3/11/26
Bros, sisses, sibs, etc: I have one thing to talk about this week and it’s the Pixar/Disney megacorporation feature film Hoppers. You have to watch it. I know people always say you don’t need to have kids of your own to enjoy a Pixar movie but in this case if you’re following this newsletter I’m extra saying it. I haven’t felt this seen by a piece of media since Sarah T. Dubb wrote a romcom about a sexy birding man.
Do you sometimes feel like you’re the only person you know in real life who cares about trees and streams and birds and beavers? Do you get angry and frustrated that in spite of all your work, you’re just one person and nothing seems to change and in fact keeps getting worse? Did you need to hear a message that in order for meaningful actions to occur you need to find common ground with people who will never see the world the same way you do, rather than fight them, hate them, and hope they lose and die alone?
That’s Mabel. I’m not going to spoil anything that isn’t in the trailer but the general setup is that she’s a 19 year old college student who has been trying to save animals her whole life, from rescuing classroom pets to defending the peaceful and wildlife-filled glade near her grandmother’s house from a new highway overpass. She discovers a method where human consciousness can be imported into a lifelike beaver robot and bing bang boom she’s a beaver now with 48 hours to save the glade.
I feel like we’ve seen this movie before, but not with the ecological heft that beaver scientist Dr. Emily Fairfax and environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager: The Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter bring (I think there were more advisors but those were the ones I know about). I can’t help but think that in addition to rap sessions about beaver life and how they work, there were some off the cuff discussions about how hard it is to be a natural resource professional. When I first saw the trailer and realized it was going to be about beavers, I was very excited. Then I was nervous that it wouldn’t do these waddling porkers justice. I’m so relieved to find that in the film they are as heroic as we know them to be. That would have been enough. I wasn’t expecting to be so overwhelmed with emotion to just see a message like this, without cynicism or a sense of doom, on such a big screen that so many people will see. I cried so much.
That’s the story of beavers to me. It’s one of our hopeful ones. These scaly-tailed beasties are hope personified (beaverified?) It’s hard to even comprehend what North America looked like before they were almost completely eradicated during the fur trade because of the top hats gentlemen wear in Jane Austen stories. The so-called fathers of ecology like John Muir and Aldo Leopold who eulogized a world they thought was unspoiled by humanity. But that vital and blooming environment they were singing the praises of was already deeply ill, as it was a post-beaver world. Somewhere between 100 and 400 million beavers used to roam this continent. Before reintroduction, there were less than 100,000 of them. They had no idea what an impacted environment it was.
By the way, there’s at least 10 million fuzzy flat-tailed bechompered swimmers in our waters today.
The entirety of the Silent Spring-inspired ecology movement in the 1960s that led to the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air and Water Acts, the National Environmental Policy Act, and many, many more also occurred in a continent where beavers were absent from the majority of our natural spaces. Our ideas of a healthy stream were wrong, our vision of what the arid American West could and should look like was, too. Beavers weren’t in Yellowstone between 1921 and 1986. California didn’t have a beaver relocation program until 2024, which blows my frickin mind. You can read about why in Eager.
Pixar movies take over 5 years to make. Just starting to make a movie is an act of hope. Work began in 2020. Do you remember 2020? Was it particularly hopeful? I remember it being not very. People showed up to work every day, or didn’t show up to work as a lot of us were not doing in those days, and spent 150 million American dollars with the assumption that in 2026 people would still want to hear a message about saving a neighborhood beaver pond. I submit that people need to hear that message even more today.
Wildlife crossings take 5-10 years to make happen. The Provo River Delta, which I’ve talked about here before, broke ground in 2020 and had a grand opening in 2024 (though there’s still some stuff they’re going to do). But planning and fundraising and grant writing started way before that. When I started work at my last job going to meetings and reviewing environmental documents for it, it was already well underway and that was in 2014. Those folks started planning not knowing who would be president at any point in the process, what war we would be in, or that there would be a pandemic during ground-breaking. Maybe that would have caused them to pause, but I don’t think so.
It’s always a bittersweet feeling to see brand new baby animals being born into a world like this one. The bird nests in the small patch of woods by our high school will be full of young fledglings and have no idea that on July 4 the night will be filled with earth-shaking explosions. They will be hit by cars and poisoned by oil, eaten by cats, their stomachs will fill with plastic and the mice they eat will be filled with rodenticide that will make them sick and weak and not know why. In spite of all this, animals don’t know how to not be optimistic. And maybe they’re right. Any given bird pair or adult raccoon has almost certainly raised more young to adulthood than I have. We need to stop letting them down.
Beavers probably don’t realize that building dams creates habitat for hundreds of other species, create fire breaks, retain water in dry places and help mitigate floods in wet ones; they only know that it expands the range they can safely find new wood to eat and cold water to store it in. They add another stick to a dam, slap some mud in there, and grab another stick. What else are they going to do? Not save the world? They’re not built that way.
I think that’s neat.