You Can Do It (probably)
You’ve taken the first step already, today, by becoming curious about this strange, difficult art.
The good news is you’ve come to the right place, and there are lots of supportive people in the community, as well as an ocean of talent. Seriously —the sheer amount of genius piled up in one esoteric field is amazing, and I’ve never met more generous people.
The bad news is we’re currently a small community of rabidly committed people who are utterly buried, so please heed the following advice: you can best help us and yourself by coming with an offer of some sort, as well as an ask. This works because most of us have thousands of unread emails piled up and things falling off the back burner and down behind the stove, despite our best efforts.
So to stand out, an offer that’s large and immediately helpful to the PBR movement as a whole always goes to the top of the stack. Remember that piece—it doesn’t necessarily have to do me personally any good, or Swift Water Design as a company, it just has to help more good work get done faster.
The best offers are something like the following:
”I know a landowner with 50,000 acres who’s gotten beaver fever and wants to flood their entire property.”
”I’m an executive producer at the BBC and want to do a season-long series exclusively about beaver- and process-based restoration.”
“I own a major timber producing company and would like very much to grow a few hundred miles of wet green fire breaks.”
”I personally have a 7 figure checkbook and want to buy all you awesome beavers a hot springs somewhere so you can do laundry and sleep indoors every couple weeks, and park all your crap in the winter.”
“I’m the aide to Senator Bullsnort, who wants advice on where funding should go and what laws need to change.”
And so on. Because that’s what it’s going to take if we’re going to address the problem of riverscape degradation in anything like a time scale that’s meaningful to any human living now.
And because stuff like this panel happens ALL THE TIME, and none of this equipment or repair is free. Of course, if you’re already a beaver, then you go straight to the head of the class.
If you haven’t got a big offer yet, don’t worry.
It’s perfectly fine, we all start there, I started right there before we were even a company.
So feel free to ask any questions you’ve got, and know you’ll likely get some auto-replies, links, online resources, and the like at first, and I’m sorry about that. Really. I get that it sucks, and there’s just no way around it—all of my efforts to clone myself have failed.
This will be exponentially worse during field season, because coverage is spotty and after 8 hours behind a chain saw we’re going to want a camp chair and a beer more than another email. So work the process, take the links and resources seriously, and include indicators of self-directed progress in your email header (I just read build like a beaver/finished the USU PBR course/visited 10 beaver dam complexes) and somebody will definitely reach out.
What’s next?