Who's bright idea is this? We now are going to have the crazies saying how grateful the farmers should be when beaver flood their farm fields.

https://news.yahoo.com/1st-midwest-beaver-summit-role-100000300.html?guccounter=1

We’re faced with flooding and drought in the same sentence

Don’t get me wrong I’m a fan of beaver.

I attended the virtual one they did out west back in October 2021, it was eye opening to see. It was hosted out of Colorado. Some of the information is educational, and good. But the theme is very much that beaver are ecological superheros and will save the world from drought issues/problems. They NEVER address the OVER abundance of beavers and damage that they can really do if not kept in check.

Google this, Beavers are found to be accelerating climate change in Alaska.

Beavers are their own worst enemy when not actively managed by trapping.
Beavers are a keystone species,and beneficial on the land when kept a healthy numbers that prevent them from degrading their own habitat.

I have yet to find a farmer here that wants them.

Here in northeast Indiana, we are saturated with beavers. Beavers live almost everyplace that has habitat and that people don’t actively keep them removed. They would most certainly turn this county back into 43% wetlands from its current drained condition of 3% wetlands in maybe a decade or two.
I have this discussion often with people. They say “beavers are the best thing for for the environment, and you are killing them!”. I say yes, they absolutely are one of the most beneficial animals to have in an ecosystem. But people have been draining and manipulating this ecosystem for 175 years, and now entire neighborhoods are built on land that was once wetlands or under water. There are many tens of thousands of acres of crops planted on land that was once wetland or water. So we are faced with the reality of that, and the discussion is more about land use and ecosystem manipulation than it is beavers. If we don’t control beaver, your grandparents 120 year old house, and your neighbors 150 acres of low ground, and many many roads, and on and on, will be unavailable for human use.

At this point in the conversation there is typically a silence while they think about that, and from there it varies. Some very few will say “people have screwed it all up, and deserve to lose all of that and the beavers should be allowed to restore the ecosystem to its pre-drained condition”. Those folks I don’t even bother any further discussion, just say well I disagree and move on. They are so far in the minority they aren’t really a force to be reckoned with.
Most will have some sense of reasonable consideration. With them I continue to explore the issue, letting them guide the conversation and using my knowledge of this ecosystem, and my position as they guy who is tasked with
solving problems that arise from OVERPOPULATION of beavers.
Then there is the average farmer. We don’t even have the conversation above, he says “I don’t care how you do it, drive yourself a path around my crop field to get back there, and stop those tree munching, mud shoving, buck toothed, tail smacking, bank eroding, feces eating varmints from flooding half my farm field and my sons house!”.
The end result of all those conversations is the same. The beavers causing the problem go bye bye.

They are trying to make beavers the new spotted owl for the pacific northwest. Private timber companies struck a deal with a governor's task force to disallow beaver harvest off of their holdings unless damage is substantiated. And in that case the beaver taken are not allowed to be skinned or utilized in any way.

Why did they do that? To get the antis off their backs so that timber harvests would be allowed without court orders against, or picketed on certain parcels. A deal with the devil.