Happy International Beaver Day

On the art of just getting started

It’s been a hot minute since I last wrote. The chaos of my own life combined with the chaos of the world all just got a little overwhelming for a while and even though the whole point of this Substack is to share my unraveling journey out in the open, I just didn’t know what to say.

I’ve started tens of pieces in the last few months. Some are angry, some are hopeful, some are downright weird and it’s probably for the best that they haven’t seen the light of day…

All that time, little did I know that what would get me writing again was beavers. And no, get your mind out of the gutter, I mean real life, toothy, dam-creating, water system-saving beavers.

You see, yesterday was International Beaver Day. This day was created in 2008 to celebrate these amazing creatures, and I love that it was the same year as the financial crash: a financial system collapses but an international day of beavers is born, the perfect antidote.

Beavers are amazing for a few reasons, all of which add up to them having a totally essential role in creating and maintaining thriving waterways (plus did you know they have orange teeth!? Which is probably not essential to the thriving waterways but is fun nonetheless).

But there’s one thing I want to focus on today. You see the thing with beavers is that they don’t have painfully circular strategy sessions, or all-hands meetings where the leadership team says thank you so much for your hard work but we’re firing half of you tomorrow and keeping the profits for our investors. They don’t have endless spreadsheets and data visualisations or lengthy application processes for planning permission.

They just get on and build.

I recently read a story about a region in the Czech Republic where a big dam-building project had stalled after seven years of planning because the necessary building permits couldn’t be acquired. Then, seemingly overnight, a set of eight beavers had just gone and made the damn thing (you see what I did there). They also saved taxpayers $1.2m in the process.

So really, the point of this piece is that in this age of crumbling systems where some people are clinging on to red tape and process and tinkering around the edges of an increasingly precarious and teetering global system, we should all be a bit more beaver.

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

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Ecosystem Engineers

Until recently, I had no idea how useful and important beavers are and how they fundamentally transform landscapes. It’s probably not surprising that I didn’t know, as in the UK we’d all but wiped them out. They were hunted to extinction in the 16th century for their fur and a secretion called ‘castoreum’, which used to be used as vanilla flavouring (I didn’t believe my friend when she told me this many years ago but she has since been roundly vindicated).

Ecologists call them "ecosystem engineers" because their work creates habitats that benefit countless other species. Their dams slow water flow, creating wetlands that filter pollutants, prevent flooding downstream, and create thriving ecosystems where previously there was just a stream.

They've been doing this for millions of years, and have outlasted the blip of our human interference to now make a major comeback. Seriously, it’s like the beaver reunion tour out here.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, the first pairs of wild beavers were officially reintroduced to Purbeck Heath in Dorset in the UK and the Welsh government is looking to follow suit. Humans created a problem: waterways full of literal shit; increased flooding; and major habitat loss leading to significant decrease in biodiversity. And now we're finally being wise enough to solve the problem by restoring nature’s own engineers, rather than trying to tech or spreadsheet our way out.

Okay, okay there probably were a few spreadsheets involved in making this happen but for poetry’s sake let a girl dream.

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From anxiety to action

I’ve talked a bit in this Substack about anxiety and my struggles with it since I quit my job and moved to Brighton a year ago. To be honest with you, it’s been pretty fucking crippling and has come for me in a way that I’ve never experienced before. It’s stolen my energy, my gratitude and my ability to make any decisions about anything.

I think it’s important to talk about because, at its root, anxiety is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of how things might play out (spoiler: when anxiety is calling the shots, things never play out well). I’ve read an awful lot about anxiety recently and it seems to all boil down to a protection mechanism to guard you against potential future pain. The killer thing is that in doing so, it causes you and those around you an awful lot of pain in the present.

Given the state of the world and our broken media system that feeds us only on stories of hate and greed, fear about the future is probably quite a reasonable response.

Yet this fear is paralysing us all, taking us out of our present lives and destroying our ability to come together to even begin to imagine a better future, let alone to expect one.

And then this morning, in one of the communities I’m in I saw someone post, inspired by the Rob Hopkins’ work on imagination, saying just how rarely we ask ourselves “what if things turn out okay?”.

What if, instead of letting fear cloud our every move, we were able to take just one step forward and say: “I don’t know exactly how this will turn out but chances are it will be alright. And, probably, the energy I’m spending on trying to plot out every next move and how everyone I know might respond to those next moves, and how I might in turn respond to those responses, might possibly maybe sometimes be better used elsewhere.”

