Welcome to the Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien podcast, where we g behind the scenes of the Arizona PBS documentary series Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien.

We'll discuss the challenges the discoveries, and the things you might not get from watching the television series alone.

I'm your host, Elise Hu, and joining me on thi podcast is the veteran science journalist himself, Miles O'Brien.

On this episode we are talking about how beavers can fight drought, wildfire, and the deterioration of vital waterways.

Miles O'Brien, welcome.

Thanks for joining me.

Good to be with you, Elise.

This episode is all about the busy beavers, and they are unsung climate heroes as we learn so set up for us.

Which environmental problems are Beavers helping address in the first place?

Well, you have to start wit the Colorado River basin, right?

The most ove utilized river in our country.

Perhaps 40 million people rely on it, millions of acres of agriculture.

It's really become kind of an engineer plumbing system, more than a river.

And it doesn't even make it to the Sea of Cortez anymore.

The water is every drop is used.

And so when you start lookin at that problem, it's difficult to come up with easy solutions when we're now about 25 to 27 years into an epic drought, like a historic climate change driven drought, which has reduced the amount of water in that river even as the population has grown, even as the demands on it grows.

So what do you do about that?

One of the issues is holding water back.

That sounds counterintuitive, right?

You would think, well, you know, the Colorado River is 100% fed by the snowpack in Colorado and Wyoming and Utah in the winter.

And as it melts, it goes down into the valley, creates the river.

So the counterintuitive idea here is if you slow down the pace of that water and nourish the soil better, you get all kinds of environmental advantages out of that and ultimately preserve water for the river because it's not running off in flash flood style.

And so how do you do that?

It turns out that beavers ar naturally good at creating dams that hold back water in places like the headwaters of the Colorado River.

So, you know when you think about it, humans were so filled with hubris.

We think we have all the solutions.

Let's pour some concrete.

We'll make the Hoover Dam and everything will be great.

But the truth is, natur has some really good solutions on its own, and beavers are the second most impactful landscape changers on the planet.

Yeah they are.

There are some other problems that beavers can help address to and we learn this through folks that we met in the episode, like the problem of overgrazing.

So talk a little bit about that and what's happening in the American West.

Well, we went to an area where, you know, it's kind of Bureau of Land Management, federal grazing land, and we had the good fortune to meet a real life no BS cowboy Tom chant, thoug it did look like you cast him.

Yes.

People would probably be skeptical.

I was like, no, come on.

That can't be real.

That actually, that actually is Tom.

It really is.

It's the real deal.

He really is.

They still exist.

And he.

He and his dad have been grazing this particular piece of land in a place called Muddy Creek in Wyoming for a couple decades now.

Collectively, it was trampled by sheep.

Those weren't his.

But, you know, when you're on federal land, you're sharing.

And so the Bureau of Land Management went in and said, you know we're totally denuded this soil.

We're ruining this pasture land, and nobody's going to be able to graze here anymore.

And so they kind of threw out their playbook and decided to put in some fencing so that they can manage where they graze at any given particular time, and then decided to make human versions of beaver dams.

Beaver dam analogs are calle little dams, made of little bit of some sticks and yeah, reeds and some mud.

Yeah.

And creating the same effect that a beaver dam would.

And what that has done i it has turned a very arid area into a very rich riparian zone, lots of beautiful, lush greenery along the the banks of this creek.

Lots of place for the cattle and the sheep to graze has this benefit of agai holding back the water in a way that nourishes the landscape, in ways that if it had just raced o down, would never have happened.

So there's the overgrazing issue.

There's the strain on the Colorado River.

There's also what's been happening with wildfires in this region, and there have been frequent and more intense.

How are wildfires also a proble that beavers can help address?

Well I had my main character in this episode is Emily Fairfax, who is a leading beaver researcher, and that is a thing.

Now that really is a thing.

