in 2016, and five days after we started postpounding, the beavers showed up. Like they noted this. There's yeah. And I actually have a video clip of a volunteer who was helping us put in the fake beaver dams. And he on the fur on that one day, and he he said, If you build it, they will come. Here, beaver, beaver, beaver. And they came the next day. It was like he called them. I still have that video. They showed up the next day. And they took the material that we had like these bundles of willow cuttings and red oger dogwood that we were gonna put in amongst the posts. Because to make a BDA, you to make a beaver dam analog, you post you pound these posts across the stream and it looks almost like a fence. And then you take branches and you weave it all into those posts, and that's how you create an an interface that slows the water down. So we had the posts pounded in this one spot, and we had all the bundles of cuttings laying in the water ready for whenever we would have time to go weave it. And the beavers took our material that we had laying there and they wove it into the postline and created a dam. So they could see, they're like, this is perfect. This is going to be stable. Like they hadn't built there in in years, like more than 15 years, because they knew it wouldn't be stable in that incision trench, which is like that that down cut stream, it's like a canyon, right? So they look at that, they're like, we can't build a dam there. But as soon as that postline went in, they noticed and they happened to be passing by, they're always kind of moving around across the landscape and they saw it and they were all for it. So they stayed only for 18 months at that time because there was very little beaver food or construction material available on the site. It was so degraded. So I was going to ask you.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

You probably have to plant, yeah, you had probably have to plant a whole habitat to nurture the beaver.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Exactly. So that's where my native plant nursery and farm names name comes from, beaver food forest, because essentially we went in and tried to plant a future beaver food forest. And, you know, sometimes we call them beaver breakfast bars. It's like a strip of land that we dedicate for future beaver food. And we plant lots of willow and, you know, red ocean dogwood and cottonwood and aspen, whatever, you know, is appropriate for the site. And on this particular project that we started implementing in 2016, we had made these rectangles that we called intensive planting plots. And they're essentially beaver breakfast bars. And it was that whole site was pretty much a monoculture, which means like one kind of plant growing of invasive reed canary grass. It's a grass that grows to be up to seven feet tall, super just takes over everything, chokes out all the native plants. Most people look at a reed canary grass site and they just say, that's impossible. Like you're not going to be able to establish native plants there unless you use herbicide and just kill everything. But I always like to find ways to work without herbicides. So we put down a lot of cardboard over just right on top of that grass when it's all matted down after the snow melts in the spring. Then you have this opportunity when it's not tall. And we just put like three layers of cardboard across and overlapped it at least eight inches on all sides. We put wood chips like this thick. And then we invited students to come out, you know, like kindergarten and second grade students and middle school students. And we'd let the cardboard sit for a couple weeks, let it rain a little bit, and it would soften. And then the kids would take a piece of metal rebar with a handle welded on it, like a T, and just make a hole through the wood chips, through the cardboard, down into the ground, and then take a cutting of willow, put it in that hole, pour some muddy water in there, and willow can grow roots anytime it's in contact with soil or water. It'll put out roots from any part of the whole plant. So all those willow cuttings sprouted, and now, what is it? It's 10 years later, and we have huge, like 20-foot-tallow thickets where the reed canary grass doesn't have a chance because it doesn't like shade, and it's been shaded out, and now the beavers came back again, and they've been eating those willows and bringing them into the creek and building with them.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

That's really incredible. It's really ingenious to think about that. And a lot of landowners they see beavers as a pest. Like they've they flood fields, obviously, they they block culverts. How do you change someone's mind about an animal that they've been kind of fighting against?

SPEAKER_00 18:06

I think it's not so much about changing anybody's mind as it is about offering support for coexistence and acknowledging the challenges and helping provide opportunities to try living with beavers with support. So if you're working with somebody whose culvert is getting plugged, and like the Methau Okanagan Beaver Project is has a really strong coexistence program because it's critical to try to allow beavers to do their work wherever it's possible. So we can put in structures that keep the culvert from being plugged. And so, you know, you put in some culvert protection. If somebody's having a flood, uh some flooding that's unacceptable to them as a landowner, it's in a field where they've been doing agriculture and they really need to do that agriculture, then we can put in a pond leveling device that limits the extent to which the water can rise. And so you choose an elevation and then the water can only go up to that point. So offering support to people and explaining like why would you do that? What's the value in having the beavers here can go a long way.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

And then did you work with people who completely changed their mind and and came on board where they were initially very reserved?

