How We Won: Lessons Learned & Replicable Strategies for Changing Beaver Restoration Policies

How We Won: Lessons Learned & Replicable Strategies for Changing Beaver Restoration Policies & Practices Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center talk about their 20-year journey to change the way California approaches beaver restoration. They share the strategies and tactics they have employed over the years to achieve some massive changes in beaver policy and management. Change is possible! Get inspired and learn from their efforts what you can do to foment the beaver revolution in your region.  Kate Lundquist (she/her) co-directs the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute and the Bring Back the Beaver Campaign. Kate collaborates with landowners, communities, tribes, conservation organizations and resource agencies across the arid west to uncover obstacles and identify strategic solutions to conserve watersheds, recover listed species, increase water security and build resilience to the impacts of climate change. Kate works to catalyze the greater acceptance, funding and implementation of beaver and process-based restoration towards regenerating biological and cultural diversity. Kate is a co-founder and member of the California Beaver Policy Working Group and the California Process-Based Restoration Network (www.calpbr.org) and serves as a member of the Beaver Institute’s (www.beaverinstitute.org) advisory board. Brock Dolman is a co-founder of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (www.oaec.org), where he co-directs the Permaculture Program, Wildlands Program and the WATER Institute in Sonoma County, California. He is a wildlife biologist, permaculture designer and watershed ecologist and has been active in promoting the idea of Bringing Back Beaver in California since the late 1990’s. He is a co-author on both the 2012 & 2013 historic ecology papers published in the California Fish and Game Journal. He was given the Golden Pipe Award in 2012 by the Salmonid Restoration Federation: “…for his leading role as a proponent of "working with beavers" to restore native salmon habitat. With his Co-Director Kate Lundquist they have been busy as beavers working on Process-based Restoration education, training and policy change in California resulting in the historic creation of California’s first Beaver Restoration Program in 2022. Brock graduated in 1992 with honors from the University of California Santa Cruz in Agro-Ecology and Conservation Biology.