And she took me to a place not far from where I was with the cowboy Tom chant, which had had a significant mega fire pass through, and she showed me this amazing green swat that was probably three quarters of a mile lon and several hundred yards wide, and it was just lush, surrounded by the burned out trees.

I mean, the trees haven't even come back yet.

It was such a bad mega fire.

Well, that that lush green space, that oasis was made by one beaver family.

And so what that did was, the first of all, created a firebreak.

I mean, this was a mega fire, so there was only so much that could do.

But it did.

You know, if you could imagine more of these, it might have stunted the spread of that fire in the first place.

But put that aside.

What that does, though, is it creates a refuge for all kinds of animals to get through a mega fire.

And so when the going get tough and the fires are burning, everybody knows to head to the, the Beaver country because that's, that's where the, the water is.

That's where the greenery is.

That's where the prey might be as well.

Beavers serve a purpose of offering up kind of a, a lifeboat for animals who are encountering these fires.

Ultimately too, if you allow enough of thi on the landscape and the soil is moister than it would be otherwise, you can dampen the initial effects of the fire in the first place.

So it has a lot of benefits that you wouldn't think of right away.

And you got to suit up to go out there and study the beavers at least for a day with Emily.

Let's take a look at that clip.

The land was trampled by overgrazing.

Sheep historically has been a big problem in this area.

Tell us about that.

The reaso why was probably just the ease of leaving the sheep where they were.

Let the sheep work the countr when they were out of feed move.

And so I think that's where, you know, the overgrazing probably came.

So the Bureau of Land Management they started by improving the roads and building fences to allow mor sustainable rotational grazing.

And then they began building lots of small dams, just like beavers.

What happened here is a familiar story.

All over the arid west, the water slowed down, pooling into ponds, and what was dust became lush, more like a salad bowl.

No surprise to these scientists.

Not far away, they are gearing up to get waist deep on a quest to better understan nature's hardworking engineers.

Oh, and deep, going dee into the world of beavers here.

They invited me along and I was, well, eager to join them.

I'm fascinated.

Miles by Emily Fairfa and what she does for a living.

I think you called her in the show.

Her official title is an eco hydrologist.

I've heard of marine biologists.

Now we're learning about eco hydrologists.

What specialties?

Just continue.

Don't think you know.

It's interesting.

I when I went to visit her at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, or I guess at Saint Paul in the Twin Cities, and she was in the geography department.

And I said, why are you here?

She said, oh, they have bigger offices, the maps.

So go figure.

Right.

So but she, you know, whatever, whatever specialties combined to make an expert on beavers.

And it involves a lot of GIS kind of technology looking at maps and data and trying to understand where the dams are and where you could put a dam and where it might be good, etc.. Her backstory is what really caught me.

So she was she studied chemistry and physics and graduated with a lot of student loans.

We can all relate.

And she needed a job.

Los Alamo National Laboratory was looking and she went to a job fair and she got a job at Los Alamos.

So she moves there an she is working in the department that is managin the nuclear weapons stockpile.

Right.

And she just wasn't feeling the love, you know, i wasn't doing it for her.

Right?

So she just plopped herself on the couch.

She was crying her soup, feeling a little sorry for herself but still had to pay the loans.

And she turned on the PBS program nature, and they did an episode called Leave It to Beaver, which was on many of the thing we're talking about right here.

And she just sh literally got off of her couch and changed her life.

I mean, I' compressing things a little bit, but she quit her job, went back to school, and is now one of the foremost researchers on this subject.

So this is the power of PBS, right?

I mean, this is when people say, why do we have PBS?

It's for moments like that.

In my view, there are a lot of moment like that we don't know about.

But when I heard that story, I was like, wow, I'm really glad I had the good fortune to work for public broadcasting.

Yeah, yeah, it's collisions like these that can have such a long tail effect.

It happened wit other scientists and researchers that we have explored in this series itself.

Just a collision with a student or a collision with PBS.

Yeah, there's a certain, like, chemistry to it.

