This commentary is by Luke Briccetti, a Ph.D. candidate in the Rubenstein School of Natural Resources at the University of Vermont, and a fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment.
There has been no shortage of commentaries about beaver management in VTDigger over the past decade.
Many Vermonters may have heard about the broad benefits that beavers provide across our landscape. At one time, beavers numbered between 60 million and 400 million in the U.S. As we systematically removed them for fur and to create agricultural land, our landscape underwent what the eminent river scientist Ellen Wohl termed the “Great Drying,” resulting in faster-flowing rivers and narrower valleys. As a result, floods are more potent, droughts are more frequent, sediment and pollutants are shuttled to the lake more efficiently, and an important habitat type has been lost. However, beaver restoration began in the 1920s, bringing some of these benefits back. Coexistence technologies such as the “beaver baffler” and the “beaver deceiver” have been popularized to slow beaver dam building at roads, reducing conflict in many areas where they are installed. Now, we rely on beavers across the landscape for flood and drought protection, habitat provision and sediment retention.
But for those Vermonters who experience the negative impacts of beavers, it can be hard to reconcile the positives of having beavers on the landscape with their experiences. Many people living in proximity to beavers have experienced property damage, worried about Giardia in their streams, and most frequently, had difficulty accessing their farms, forests or homes. Many Vermonters are incurring a significant toll in managing them, paid in money, time and energy. In my field research talking to people about their experiences with beavers, I have met many streamside landowners who marvel at the habitat that they create, but I have also met people who can’t afford to install an expensive beaver baffle and have spent countless hours clearing out their culverts so that they can access the land they rely on to earn an income.
As someone interested in both the incredible benefits that I know beavers can provide and in the well-being of my neighbors, this can sometimes be a difficult thought to reconcile. How do we balance the very real, broad benefits of beavers with the very real, personal costs that they can incur?
One way, simply, is to compensate people for their losses. A recent study found that a single acre of beaver pond can save us around $306 per year by reducing flood and drought damage, $77 per year in water quality remediation, $329 per year by providing habitat and $185 per year in greenhouse gas sequestration. This is in addition to the priceless benefits of protecting biodiversity and restoring our landscape to a more natural state. So if we collectively gain all of these things from the presence of beavers, wouldn’t it only be fair to compensate those who bear the costs of beaver damage? Maybe this could involve financially incentivizing people to install coexistence devices such as beaver deceivers. Or maybe installing beaver baffles could make you eligible for a tax break through the Current Use program.
How would we pay for this? Well, we could get creative. We could use some of the adaptation funding from Vermont’s Climate Superfund Act, if it survives litigation. Or perhaps a policy could be built into the net-gain wetlands rule required under Act 121, the Flood Safety Act, though that rule is still being worked out; lawmakers rejected the Agency of Natural Resources’ proposed version this spring. As currently written, the law requires that any permitted, permanent loss of more than 5,000 square feet of wetland be offset by restoring or creating wetlands at a 2:1 ratio. Maybe as a credit for some portion of this mitigation, permit applicants could contribute to a beaver coexistence fund that compensates Vermonters for new beaver baffles. Some of these ideas might need a bit more thinking through, but the point is that gaining beavers should be a net benefit for Vermont in the long run, and we should try to find ways to make that happen.
I also want to add that I’m not advocating for restricting people’s right to trap or hunt beavers, under a nuisance permit or otherwise. As an avid outdoorsperson myself, I know how seriously people take these rights, and for good reason. I am not advocating for restricting people’s ability to remove beavers from the landscape, but finding a way to incentivize them not to need to do so.
Ultimately, inequitable conservation strategies work for no one. So if we care about beaver restoration, let’s try to make it work for everyone.
