How can one furry critter can help us restore wetlands, protect biodiversity and mitigate both floods and fires.
Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist will shared their insights on beavers’ beneficial role as ecosystem engineers, and lessons from their successful support of a recent state-led Beaver Restoration Program in California. Watch the recorded event.
As WATER Institute Co-Directors from the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC), Dolman and Lundquist have been working to provide education and advocacy for healthy watersheds and the pivotal role beavers can play for many years. After successfully championing beaver reintroduction, they are seeing beavers released in the wild in CA for the first time in nearly 75 years, in collaboration with tribal partners from the Maidu Summit Consortium.
Kate Lundquist co-directs the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign. Kate collaborates with landowners, communities, tribes, conservation organizations and resource agencies across the arid west to uncover obstacles and identify strategic solutions to conserve watersheds, recover listed species, increase water security and build resilience to the impacts of climate change. Kate works to catalyze the greater acceptance, funding and implementation of beaver and process-based restoration towards regenerating biological and cultural diversity. Kate is a co-founder and member of the California Beaver Policy Working Group and the California Process-Based Restoration Network (www.calpbr.org) and serves as a member of the Beaver Institute’s (www.beaverinstitute.org) advisory board.
Brock Dolman is a co-founder of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (www.oaec.org), where he co-directs the Permaculture Program, Wildlands Program and the WATER Institute in Sonoma County, California. He is a wildlife biologist, permaculture designer and watershed ecologist and has been active in promoting the idea of Bringing Back the Beaver in California since the late 1990’s. He is a co-author on both the 2012 & 2013 historic ecology papers published in the California Fish and Game Journal. He was given the Golden Pipe Award in 2012 by the Salmonid Restoration Federation: “ …for his leading role as a proponent of “working with beavers” to restore salmon native habitat. With his Co-Director Kate Lundquist they have been busy as beavers working on education, training and policy change in California resulting in the historic creation of California’s first Beaver Restoration Program in 2022. In 1992 he completed his BA in Agro-Ecology & Conservation Biology, graduating with honors from the University of California Santa Cruz with the Biology Department and Environmental Studies Department.
This is the latest installment in our Life Saves the Planet lecture series, and it will be recorded by our partners at GBH Forum Network.