• Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
• WATER Institute
• Bring Back the Beaver campaign
• CalPBR

Before European colonizers arrived in North America, an estimated 60 to 400 million beavers managed 10 to 20 percent of the continent's waterways, creating vast wetland systems that filtered water, stored carbon, and sustained countless species. The fur trade nearly wiped them out, and centuries of additional damage from gold mining, clear-cutting, dam building, and fire suppression left most waterways compromised. In this session, Kate Lundquist, co-director of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in western Sonoma County, California, traces her two-decade journey of working to restore beavers to their rightful role as ecological partners.

Kate explains how beaver complexes act as speed bumps during floods, hold water longer into dry seasons, create firebreaks during wildfires, filter sediments and pollutants, and generate habitat for threatened species like coho salmon, willow flycatchers, and Cascade frogs. She shares the story of a Nevada ranch where simply removing cattle during the hot season allowed vegetation to recover enough for beavers to return on their own, and a California site where beavers expanded a wetland by 1,200 percent with minimal human investment. She also describes the policy breakthroughs her team helped secure: California's first beaver depredation policy requiring landowners to try coexistence before lethal removal, a beaver bill codified into state law, and the first beaver translocations in the state in nearly 75 years, carried out in partnership with the Tule River Tribe and the Maidu Summit Consortium.

Throughout, Kate invites viewers to look at their own watersheds and ask which keystone species they might partner with to accelerate restoration.