Discussion: the irony of Scottish beavers - more of a rant, really

Trying hard not to make this sound like a dodgy post... but anyway...

This has been inspired from a short I saw today on the bbc website. It's a followup from a reintroduction and release of beavers in Knapdale Forest in Argyll, Scotland last year. The behaviour of the animals were being documented, and they were doing what beavers would be expected to do - felling trees for both food and for making dams for their homes. From some perspectives this reintroduction of a lost species was therefore going very successfully. They seemed to have settled in nicely and being treating the place as 'home'. The irony of this, for me, comes from the 'other side of the story'.

As the presenter pointed out, some people has seen the actions of the beavers as 'damaging the landscape' - to which Nick Purdy, from the Forestry Commission, countered 'they're not indiscriminate, their selective about what they fell... they don't fell everything... They select their pond, they'll stay in it a good number of years, build a bigger lodge which will will flood a bigger area ... and create habitat and diversity. Then they move on and everything retreats back again, it's a cycle...'.

So, to me it seems the beavers were essentially being semi-nomadic subsistence farmers; using only what they needed to survive - and doing so in a way which, granted, changed the landscape around them, but in a way which supported the ecosystem in which they lived. They also had a natural tendency to move around and let the landscape 'recover' over time. Now, correct me if I'm wrong but that sounds like an ideal symbiotic relationship with the environment.

The real point I'm trying to make is the audacity with which any human can make a statement like 'oh look they're damaging the landscape'. Not to put too finer point on it, but if we lived anything like the beavers lived, our environment would be a hell of a lot happier. We devastate entire rainforests for paper, most of which is disposed of after a single use, or rip oil out of the ground for plastics and fuel (among a multitude of uses), which similarly get disposed of indiscriminately - to name just acouple of ways we're 'interacting' with our landscape. And yet the humble beaver, epitomising environmental living, is victimised for felling afew trees in one of the few forests we've decided not to demolish... Amazing.