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Yeah. And it's understandable, you know, it's frustrating when you're working with beaver or you're you're living with beavers and you're trying to do something and they're doing an action that counteracts what you're trying to do. It's a conflict, right? So it's understandable that that would be frustrating. And we have worked with people who have been feeling frustrated and were able to offer the support for coexistence so that they can still do the activities on the land that they're trying to do. They can still drive on their driveway, it's not getting flooded anymore, or the culvert's not getting plugged. You know, you you ameliorate those issues and explain how beavers are helping us all to have enough clean water, enough clean water, so quality and quantity. And everybody can get behind that. But I've never met anybody who disagrees that we all need enough clean water, right? So if beavers are helping make that happen and we provide the tools and the support to help somebody live with beavers and they can help make it happen, then that's a win-win. And so that's our goal anytime there's a beaver conflict is to be able to provide coexistence support so that people can allow beavers to keep doing their work. And it can be really exciting for a landowner to go from feeling super frustrated to feeling really good about supporting a species that is helping all of us. And that's not always the outcome. Sometimes people try coexistence and they're just like, you know what, this isn't working. I just want these beavers gone. And if you want me to not shoot the beaver, then you should live trap it, but I'm done. Like sometimes people decide that. And at that point, we, you know, we respect that decision. It's their their choice. And then that's when we'll go in and live trap and move beavers to a location where there isn't going to be conflict with humans, where they can really do their magic up in the water.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

How does how does relocation happen for is it is it complicated to relocate a beaver? Do they have, do they live, you know, as families? Do you have to, if you remove one, do you have to remove a whole bunch? Uh, how does it work? What's the complexity around that?

SPEAKER_00 21:19

Yeah, that's yeah, that's a great question. And that's been a learning experience where the Matt How Okanagan Beaver Project has been moving beavers for a really long time. And so it's an organization that people look to for workshops and trainings on how to do relocation and not just how to live trap and physically move a beaver, but what are the considerations, like you said, for trapping, for keeping families together, for finding locations that are going to be successful, and the time of year and the conditions on the sites where you're taking them to, and all of that. So if you like if you read Ben Goldfarb's book, Eager, it's a great book about beavers. I recommend. It to anybody who's curious. And because we're not going to have time to cover all this, all the the ground that Ben covers in that book. And he also, he also includes a history of the Methow Okanagan Beaver Project. At the time, it was just called the MetHau Beaver Project. But you'll get a sense of how the organization operated back then and and where we've come from. And there's been a lot of lessons learned along the way that we're now sharing with other people. And one of them is that beavers do need each other, right? So we try, there's there's a hatchery, a fish hatchery where there's we have a relationship with the hatchery where we can use some of the runway space for housing beavers temporarily. And so we can, if we need to, trap beavers from different sites and try giving them a chance to coexist together in a space and see if they get along. And then if they get along well, then translocate them together to a site. We've also learned the importance of proximity. So taking a beaver and putting it way in the upper watershed where it has no proximity to other beavers reduces its survival. Whereas if you start at the main river where there's lots of beavers and you kind of work your way up the stream, translocating beavers over time, gradually moving farther, they do better when you do it that way. There's other beavers that aren't too far away.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

