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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper looks at a group of activists collaborating with, and learning from, beavers to help prevent wetland desiccation. Reversing conventional hierarchies, in this work beavers are treated as skilled environmental engineers, and human activists assume the roles of their humble helpers.

Paper Abstract:

'Do as the beavers do!' was the advice I was given by a more experienced activist the first time I joined a beaver-dam reconstruction action, and was unsure how exactly to lay the next log on the dam we were building. This paper draws on my activist ethnographic work with a group of direct-action activists engaged in 'guerrilla' efforts to protect wetlands threatened by expanding real-estate and other projects in central and eastern Poland. I focus on the ways the activists observe the work done by beavers and explicitly learn from these rodents the skills of dam-building and hydrological earthwork. Reversing the conventional knowledge hierarchies between humans and non-human animals, in this work, the beavers are treated as experts in environmental 'engineering', while human activists assume the roles of their humble apprentices. Humans are no longer the masters, and other animals no longer the passive objects of 'conservation' or 'management'. An interspecies community of practice is thus created, that suggests a rethinking of available theoretical models of multi-species relations. While these have recently been crafted around ideas such as 'animal rights', 'animal sovereignty', or 'democratic representation', the human-beaver relation I'm observing resembles more anarchist models of community based on skill-sharing and direct action. Moreover, bearing in mind Lewis H. Morgan's 1868 thesis that early human societies had picked their basic technology up from beavers, this case invites a reflection on anthropology's own lost tradition of multi-species learning.