All right.

You know, there's a certain it's like cooking.

You almost need this kind of recipe this bouillabaisse of solutions.

You know, when you put a little dash of this here and a littl that there and turn up the heat and suddenl you've got something exciting.

Yeah.

The person is altered, and so is the world or the climate, arguably.

Let's tal a little bit about technology, because in this episode we see Emily as drone pilot.

Like you said, there is a lot of GIS and mapping, so it makes sense that she would also know how to fly a drone to follow the work of a Beaver family.

You have been in the field now, or in this field as a journalist and as a science journalist for more than 40 years.

And part of your job has been t follow advances in technology.

So I wanted to know, with more advanced data collection and camera technology, we now have the tools to capture more than we have ever before.

How have these sorts of tools changed the gam for researchers and scientists, and have any of them come at an ecological price?

That's a really good point.

So you're right.

We are we are swimming in data, you know, big data.

And that's that is a two edged sword, right.

How do you how do you process it and manage it.

And so as long as we're talking about wildfires, we I did a story for Nova a couple of years ago, and we were looking at artificial intelligence and trying to do a story which showed that it's not all Terminator.

There is another side to artificial intelligence.

There are some good things that can come out of this as long as it doesn't kill us.

But that's that's a subject for we could do that in another podcast.

But in California, most every mountaintop now has a remotely controlled camera there to look for the possibility of wildfires at a very early stage.

Well, the problem is, of course, you kno who's going to monitor all that.

Right?

And how would you know?

You kno where that little puff of smoke is and tur that into something actionable.

And so University of California, San Diego developed a pattern recognition algorithm, artificial intelligence, you know, which it taught a computer said to identify the early stages o what could become a mega fire.

And and so now all of those cameras on all those mountaintops don't have to be monitored by a human, but the machines monitor it and tell the human, hey, you might want to look over here.

And they have found numerous wisps of smok caused by a strike of lightning, which no one has seen becaus they're in the middle of nowhere and have sent crews in to put them out when they were just, you know, over the course the size of a football field so long before mega fires.

So you have to wonder how man mega fires have been prevented.

We don't know the answer to that.

That's a great example to me of how all this data, all this capacity we hav with cameras and imagery coupled with artificial intelligence is potent and and is useful.

It also has this other dark side which we have to manage somehow.

You mentioned earlier, as we talked about the team at the Bureau of Land Management, Scott Miller, whose team is building these beaver dam analogs.

How good are these analogs?

Well, the beavers could do better.

There's no question every now and then.

And Scot considers this a point of pride.

Every now and then, the Beavers will kind of move in and make some renovations.

But usually, usually what they do, they'r going to spruce this up a bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think we would need to move a few walls a few twigs.

What what they do mostly what they do is the dams themselves create beaver food.

You know, they like willows and greens and so forth.

And so as you build the dams, you build the riparian zone that attracts them because they have a good place to find their groceries.

And so a lot of times what they do is they will build their own damn, you know, upstream of it or whatever, because they just, you know, that's what beavers do.

They like to build dams.

Right?

So it's really interesting to see this idea of humans buildin something that kind of lures the beavers back onto the landscape.

Because for a long, long time, we did a number on beavers and virtually rendered them extinct because we thought they were a pest.

And they also had valuable pelts.

And so that that's had to turn around.

And, you know, there' still a lot of that out there.

There's still a lot of resistance to beavers because people feel that they can't control their land as they want to.

Let's look at the opposite.

Let's take a look at a clip of coexistence with beavers and encouraging beavers by building these human analogs for beaver dams, we first drive the post into the ground.

That's good.

We put some sod in, and then we're weaving willow and aspe branches between the the poles.

And then we're putting some more.

Saw it in and then we're just alternating that process until we get to the desired height of how much we want to back water up.

They can be built in anywher from a half hour to two hours, depending on the size and complexity.

They're building a hundred beaver dam analogs here, and that's creatin lots of groceries for beavers.

