Bringing Back the Beaver by Derek Gow

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Bringing Back the Beaver: The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways By Derek Gow Chelsea Green, 2020

According to the brief author biography on the dust jacket of his new book Bringing Back the Beaver, Derek Gow is a nature conservationist “who now lives with his two children on a 300-acre farm on the Devon/Cornwall border which he is in the process of rewilding.” And it goes on: “Derek has played a significant role in the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver, the water vole and the white stork to England. He is currently working on a reintroduction project for the wildcat.” 

So, a tilter at windmills. A visionary. A troublemaker. And certainly in line with how Gow himself characterizes his ruling passion: “If you’re a ‘Beaver Nut’” he writes,  “and realise earnestly just how critical these creatures are to the future well-being of the earth, with a pivotal role in the creation of abundant biodiversity, water provision, purification, flood and drought alleviation, you will pursue beaver advocacy with the kind of tedious zeal generally restricted to deluded members of obscure religious cults.”

Readers of Ben Goldfarb’s 2018 book Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (also from Chelsea Creen, which is certainly grounds to spot-check the publisher’s board of directors for webbed feet; there’s clearly a beaver partisan in the fold) will be familiar with this particular kind of zeal - endearing rather than tedious - and the rock-solid science behind it. 

As Gow makes clear throughout his book (which is enlivened by the author’s own black-and-white illustrations), when the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) was once plentiful in England, England was unquestionably better off for it. Although Gow puts forward the contention that beavers are gentle, caring community members, it’s really their capacity as nature’s workaholics that he’s championing: when a beaver family takes up residence in the neighborhood of a local stream, they set about immediately changing the landscape for the better. Their famous dams are only a part of it; in the long term, they create entirely new and incredibly rich wetlands, supporting a far greater diversity of plant and wildlife than the pre-beaver version of the same area could have attracted and maintained. 

Which is all well and good unless you’re a farmer, in which case you don’t want wetlands, you want farmlands. Over the course of his career, Gow has had to deal with plenty of such people, and one anecdote will stand for their typical reaction:

Years ago, one farmer who blessed me with the time required to explain why we wanted to introduce beavers into his wetlands said, ‘Well, Derek, I know nothing about this. Never thought about it at all. It makes as much sense to me as if you had come in here and said that you wished to put a great white shark in the reservoir, a giraffe on the hill in the far distance and a troop of dog-faced baboons in the trees below my house. Now bugger off.’

“People have been killing beavers for so long now,” Gow writes, “it’s considered by most to be completely normal, commonplace and commercially appropriate.” The beaver’s extirpation from Britain centuries ago is ample proof of the ‘commonplace’ part, but as Gow convincingly demonstrates, the ‘commercially appropriate’ is dead wrong. Even those bugger-off farmers ultimately benefit from letting beavers do their thing in peace. 

Bringing Back the Beaver is filled with Gow’s war stories from his years dealing with hostile farmers, recalcitrant and critically under-informed town councils, and a public that naturally loves the idea of having beavers in their local river but usually knows nothing beyond that about their ecological value. These war stories have all the benefits and drawbacks of their kind: they make for great entertainment, but they can feel a bit longish. 

But they consistently illustrate a point, as all good war stories should but so few do, and the point is that humans need wild beavers to be out and about their work, perhaps now more than ever. It was simply greedy and cruel to wipe them out; it’s equally simple good sense to bring them back. 

“Beavers have no patron saint,” Gow writes at one point. Readers of Bringing Back the Beaver will likely beg to differ.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.