I wanted to ask you about the Bonaparte meadows because I know you're in the middle of something really important right now. Can you explain to me what that place is and why you're fighting, fighting so hard to protect it?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Yes. Thank you for asking about Bonaparte Meadows. It is it is a very special site. And I've been watching it just driving by for years because I worked in the area. And I would drive by and look at that site, and it's a peat wetland. So peat is like peat moss when you buy potting mix to plant things in can in pots. Most of the potting mix that you buy, if you look at the ingredients, it will say peat moss on there somewhere, unless it's a peat-free product. So there was peat extraction happening at this wetland. And peat forms really slowly over time, like one millimeter a year. And this peat wetland is, you know, between 20 to maybe up to 27 feet deep in peat. So think about the math on that. It's taken a lot of years to develop all this peat. And I used to drive by and see the peat being extracted with the big machinery. And I would just wonder, like, what is the story on this wetland? You know, and and like, is there ever going to be an opportunity where we can protect it and have this wetland be there for the wildlife, for the water storage, for the carbon storage, for the biodiversity and the plants? And I would just wonder, like, what is going on here? And I wasn't sure, like, if there would ever be a chance to protect it. But it turned out that the landowner decided that he wanted to sell the property. And we heard this from some neighbors who he knew and other people in the in the neighborhood. And so it was like, okay, now's our chance. Like, we've got to do this. And the and and and the landowner was getting toward the end of his life. He was in his 90s. And he told his sons when they asked him, What do you want us to do with Bonaparte Meadows? He said, I want it to stay whole. I don't want it to get all divided up into pieces and so get shivers. I have these funds too. And they're they're trying to honor that. So they're we have an option agreement. We being a group of partners that are working together to protect this wetland that expires at the end of July to raise funds to purchase this wetland. And why is it so special? Not just that it's peat that's taken so long to form and that holds so much water and carbon and creates biodiversity. It's it's not just any peat wetland, it's a really unique kind of peat wetland. And that makes it even more important to protect. Because usually, you know, peat wetlands are acidic and that creates a whole kind of environment that grows things that grow and live in acidic places. But this particular peat wetland is alkaline. So when you think about the pH scale and you have neutral in the middle, and you've got those smaller numbers, means it's acidic. Like we're up in the, you know, eight, nine, 10, we're alkaline. We're not just neutral. It's really unusual. And that's because the bedrock has so much calcium in it. So when the groundwater flows through, it it buffers that acidity and it makes it alkaline. So there's plants growing in that wetland that only grow in peat wetlands where the bedrock has calcium in it and it's limestone or something like that. And it's and it also has groundwater flowing through it, like into it and out of it. And that's a really special kind of peat wetland, too, because most peat wetlands are more like a bowl that holds water, like a bog is a bowl essentially, that is fed by surface water. Whereas this kind of wetland has water flowing in and out and constantly flowing through it. So that makes it a fen. And it's it's one of the rarest, this calcareous fen, it's one of the rarest peat wetland types, one of the rarest wetland types in all of the United States. And and so it's got lots of reasons for needing to be protected.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

What happened if it disappears? What would people use it for? Development or yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

So the the threat is that, you know, it's really close to a lake, Bonaparte Lake, where people go to recreate. So it would be a very desirable place to have a cabin. And so the most likely thing would be for it to be subdivided into a bunch of little slices where each slice has a little bit of wetland and a cabin. And then people can go to their cabin that overlooks the wetland and they can just drive a little ways down the road and recreate at Bonaparte Lake. And so if that happens, then you've taken one giant habitat and you've fragmented it into a bunch of little pieces where you've got septic systems from people's toilets that are going to impact water quality. You've got wildlife barriers all over the place. Because once people own land privately, you can have fences and all kinds of barriers to wildlife movement and wildlife usage. So you can have noise and disturbances that cause birds to not nest, amphibians to not lay their eggs, you can have water withdrawal because people would want to put wells in, and so now there's less water available for wildlife. So that's that's the threat. And then you lose biodiversity. And why does that matter? Why does biodiversity matter? Because biodiversity is the foundation for all of life on planet Earth. And you can think about it like not having all your eggs in one basket. There's all these different plants that grow in these environments that have unique strengths and weaknesses. So when you have extreme weather or you have a wildfire that changes the conditions, or a pest or disease that comes through, you're gonna have some plants and wildlife species that are resilient in that situation. But you don't know what those future conditions are gonna be. So you need to have a lot of different species, both plants and wildlife, that are thriving so that no matter what happens as the future conditions change, there's gonna be some species that are resilient and that can still thrive. Otherwise, you could have just a few different kinds of plants and animals, and they might all be susceptible to, you know, not being able to survive extreme, extreme heat, for example.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

I was wondering why there's a lot of wildfires in in in Washington, and when there's so many degraded watersheds or wetlands, does this contribute to more extreme wildfires every year?

