Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature

Beaver Believers: How to Restore Planet Water

Mar 4, 2025

Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman, conservation enthusiasts from the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, dive into the vital role of beavers in ecosystem restoration. They discuss how these furry engineers enhance wetlands, support biodiversity, and even facilitate salmon habitats. Changing perspectives among ranchers now view beavers as allies, critical for combating climate challenges. The pair highlight grassroots movements, legislative advancements, and the cultural significance of beaver restoration efforts, emphasizing how working with nature can heal our planet.

29:36

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Episode guests

Brock Dolman

Kate Lundquist

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Beavers are vital keystone species whose dam-building activities create wetlands that enhance biodiversity and mitigate climate challenges.

Community-driven initiatives and grassroots movements are essential for raising awareness and promoting coexistence strategies for beaver conservation.

Deep dives

Beavers as Keystone Species

Beavers are recognized as keystone species due to their significant role in ecosystem health and water management. Their dams create wetlands that slow down water flow, helping to recharge groundwater, prevent flooding, and sustain diverse habitats for various wildlife. Beaver activity fosters a rich biodiversity by creating conditions conducive to life, as their engineering creates intricate ecosystems that benefit not only themselves but countless other species. Historical data indicates that beavers could have impounded a vast area of water in pre-contact North America, demonstrating their impact on shaping the landscape.

Intro

3min

The Keystone Beaver

13min

Coexisting with Beavers: Strategies for Restoration and Harmony

6min

Beaver Restoration: Changing Perspectives and Reviving Ecosystems

2min

The Vital Role of Beavers in Ecosystem Restoration

4min

In this age of global weirding where climate disruption has tumbled the Goldilocks effect into unruly surges of too much and too little water, the restoration of beavers offers ancient nature-based solutions to the tangle of challenges bedeviling human civilization. Droughts, floods, soil erosion, climate change, biodiversity loss – you name it, and beaver is on it.

In this episode, Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center share their semi-aquatic journey to becoming Beaver Believers. They are part of a passionate global movement to bring back our rodent relatives who show us how to heal nature by working with nature.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

Featuring

Kate Lundquist, co-director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign in Sonoma County, is a conservationist, educator and ecological artist who works with landowners, communities and resource agencies to uncover obstacles, identify strategic solutions, and generate restoration recommendations to assure healthy watersheds, water security, listed species recovery and climate change resiliency.

Brock Dolman, co-founded (in 1994) the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center where he co-directs the WATER Institute. A wildlife biologist and watershed ecologist, he has been actively promoting “Bringing Back Beaver in California” since the early 2000s. He was given the Salmonid Restoration Federation’s coveted Golden Pipe Award in 2012: “…for his leading role as a proponent of “working with beavers” to restore native habitat.