An Update on Strategic Beaver Deployment
Stop giggling. You're not 12.
Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.
And that includes showing you how a futurist doesn’t pay attention to the Big Story of the Week and instead pays attention to a game-changer under way that may generate lots of other game-changers later.
If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while you know that futurists read/watch the news for trends and for game-changers.
The Iowa primaries contained no game-changers and was simply the continuation of a trend: Trump’s march to the GOP nomination. So I paid zero attention to it, the biggest political story of the week.
Instead I’ve been paying attention to snow, the Supreme Court, and beavers. But not mixed together because that would be weird.
Why snow? Because in the Washington, DC area we actually got some and the kids got a snow day out of it. My kids haven’t had a deep-snow winter, though, since Snowzilla (January 2016) when they were so little we bundled them up so thick they couldn’t move and they rolled off the back of the sled like potatoes. And Snowmageddon (Feb. 5-6, 2010) and its sequel Snowmageddon: Snoverkill a few days later (Feb. 9-11, 2010) predated them. And nobody in this area can forget Clusterflake (Jan. 26, 2011), the sudden ice storm one weekday afternoon that paralyzed every road in the region into the overnight and created the Commute When Hell Froze Over.
So a few days ago the mere chance that we MIGHT get 2-3 inches of snow and an actual SNOW DAY had me in full futurist mode studying every update from the weather models like they were the Zapruder film. And we might get 0-2 more inches of snow tomorrow. I. Might. Make. Chili.
I just want one good deep snow for my kids to play in. If we get a really good blizzard sometime soon I’m going to call it SnowMyGod. I’m naming it right now.
I remain on the lookout.
Why the Supreme Court? SCOTUS has started writing the next season of its suspense-filled streaming series, AAAAAAAAGGGGHH!!! (It will be on every news channel this June.) While I’ll deal with the next season more fully in a future newsletter because there may be a few game-changers in there for the future of the country, yesterday SCOTUS heard oral arguments in a case challenging federal agencies’ authority to interpret laws relevant to their agencies’ domains whenever the law is ambiguous or could have multiple meanings. For-basically-ever federal agencies — because they’ve held the substantive expertise on, say, food safety, drug safety, etc. — were trusted to interpret ambiguous laws regarding, say, food and drug safety regulations. The folks challenging federal agencies’ authorities on this want those decisions returned to the courts… where hijinks could ensue.
While there’s a lot to unpack on this, this futurist — because he believes that infrastructure, many public safety regulations, and the general lack of typhus serve as platforms for growth — reflexively worries about cases like this, though he may be wrong and wants to devote more thought to this for a future newsletter for you.
In the meantime here’s The Hill’s pretty even-handed roundup of the back-and-forth in those oral arguments yesterday as well as PBS NewsHour’s report in case you want previews/spoilers. Both are especially good summaries worth reading/watching closely.
Why beavers? A few months ago I told a couple of stories of how futurists have learned from instances where governments emergency-parachuted various mammals into wilderness areas. (Yes, you read that right.) I started with a strategic cat deployment (by air) in the 1950s by the World Health Organization and a strategic beaver deployment (also by air) in the 1940s by the state of Idaho. (I also told the story of The Great Emu War in western Australia in 1932 which was — to use a professional-writer term — amazeballs.)
It turns out there’s an update on the state of California’s efforts to figure out how to capitalize upon beaver behavior and placement. California, along with beaver researchers at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere, and a Google real-estate sustainability engineer are now trying to study beaver positioning and activity in the United States to assess to what degree beavers are naturally combating soil erosion, etc. so they can form a beaver deployment strategy at the state level to fix stuff.
First, the real news here is that “beaver researcher,” “beaver scientist,” and “Google real-estate sustainability engineer” are actually real jobs. Someone should alert every high school guidance counselor in the country — stat.
Second, what some guys at Google and some outside beaver scientists are doing is building a machine-learning algorithm that goes through satellite imagery to identify probable beaver dams across North America to get a baseline on beaver population, dispersal, size-and-effectiveness of their dams, etc. (Smart people in beaver studies realized relatively recently that beaver dam wetlands not only provide refuges for wildlife during California wildfires, those wetlands sometimes stop wildfires in their tracks. And some of those dams and wetlands can now be seen from space by commercial imagery. Like imagery Google has on Google Earth.) This baseline by itself would be an epic boon to nature conservationists, firefighters, American agriculture, every insurance company in the world, and more. A major solution to soil erosion, ecological, and fire-control problems may have been under our noses all along. Or under their noses, rather. The beavers’ noses, I mean. Where, you know, their big beaver teeth are. Anyway, you take my point:
Strategic beaver deployment could be a game changer for many industries and localities in many parts of North America.
So.
Beyond the usual search for trends, futurists look for these sorts of game-changers in every industry, country, venue, and “world.” Because if one of those game-changers happens then the future you get won’t be the one everyone expects or the one every cynic knows will come true.
Breaking: My wife informs me that if I say the words “strategic beaver deployment” one more time every 12-year-old boy in the metro area will snort milk out their noses at the school lunch table today and because of that they’ll catch pneumonia from playing in the snow tomorrow. So — for public health reasons — I’ll stop here except to say (1) Grow up, (2) I’ll see you next week, and (3) if in the meantime you need 45 seconds of a beaver eating cabbage, here you go. You’re welcome.
I'm a beaver believer! Thanks for the awesome news!