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Yeah, absolutely. So we've had increasing size and intensity of wildfires over the last 11, 12 years, especially in this area. And because we've been suppressing wildfires so long, we've been putting out every fire that we can as a society. We've built up a lot of fuel in those forests. So things that are ready to burn that haven't had a chance to burn in a long time. And this this region is adapted in it's supposed to burn frequently, low intensity, frequent fires, and that's healthy for the landscape. But now we've had these mega fires that are huge and they're very intense, high heat, they move fast, they destroy everything. And it's a very different reality working in a landscape where we've had these new kinds of fires, because that's not what the ecosystem is adapted for. And so now we have extreme debris flows, post-wildfire debris flows, where it's not just flooding after a fire, it's all this debris, like rock and huge trees and everything that just comes rushing down the hillsides and destroying everything in its path. And then those debris flows cut the streams down. Like I was talking before about streams that have been cut down into their floodplain. So that's happening after every wildfire. We have streams that are being down cut, and the stream bed is now so low that it can't reconnect, it can't connect with the floodplain anymore. And so now you're just encouraging water, just takes the path of least resistance. So now when it floods the following year, it cuts down even more and it becomes more degraded and more degraded. And so we really need to step in, and that's why we're adding structure back into streams because beavers have been removed, wildfire has been suppressed, and that combination means degradation. But if we can get structure back into streams, then when you have those big flow events, those structures do work in the stream. They cause changes that you would otherwise need heavy-duty diesel machinery to accomplish. They cause the stream to become curvy again, because the stream goes around a structure. We need that curviness in the stream so that the water can flow more slowly, so that it can sink into the ground and recharge our groundwater aquifers again. Um, it's all connected.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Yeah, that's that's why when you were talking about the the Bonaparte meadows, I was like, wow, with between degraded watersheds, the loss of like beaver habitat, for example, and the fact that meadows like Bonaparte meadows are at risk of, you know, being removed for construction purposes, I was wondering if all that, you know, fuels the risk of mega wildfires.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Healthy wetlands are critical to wildfire resilience. So even somebody who doesn't care a lot about wildlife species and biodiversity, wildfire affects all of us. And when we have a healthy, yeah, and when we have a healthy wetland on somewhere on the landscape, it's a wet, cool green spot that slows the fire down. And so we can't afford to lose the the healthy status of those wetlands, like the hydrology where you have enough water to keep things wet throughout the the summer. We can't afford to lose those as wildfire resilience pieces across the landscape. There, you can look up the work of Emily Fairfax, and she has incredible photos comparing areas that have beaver activity and areas that don't when a wildfire goes through. It's dramatic to look at aerial images. It's just like night and day how that fire moves across the landscape with and without beavers. So, you know, beavers are crucial to wildfire resilience, and that affects every single person who lives in eastern Washington.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

Do you think people make the connection, like the general public? Do you think the general public makes make this connection when they want to build their cabin on the on, you know, when they want the development to progress so they can buy their cabin by the water? And why do you think why do you think the connection is not being made? Where is the the blockage?

SPEAKER_00 33:29

I think that we just need more people talking about it. Like you're not gonna on your own, if you've never thought about it before, it's pretty unlikely that you're gonna connect those dots and think, I care about wildfire and wildfire resilience. We need more beavers, you know? It it takes some conversation to get to that point. And I just think we need more people talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

I know about wildfires because I live in Washington. So I've you know, I've seen, I've witnessed it the last few years, but I knew nothing about beavers until I came across some of your videos, for example. And uh and that was just in the recent months. So you you've been a voice, you know, you've been a voice for me, so you've probably been a voice for uh, you know, other people.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

That makes me really happy. I'm like you just made my day. That's what I want to do. I want to help people see things from a different angle and connect those dots.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

I started reading about beavers and I didn't even know that a massive amount of the beaver population was decimated in the last hundred years. And why is that?

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Well, so everybody wanted to have a felt hat that was made out of a beaver pelt in Europe, you know, in the the late 1800s and and and and early 1900s as people were moving from those Western civilization societies across the ocean into North America, it seemed like an endless resource. There were so many beavers, like every drainage was just beaver dam after beaver dam, right? So people saw that and thought that it was endless, but it wasn't. It was finite. And so there was so you know, there was there was this great demand for beaver pelts for these felt hats that were all the rage. And so people could make pretty big money, you know, trapping beavers. And it was this plentiful resource, and it was very, yeah, money-oriented, you know. People were trying to make make a make a buck and they made lots of bucks, and we lost a lot of beavers. That stopped? Well, beaver trapping still happens, and that's a whole other conversation that's really important because like, and it's different in every place depending where you live. But in Washington State, for example, we don't have a beaver management plan that's statewide that helps us to manage this population for everybody's benefit, for wildfire resilience, for water quality, for water quantity, having enough water for all the wildlife that depend on them. Beaver trapping is still kind of kind of like the Wild West. We don't even know for sure like how many beavers are being trapped each year. We could have a restoration site where the beavers have just come back and we've done everything to lay the foundation so that the food and the construction materials are in place and everything is just right. And then they show up and they start to do their work, and somebody could legally trap that beaver. There's no protection.