So they're moving back in some times using the human built knock offs, other time building something much better.

Scott Miller is happy wit the way things are turning out.

Miles's episod is more about multiple problems that can be solved with this one solution the Beaver dams.

So in this episode, did you come to the problem first, or one of the solutions that then led to other solutions?

This one started for me, at least with my interest in the Colorado River.

I've done a lot of reporting on it.

When you look at how climate change has affected that river it's one of the most real time, significant climat change impacts I can think of.

And and it's, you know, it' kind of drying up in real time right before our very eyes that we rely on it in a significant way.

You in Los Angeles rely heavily on the Colorado River every time you take a shower.

And that that water is crucial for the American West.

And so I became interested in that.

And I was, you know, tackling solutions like you look at the growth of alfalfa in places like the Imperial Valley, which gobbles up huge amounts of the Colorado River water, and then some of that alfalfa gets shipped to Saudi Arabia and the Pacific Rim.

Is that the best way to be using that water?

All these questions come into play, but then you start thinking, you know, could we could there be an alternative crop that people could plant that would be just as lucrative for a farmer, but wouldn't be as thirsty?

These kinds of questions come into play.

And that was when I happened upon two things I found interesting.

There's a strong effort to try to reorder the delta for the Colorado River, which is pretty much dry now, allowing some water to flow in there.

In other words, you'v got the seven states in the base that all tried to duke out what to do with the water, but the environment doesn't have a seat at the table.

And so the idea that some water could be allocated to allow those wetland to be re nourished in the Delta, I found fascinating.

And then at the other end of the river, I had heard these storie about using beavers to hold back the water before it gets into the system and improving the ecology there.

And so let's face it, as I said earlier, the Colorado is an engineered system to the nth degree.

And you know, when you start talking about natural solutions there are some limitations here.

But they're all it's still so intriguing.

And since there is no silve bullet for the Colorado River, you got to look at all the the silver buckshot that might be out there.

Okay, Miles now to one of my favorite parts of this podcast which is what sort of challenges did you run into or surprises did you run into while capturing this story?

I thought that I wanted to delve into the world of Beaver haters a little more and it was it was a challenge.

There are states where there are sanctioned state officials that go out and eradicate beavers, and there's a nuance here which I fully appreciated later, is that, you know, beaver on the East Coast versus beavers and the Colorado River system, two different things, right?

You know, water is a different kind of well, you know, the water problem i a distribution problem, right?

We got plenty of it where I am right now in the East Coast, not so much of it in Colorado.

So people think about beavers very differently in different states.

And so you have to respect that going down that road and getting a bunch of peopl griping about beavers in their driveways really wasn't going to get me anywhere.

And it certainly didn't address the real issue, which is this is something that's kind of site specific, right?

Or regional specific.

Anyway, beavers in that part, you know, a ranche like Tom chant welcomes beavers.

You know, a ranche maybe where it's a little more, there's a little more rain and it's flooding a field or a farmer where it floods a field that they're trying to grow crops on might view it very differently.

So I didn't want to turn it into one of these on the one on the on hand, on the other hand stories.

So so that was I kind of taugh myself a lesson along the way.

We were kind of slated to go out with one of the the Beaver eradication teams, and we decided against it.

How well is this solution working in the Colorado River basin in the area?

Generally, it's really hard to come up with metrics.

You know, we know, you know, you talk to Scott Miller, he's built hundreds of beaver dam analogs that has lured in lots of beavers.

Emily, using her GIS techniques and satellite technology, has identified all these unexpected places all over the country where beave dams and beaver families live.

You know, coming up with a bottom line metric on what that doe and how many acre feet of water.

I don't know that anybody has that number except to say that they're industrious as they can be.

They they never ask for overtime and they just keep working.

So where that where that ends up and how that affects the drought is pretty difficult to nail down the number, except to say when you when you look at that green swath.

Yeah.

