The evidence of how beavers protect land when wildfires burn through, and how they restore degraded ecosystems much faster and much less expensively than humans can, is piling up in a remarkable fashion. And it’s encouraging many projects to reintroduce beavers all across the landscapes that are most likely to burn – unsurprisingly, many of them are in California.

Heidi Perryman calls them the trickle down economy that works. “Let’s call them water savers,” she says. If you want water in your taps, there should be beavers in the mountains.