unknown 36:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

Right? Yeah. And so there's a lot of work to be done still, a lot of work to be done in our general understanding of how and why we need beavers, but then also how to manage them so that they can do their work in the places where they're doing a lot of good. And I'm not saying that we need to ban all beaver trapping. I'm just saying we need to manage this as a precious resource, like as a precious part of our ecosystem and not just let it be whatever it is and hope for the best.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

Coming back to the Bonaparte meadow, I wanted to ask you if there is a deadline. Is there a deadline and what does the next few weeks look like look like for you?

SPEAKER_00 37:00

Yeah, thank you. So essentially we have the full cost of purchasing Bonaparte Meadows, which is the 260-ish acres of wetland plus surrounding upland forest for a total of 745 acres. The total cost of that is $3 million, including closing costs and a small stewardship fund that would help fund, you know, paying for the property taxes and maintenance on the property. So $3 million is the total amount we're raising. We've written a couple of grants that would pay like the best match, the best fit grant is from the recreation and conservation office. That would pay for 50% of that amount. And this this project is a really compelling application. We have a very good chance of being funded, and that would pay for 50%, 1.5 million. So that leaves 1.5 million that we need to raise in match. And so we launched a fundraising campaign, and that was just earlier this year in the spring. And we have already raised almost $1 million, but we have to raise the remaining $580,000 by the end of July. That's when our option agreement expires. So our option agreement is an agreement with the landowners where they say, okay, we will not put this on the market. We will give you time to raise the money to buy this land and we will wait until end of July. So that's our deadline.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

What's there a what's the plan for the next few weeks to get to get half a mil?

SPEAKER_00 38:28

Yeah. So we have been working hard to get the word out. So the one one of the strategies is lots of articles and interviews. So we've put out articles in the Washington Ornithological Society, which is the you know, birds. The Washington Native Plant Society publication, Daglacia, is going to publish a story this month. Local newspapers, our our local newspaper wrote a really great story and just came out last week. We also sent a press release to all of the newspapers in the region, as well as Seattle Times and New York Times, and hoping that folks will pick up and see the urgency and the importance of this. And so getting the word out in just all, you know, radio interviews, whatever we can do is one because you never know who might be listening who could say, I have some funding, I can help support this. And if anybody wants to support the project, then you can go to Okanaganlandtrust.org and there's all the information about the project and and then the opportunity to donate online there. Anyone can donate. Anyone can donate, any amount is helpful. We're at the point, you know, where we just need anyone who wants to see this happen to help out to whatever extent they can. And then the other strategy is that we're having conversations with people who do have the means to donate larger amounts and really focusing in on those conversations to see what people would be willing to do. And it really at this point, it would only take a handful of large, you know, major donations and we would be there. And some people can do that. You know, there's people who can write a check for $200,000 and it's gonna be fine. It's not gonna hurt their situation. So our hope is that people will hear about this opportunity and want to be a part of it.

SPEAKER_01 40:09

And can the owner do um also a little gesture?

SPEAKER_00 40:13

You know, the landowners have been really generous with allowing us to do things like we had a concert on the property last Saturday night, and we brought in local musicians as well as a bluegrass band, and people came and listened to music and heard about what we're trying to do and why we need support in making it happen. They didn't have to say the landowners did not have to say yes to that. You know, they're like, yes, go ahead, have a concert on the land, you know. And so everything that we've asked, we asked if we could have a part of the land where we were gonna be like missing a section of the creek in our conservation acquisition because there was a parcel with a house on it that we're not gonna buy as part of the conservation acquisition. And I I called them up and said, Hey, you know what? It would make a huge difference to us if we could have like the whole creek as part of this project, because then when we go to do restoration, we can make changes along the whole channel. And they just they just said yes. They're like, Yeah, let's do it. And they changed the property lines and they didn't they didn't charge us any extra money. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

So they're they're fully on board. Yeah. I have a good feeling it's gonna work.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

It's gonna work, keeping the positive attitude. There is so much momentum right now that is gonna happen. I'm sure of it.