In the middle of, you know, that area that was so devastated by a mega fire, you can't help but say, well, that's that's some pretty strong evidence this is doing something.

But if there is no a clear metric for their success or not, a clear way to measure how well this is working, does it get in the way of being able to implement the beaver solution in a more widespread way?

Yeah So it's a really good question.

You know, how do you take this?

As you know, i we put X number of beavers here, we will save y acre feet of water there.

Frankly, that's at the core of Emily's work right now is to try to she wants to do, you know, kind of a beaver census.

Yeah Which has never been attempted.

No one really knows how much impact they'r already having on the landscape, much les what more beavers might provide.

Right.

And so, you know, this is when she got into it, when she had her epiphany on the couch watching nature.

This was kind of a nascent field.

No one really had kind of focused on this as a, you know, landscape climate change issue.

And so this is it's kind of new science.

And there's an annual meeting of the the Beaver Nation, and it's growing in size, but it's still a small group.

Yeah.

It just strikes me that if you could measure their effect and measure their good effects on the environment then that would only encourage more support for the work of beavers and the beaver population generally.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Okay.

We'll have to do a we'll have to do a follow up with Emily.

Yeah, absolutely.

Emily is kind of fun to hang out with.

Anyway.

It seems like it for sure for our last question.

And this ties to this conversation that we're having are there any practical action items for our viewers and listeners who might want to support this work?

I think property owner who find beavers on their land should not have any jerk response to it.

You know, I think I think, you know, we have been ingrained with the idea that beavers are a pest.

A lot of people think of them that way.

They don't really see the the benefits to the ecosystem when it's perhaps flooding part of your property that you don't want flooded.

But there are huge advantages to allowing them to do their work.

There was a couple we met who unfortunately ended up on the cutting room floor.

They had.

Beavers arrived on their property in Colorado and created this, this pond.

And initially they were they were like, oh gosh, we got to stop this.

We want we want our stream flowing through here.

Well, they let it happen.

They didn't, you know, try to take out the beavers, so to speak.

They ended up with this amazing fishing pond.

And they told this story of taking their their grandchildren out ther in a little canoe and catching their first fish in this pond created by the beavers.

And weirdly, just a couple of years ago, the beavers left this this happens, you know, maybe they ran out of food or somebody got sick.

Who knows?

And they lost their beavers.

And so they called up Scott Mille with Bureau of Land Management, and he went out there and built a beaver dam analog for them, hoping to lure back the real thing.

So it's a classic case where if you stop and think about it for a moment and, and think about why you're against something, as Emily would say, we as humans are, you know, used to this idea that we control our environment completely.

It's like kind of the definition of hubris.

And if we allow nature to do what it does, sometimes we can be ahead of the game.

It forces us as humans to eas up on the reins a little bit to to maybe not control it exactly as we see, but allow it to go in a direction that nature wants it to.

And sometimes we're better off.

Yeah, look at how beautiful these dams are, and much better than wha the humans were able to produce.

Yes, yes.

Miles, thank you so muc for talking this over with me.

And just one last question.

How many step did you have any sort of Fitbit or tracker device to measure how many steps you too in the filming of this episode?

How you got to come up with some way of waiting, the steps when it's up to your weight?

Oh that's true.

Right, right.

You know, doesn't that count as like ten steps per or something so much more difficult.

Thank you.

Miles, you were great.

You're welcome.

Elise.

Resolve to solve with Miles O'Brien as a co-production of Mobius Media and Arizona PBS.

You can watch the show at ASB.

Resolve to solve this podcast is a productio of Central Sound at Arizona PBS.

Our video editors are Matthew Anderson and Macy Logan.

We get audio support from Joe Miller and Daniel Bebek.

Our producer is Anna Williams.

Executive producers Alex Cusack, Carol Yanko, Scott, willful, and Miles O'Brien.

I'm your host, Elise.

Hugh.

Thanks for joining us.