[Warning: long, two-part post ahead]On Tuesday, in an interesting demonstration of synchronicity, I wrote up some new news and finished reading an old book on Canada that improbably had a direct relationship with each other.
The news: the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s dismal Drought Report. The book: Eric Collier’s Three Against the Wilderness, an account of life in the wilds of British Colombia during the 1930s.
It’s no longer politically correct to be "against" the wilderness, but in fact Collier was far from being against his adopted home. He restored it, and therein lies some thinking for contemporary Australia and its drought-stricken bread bowl.
Collier’s story, in short, is this:
As a young Englishman, bored with his country and the legal profession his father wanted him to enter, he took off for British Colombia. He married a part-Indian girl, and put his taste for adventure fully to the test by becoming a fur trapper. He bought trapping rights to 150,000 acres of remote forest, and with his wife and infant son set off to make a living from muskrats, coyote, weasels, foxes and mink.
In these comfortable times, you forget how tough people can be.
Collier and his wife Lillian put up an earth-floored, sod-roofed log cabin in 10 days, and lived in it for the next 27 years. He describes winters when temperatures got down to -50°C and beyond, and stayed there for days. Birds froze to their perches, moose calves froze where they lay.
But so long as the temperature was "warmer" than -30°C, Collier still toured his traps on snowshoes and skis.
One animal never appeared in his traps: the beaver.
When Collier arrived on his trap run, penniless, in 1931, there wasn't a beaver for hundreds of square kilometres around, and very few in all of BC. There hadn't been for at least 30 years. Indians, their old ways of life broken, had hunted beavers almost to extinction in order to trade their pelts for white man’s tobacco and booze.
As a result, old beaver dams had collapsed by the time Collier arrived. Areas once covered with hundreds of hectares of lake banked up behind the beaver dams were now putrid, stinking marshes. Snowmelt from the mountains rushed down the narrow streams out to sea, leaving only a thin trickle of water in the stream through summer.
Collier describes his first survey of his new kingdom. It was raked by forest fires no longer checked by the lakes and damp ground that the beaver dams had created. The fur-bearing life he was looking for wasn’t there.
He wrote: "…after having spent five long days in the saddle, skirting the edges of the marshes and following the deer paths through the forest, and in all that time glimpsing no other furbearer's track except those of the coyotes (their tracks were everywhere), I summed it all up by declaring, 'It's hopeless'."
And perhaps it would have been if Collier was just a whinging Pom and his wife wasn't made of seriously tough stuff.
They started by rebuilding some of the beaver dams by hand. They used crosscut saws, wheelbarrows and a horse team, and rebuilt a beaver dam wall 100 metres long, to a depth of 1.5 metres.
As the dam filled, aquatic plants filled once-rank marshes and migrating Canada geese splashed down in the new-old lake. The couple rebuilt another dam, and then another, 25 in all. The muskrats came back, and mink, and a whole suite of life that hadn't been there in numbers for decades. The forest fires coming down from the mountains stopped at the Colliers' dams.
Downstream, the farmers irrigating the fertile flats of the Fraser River suddenly found the boom-bust nature of their water supply resolved. They still got the boom with the spring snowmelt, but no bust after the melt had run through. Snowmelt held back by the Colliers’ dams and marshlands percolated down the river through the summer, maintaining flow.
When a game warden visited the Colliers in 1941, he recognised the potential for environmental restoration. A few months later, the first car to reach the Collier cabin limped in carrying two pairs of beavers.
Nine years later, Collier reported, he began trapping beavers for fur. Beavers had spread not only through the lakes within the Collier trapline, but right through the vast Chilcotin wilderness.
"(The beaver's) dams held and conserved the water upon thousands of major and minor watersheds, subirrigating the soils around them, and keeping them cool and moist during the hottest days of summer," Collier wrote.
What Collier described is the "landscape hydration" that is being discussed in Australia, thanks to Peter Andrews of Natural Sequence Farming fame, and quiet achievers Peter and Kate Marshall.
Australia isn't Canada. We don't have beavers or a massive snowmelt or, thankfully, the cold. But we have let our streams and rivers become gutters that carry water off the landscape and out to sea with maximum haste.
That needs to change. More in tomorrow's posting.
(Continued...)
* Three Against the Wilderness is long out of print. Fortunately there seems to be plenty of copies available through online secondhand booksellers. I got my copy out of Brisbane via Abebooks.
Update: it seems a reprint is available. See comment from "william" below.
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