SPEAKER_01 41:26

From everything I've I've been learning, you've been working against drought, wildfire policy gaps, and general public that maybe doesn't always understand why all this matters, uh, was wondering what keeps you going.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

It's really easy. I love this work and I love these places. So it's just it's it's very clear what I need to do and and what I can do. I have, you know, kind of a unique set of experiences and skills. And so it's just like, let's go.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

For for someone who's listening right now and who's never seen a uh a beaver in the wild, including myself, by the way. I've actually never seen a beaver in the wild, only in captivity in the biodome of Montreal. What can someone do to actually support this kind of work? I know you just mentioned, and we can mention it again at the donation website. Anyone else can do to support your work.

SPEAKER_00 42:19

Yeah, thank you so much for that question. That's important because there's a lot of different ways that people can support this kind of work. We've talked about, you know, financial support, which is very important. And if anyone wants to pitch in, again, that website is Okanaganlandtrust.org. And Okanagan is spelt with an O in the middle because we're in the United States. But also, not everybody has extra money to give, right? Like I totally get that. I have absolutely spent a big chunk of my life feeling that way. And the thing is that there's a lot more you could do that's not just money. So when we post about Bonaparte Meadows online and people share those posts and comment and like ask questions and get involved, that helps get the word out to people who do have money. And so just taking the time to check out the content, like we just discovered another species of greatest conservation need. This is a species that has special status in Washington state. It's a candidate for listing as endangered or protected. Just this week discovered another one. I swear it's constant. The more time we spend out in this wetland, the more priority wildlife species we discover. So this one is the Western Bumblebee. So I'm gonna make a video about the Western Bumblebee as soon as I can carve out the time to do that. I'm very excited about having it on this site. And then if people just share that and comment and create engagement online, that matters. Like, don't underestimate the power that you have when you click repost or you just make a little comment, ask a question. Like it's we're trying to get the word out. And it takes people sharing to get the word out.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

Before I let you go, my last guest, uh Milo Patnam, who's a founder of Laro, it's uh it's a leading voice in ethical wildlife tourism, uh, left a question for the next guest not knowing who it was going to be. And the question is if you could remove one form of exploitation of wild animals, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 44:14

Wow. If I could remove one form of exploitation of wild animals, what would it be? I try really hard not to be anti-beaver trapping because I think that it can be polarizing to talk about ending something. And so I try to think more about how to manage something in a healthy way. But it's really hard for me to answer that question and not say that I would love to see beavers not getting trapped until we have more on the landscape. And they can be plentiful in some areas, but people need to understand that doesn't mean that their population has been restored. We are still feeling the effects of the loss of beaver across the whole Pacific Northwest. And so if we could just slow down on the trapping, the lethal trapping, it would make such a big difference in our watersheds.

SPEAKER_01 45:03

This is actually something I've been meaning to ask you earlier. We're talking a lot about Washington State, but what about the rest of the US? Does somebody like in New York, you know, or Vermont should care about beavers the way we care about beaver here? Or across the the United States?

SPEAKER_00 45:18

Yeah, so beavers were almost extirpated, right? They were almost completely removed from a lot of North America at one point in history. It was a major loss, not just in the Pacific Northwest, but all across North America. And while there are places where we see more beavers now, this is a concern everywhere because the degree to which they slow down water and help groundwater to recharge, and the degree to which they make healthy wetlands for other wildlife to thrive cannot be overstated. And if you look, the more you learn about the landscape, the more you realize it was shaped by beavers. And so this is a concern across all of North America that we need to get more beavers back in in our creeks.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Oh, it's fascinating. I feel like we could have three episodes just about beavers, just to understand the work of beavers. Uh, but now it's your turn. What question, what question would you want to leave for for the next guest not knowing who it's going to be?

SPEAKER_00 46:14

Wow, that's a great question. So I would like to ask, what is what is something that people can do in their daily lives that will make a positive impact on the natural world?

SPEAKER_01 46:26

Noted. Thank you so much, uh Julie, for taking the time today. I know you're busy and have a lot of things to do. It was a really wonderful conversation and I've learned a lot and I'm really looking forward to share it.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

Likewise, thank you so much. I just, it means a lot that you reached out and that my content has had meaning for you, and it means even more that you're here to help other people see things from new angles and to help spread this information around. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 46:53

You've just listened to an episode of Back to 2050. If you liked it, please share it along. If it sparked something in you, I'd love to hear about it. And if you know change makers, building solutions, who should be on this show, send them my way. More episodes on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I'm Jessica Alseed, and this was Back to Twenty Fifty. Thank you for listening.