Never Cave to the Mob

A Big Flat Cautionary Tail

Beavers were once abundant in North American ecosystems. They transformed landscapes to such a degree that we tend to think of the American West as highly prone to both drought and fire, but this is, in fact, largely an outgrowth of humanity’s near eradication of these charismatic, social, flat-tailed rodents. When beavers were managing the ecosystems, things were different. The West didn’t seem so…apocalyptic. It tended more towards lush meadows and wetlands than to scorched earth and the charred corpses of trees.

A few hearty souls have taken on the challenge of trying to salvage the reputation of beavers, and to help them reestablish in American landscapes. Our waterways and water tables will begin to heal if we can learn to coexist with this persistent rodent. This is a big job, and not for the faint of heart.

Leading the charge for the last several years was a non-profit called The Beaver Coalition, which has recently reincarnated itself as Project Beaver. The man behind both organizations is Jakob Shockey. Jakob was a student of mine at Evergreen, and has been a friend for many years. Jakob taught me about beavers—among many other things—and I wrote about them in this space fourteen months ago. My goal then was to raise awareness of the central role that beavers have played in North American ecology, and also to direct people to Jakob’s work.

What happened behind the scenes after I published my piece was truly awful, and wholly unexpected by either Jakob or me. In retrospect, perhaps we both should have seen it coming.

As the maelstrom was still happening—as it would be for a long time to come—Jakob had this conversation on DarkHorse with Bret. It steers clear of the chaos, and it is well worth a listen.

A couple of months ago, I asked Jakob if he would like to reflect publicly about what had happened a year earlier. Neither of us had said anything to the world about it, although a careful observer might wonder why The Beaver Coalition had to die, only to be replaced by Project Beaver. Project Beaver has a Board that is far more anti-fragile than that of the previous organization, but otherwise, they seem to be doing very much the same work.

Jakob said yes. He wrote me a letter—a hand-written letter that he mailed to me by post, from his home in the Siskiyou mountains of southern Oregon. I wrote back, and he wrote me again, and what follows is that exchange, now in electronic form. It neither provides salacious details, nor does it name names. What it does do, however—and what Jakob does in his life—is provide for anyone who finds themselves the subject of a witch hunt, anyone who is suffering from attempted cancellation, a model of how to live with integrity and in truth.

Never cave to the mob.

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February 1, 2024

Dear Heather,

At three years old I met another little boy at a campout. We played. Our parents had similar interests so our friendship developed, carried on by inertia and the interests of children. He lived in the mountains above the Oregon coast—I was in the Siskiyous—so as we grew our parents took turns driving, at least twice a year, the four hours between our houses to drop off a kid for a week. At my house, he’d help pick apples in the fall, we’d go on rambling walks with my herd of goats and play jacks on the concrete patio. At his house, I saw my first beaver dam—he and his dad broke apart beaver dams to help the elderly neighbor keep water off the land where he pastured cattle. We drove around on a three-wheeler to look for those dams. I got to try driving once but jammed down the little accelerator with my thumb too hard and popped a wheelie. From then on I got to watch and he made fun of me about that for years.

I did a lot of watching at his house. He was six months older and possessed high-value resources like a BB gun and a trampoline. My role was to witness his prowess with these extraordinary objects, then he might let me have a turn.  In our early adolescence, his favorite activity became sitting at the family’s gray-plastic desktop computer to scroll through the photos posted to Myspace.com by girls he knew. I’d pull up a dining-room chair and make appropriate noises of approval at intervals. Bored, I remember considering his mouse pad—a flexible rubber square with rounded corners—a gift from the Go Army! recruiters at the county fair. Its cloth surface was printed with the photo of a soldier in a tan muscle shirt doing pull-ups and the words “Pain is Weakness Leaving Your Body!”

No, said my indignant fourteen-year-old mind, pain is your body signaling for attention; telling you to stop doing that before something breaks.

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This time last year was painful.

In the beginning, I was provided the opportunity to publicly condemn my friends, swear “I didn’t know” and offer apologies and loyalty oaths. (You have strayed from the path, but we may be willing to overlook it, if…)

Then, there was the rush of vitriol from my colleagues—outraged by my lack of shame and compliance. (Youare the problem! How can you be SO tone-deaf to your own hate-adjacency?)