What if we spent our energy on working out which is the best next step to take from exactly where we are, with the resources and information available to us, and maybe a little bit of instinct and intuition to guide us on the path? What if we didn’t need to know where we are going to end up when we start something?

If you’re anything like me, this winter has been hard. Trump’s inauguration in January has set us down a path that would have been unthinkable a few years ago and has brought into the open a lot about how the world works that used to sit behind closed doors. It’s harder and harder to close your eyes and ears to it and to bury your head in the sand.

But somehow, to so many of us, that feels less scary than doing something, anything new, where we get out of the safety zone of familiarity. Watching the world burn feels more doable than knocking on our neighbour’s front door and saying “hi, hello there, shall we have a cup of tea?”.

As spring is springing all around me, I, for one, am saying enough with this endless barrage of fear. Enough of the embodied terror that is anxiety, clutching at your stomach, your chest, your throat, and ruminating endlessly on every single thing that might go wrong.

What about the excitement and joy of thinking of what might, just possibly, go right? And what about the finding contentment in the journey?

Me finding a lot of contentment in a recent journey

Let’s just build, damn it

Which brings me to ACTionism (and also back to beavers).

I’ve recently got involved with a few folks who are championing the concept of ACTionism. ACTionism started life as a film, quickly became a magazine under the stewardship of Gavin Fernie Jones and is now, dare I even say it, feeling like the start of a movement.

ACTionism, “ack-shun-ism”: the art of finding your people and taking collective action.

The beauty of ACTionism is that it almost doesn’t matter what action you take, it just matters that you take one. I mean ideally you’re not taking the action of going outside and trampling your neighbour’s flowerbed, or the action of cutting millions of dollars of USAID, condemning millions of children to an unnecessary death in the process. Don’t do that.

But the point is it doesn’t need to be big.

It could literally just be a conversation with someone you wouldn’t normally speak to. Or looking for a local community group you could pop along to. Or not buying that new coat you had your eye on and mending something you already own.

And it just so happens to be your lucky day because if you’re reading this and feeling stuck for ideas, well, there’s a whole handbook full of them. There’s the story of Isabel Mack, who started The Party Kit network after getting really frustrated with all the waste she saw coming from children’s birthday parties. Or Lisa Matzi, whose journey to starting ‘Rebel Patch’ began with starting a book club.

And there’s even a couple of pieces by lil ol’ me.

It’s an exciting day actually, as the ACTionism handbook has just to print, to be shared round at community screenings of the film and spark conversations in real life. But it’s also available online.

In fact you can read it here. So there’s no excuse really.

Look, just click here:

I promise you that spending an hour of your time reading this will be a significantly better use of your time today than:

• Doom scrolling

• Regular scrolling

• Reading the news

• Doing your job (probably. Only you can decide this one but I’ll bet it’s true for a worryingly large number of people).

Hey, you can even split it into chunks if you don’t have a whole hour today. But when you’re looking at Instagram content later tonight, I want you to think about what you could be looking at instead.

And how does this all relate to beavers? How am I going to tie this whole thing together? Well, ACTionism and beavering have an awful lot in common it turns out. Here are a few lessons from our beaver friends that we can all be thinking about:

1. Don't wait for permission to solve problems that need solving

2. Work with what you have, where you are

3. Your actions will create space for others to thrive, in ways that you can’t even imagine when you start

4. The systems you build might outlast you (beaver dams can last decades)

5. You don't need to have the whole plan figured out to get going.

This is the essence of what I'm exploring with Unravelling Together and Uncommon Threads - how we can each find the energy to lay that first stick and start building the systems we need, rather than just critiquing the ones that are failing us.

Because what's the alternative? To keep waiting for the perfect conditions? To keep hoping someone else will build it for us?

I hate to break it to you but no one is coming to save you. No one has a magical answer or a blueprint of how we’re going to build the dam that will save us from the oncoming floods.

So I'm asking all of us to think of what seems on the surface a silly question but actually might hold the key to a life not in the thrall of fear and anxiety, but filled with the joy of taking action: what would a beaver do?

And the answer is always the same: Build. Create. Transform. One stick at a time.

What are you waiting for permission to build? Where could you be a bit more beaver in your life? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

And happy belated International Beaver Day. I wonder what we will have built this time next year…