Do as the Beavers Do': Human-Beaver Collaboration as Resistance to Ecocide
Knee-deep in thick black mud, I was wading through the swamp, carrying a large log. It was still early morning, and all was damp and grey – the land, the water, the plants, the sky, the forest line a stone’s throw away. I was with an ad hoc band of environmental activists who had come to this place – a marshy meadow outside Warsaw, Poland – in response to an online call by a local eco-blogger and activist to reconstruct a destroyed beaver dam. Most likely, the dam had been removed by someone looking to dry the land to make it amenable for real-estate development or some other such business venture. You could tell the more experienced beaver-people among us by their professional-looking waders. I reached the middle of the old canal where a still rather shapeless heap of wood, mud, and straw was slowly rising to become a more-than-beaver dam (or actually, a not-quite-beaver dam). Unsure how exactly I was supposed to place my log on it, I asked for advice. ‘Do as the beavers do!’ was the response I received. ‘The beavers know better, they’re gonna come after we leave and fix it their own way.’
That was the first time I had joined activists rebuilding a beaver dam, at some point in spring 2023. At the time, I was not even thinking of what I was doing as research. I was just being an activist, there to give a hand to some others I had collaborated with on and off in various direct-action efforts to protect wild habitats near and around Warsaw. I was struck, however, by the conspicuous role reversal contained in the short piece of advice the other activists had given me: ‘Do as the beavers do! The beavers know better.’ Usually, I thought, the assumption behind ‘environmental conservation’ is that it is the humans who play protagonist roles, while non-human-animals are passive beneficiaries, the objects of (beneficent) human action. Here, it was the other way around. The beavers were the skilled environmental engineers, and us humans – their well-meaning but clumsy apprentices.
Hence came the idea for this ethnographic research project. Over the months that followed, I joined several more dam-rebuildings and other beaver-related activities with various groups of human activists in central and north-eastern Poland. I have also been interviewing activists, asking them to meet and talk on location, at the ‘beaver sites’ to which they feel the most connection. At a conceptual level, this work revolves around such ideas as 'rewilding', 'more-than-human resistance', and 'wild infrastructure'. As in any ethnographic research project in its early stages, though, I have no idea where it's going to take me. I'm planning to follow the beavers, and their human aides, through the quaggy terrain of Anthropocenic politics, looking for some hope.
