Bringing beavers back to the landscape

On a sunny autumn day, in a beautiful little slice of Montana, two people bob up and down in the chest-deep water of a beaver pond wrestling with a giant tube attached to a fence. Their names are Elissa and Elyssa, which I know can be confusing, and they are both some of the leading experts in western North America on protecting human infrastructure from beavers.

The giant tube Elissa and Elyssa are wrestling runs through a notch in a broad, decades-old beaver dam. Pretty much as soon as the pipe sinks down into the beaver pond upstream of the dam, the downstream end of the pipe starts spewing...