Stewarding The Land

And Learning from Nature

We Homo-Sapiens are quite special. Since the cognitive revolution¹, 70,000 years ago, we’ve driven other life forms to extinction. It all stems from our ability to communicate with each other, allowing us to organise and apply ourselves in novel ways, at scale. Because of this, we’ve become one of just a few species that is able to completely overhaul a natural environment.

We can reclaim land from the ocean, fill a valley with water, destroy a forest, grow a forest, create wastelands where there was once abundance. The list could go on as far as we can imagine… This makes us special, for better or worse, or more likely both. But we’re not the only species on the list.

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Take the beaver, this creature can also radically and intentionally transform a place, very much like us. By creating dams from debris and mud, they can make dry land into wetland. Once a family of beavers create a dam and a “lodge” in which to live, they will regulate the environment to suit their needs, which has a series of knock on effects that create the conditions for a huge and diverse collection of other lifeforms.

By creating a reservoir, the flow of water across the land is slowed down and seeps deeper into the earth, recharging the water table. As the sun raises the temperature of the water, a number of different microbial organisms can thrive, which forms the basis of a new ecosystem, existing within and dependent on the entirely artificial habitat of the beaver dam.

The resident beaver family will carefully maintain the balance of life in the habitat by regulating the level of the water. The beaver lodge, which is like a house, constructed by the family, has its entrances below the water level, which serves as a front door and home security measure. If the dam becomes too porous and allows the water to drop to a point which exposes the entrance of the lodge, then the beavers will promptly begin collecting mud, stones, and sticks to patch up the dam, thereby increasing the level of water and closing the entrances to the lodge.

Beavers don’t have the ability to communicate with each other in the way that we do, so their social systems are instinctive², they have coevolved with their neighbours for millions of years, which has made them into efficient ecosystem engineers.

It seems to me that the beaver’s habitat is both natural and artificial. Natural because the beavers act purely instinctively in conjunction with other lifeforms that they evolved alongside, but at the same time artificial because their environments exist entirely because they were physically engineered by the beavers. It’s almost paradoxical but makes an interesting kind of sense.

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We humans could be the same as the beavers in this way, we too could engineer our environments so that it suits both us and our natural neighbours, but we stick for the most part to building wholly artificial environments that don’t really benefit nature.

The consequences of that culture are playing out before our very eyes — for those who can see it — the climate is warming³, our local environments and ecosystems are no longer able to handle that fact.

The genocide of insects⁴ through chemical contamination and temperature variation is undermining the food chain because they are one of the lowest links of that system, and also considering that insects have been pollinating our food crops this whole time, our modern agriculture is essentially self-destructing, so far in slow motion, but speeding up fast.

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Though I could write much more about the ways in which we are destroying our home, I’ll leave it at that and get down to the real points that I wanted to make.