Beaver Management

In her NY Times column yesterday, Maureen Dowd channelled that crusty old twat John McCain and his odious, anti-eco attempt (via Twitter, no less!) to derail the beaver bandwagon and its Washington gravy train by berating/belittling this most important stimulus package proposal:

• $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi.

Today, one of Andrew Sullivan's more informed and compassionate readers chimed in with some common sense in its defense:

I'd like to take a moment to point out that the so-called beaver management is a legitimate piece of infrastructure spending. I spent nearly a year with the Washington Conservation Corps, and this was one of our tasks. We all know that beavers are really good at two things: chewing down trees and building dams. Combined with the fact that many streams are rerouted to accommodate roads and drainage systems, ignoring these furry engineers will lead to logs falling all over the place, blocked drainage and washed out roads. Tearing out these dams and installing counter-measures known as "beaver deceivers" is a time and labor intensive project. I don't have to tell you that repairing flooded roads and homes is even more expensive.

Yes, I can understand that the state of Arizona doesn't have too many beavers swimming around, but it's not that difficult for Senator McCain to ask about.

Bravo!