Later, the last set of ultimatums and hostages, a parade of their power to destroy the organization, projects and relationships I’d built. (We wouldn’t have to do this if you’d behaved. This is for your own good and it hurts us as much as it hurts you.)

Last, follow-through on all the threats; calls and emails to collaborators, contractors, funders and advisors to warn them that I have a hate problem that they can’t discuss in depth. (Silence.)

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It is morning yet again, and as you stand in your banishment to ‘beyond the pale’ the living world rushes in and welcomes you back to the wilds. Birds sing and a female praying mantis pragmatically chews off her mate’s head while his coupled body continues to thrust. A red-tailed hawk spots an invisible thermal—launching from their perch in a straight vector and beating wings until they catch that warm swell and rise into clean air.

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Approval is not love—approval promises love if you act in a certain way. Like a bully who has caught up your arm behind your back and twists up toward your neck—those who “cancel” others use leverage, wielding approval to pry at your public sense of self. Of course, the secret of leverage is that it only works by pivoting against something substantial. In this, that fulcrum is your hope for future security.

As Helen Keller wrote:

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

The cancellation of a year ago tore away my public sense of self, assassinating my hopes with cold precision. “Cancelled” is a word that applies to business, commerce, and the digital ether—a living entity cannot be canceled —the word for that is killed. I was symbolically murdered in the world of social and status games, which left me without the expectation, coercion, and distraction of that culture. I was cast out into the mud and sticks of the real, breathing world with no public sense of self, no approval, and no hope of security—all those notions that made me prone to the manipulation of others were gone. I was freed.

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Big, financially successful nonprofits are in the morality game—regardless of what their mission says they will do in the real world. Civilization is killing the planet. The winning environmental nonprofits are in the business of selling absolutions for the soul.

This time last year was painful. I’d wake up every morning nauseous with stress—my body signaling that if this tension continued, something would break. Then it did. Even as our organization’s efficacy increased, board members resigned, contractors abandoned projects, and scientific advisors scattered like quail. Funders took back over $100,000, while others said they would no longer support us in the future. Upcoming high-definition media coverage in National Geographic and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom withered to dust. In hindsight, of course there was a clamor for the exit.

It had become clear that we were not in the morality business. Those who wanted to build a successful nonprofit left in disgust, leaving the rest of us to get on with our work.

We now wake up every day and go to work for life, not to build a living—and we are more effective than we’ve ever been.

Jakob

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February 26, 2024

Dear Jakob,

When the mob came for you last year, I hoped that I could make them go away. I thought, for a moment, that you just needed permission to give me up. If you prostrated yourself before the mob—allowing that I, formerly your professor and now your friend, was in fact a terrible person and that you had had no idea of my beliefs, none whatsoever, before facilitating me writing about the value of beaver in North American landscapes—maybe that would work. Perhaps, if you did this, you could escape the maw of the mob.

Shocking, really, that I had any such thoughts, given that I am all too aware of how mobs work, and that signs of weakness are met not with respect but with enhanced wrath. In truth, I don’t think that I believed that it would work. But I needed you to know that it would be okay with me if you threw me under the bus, to try to protect what you had built.

In deeper truth, I knew that you would never do it. That’s the thing about integrity. It shows itself in bad times more than in good. And I’ve seen you in both before this. After all, we’ve had some other difficult times together. Those weeks on and around the remote Panamanian island of Escudo de Veraguas, where you would go on to conduct ground-breaking research on the endangered pygmy sloth, was nothing if not exciting. And on domestic soil, do you remember climbing the Capitol building together in Olympia, during Occupy? In retrospect, all good times. At the very least, important times. But never, before last year, had the difficult times that we experienced together been entirely social in their construction.

After graduating from Evergreen, you built something so important and beautiful in The Beaver Coalition. You are that rare creature who seems equally comfortable in the analytical and creative realms, speaking both quantitative and qualitative languages, fully aware of the value of both logic, and of story. And you have a special skill for finding necessary, little known ecological truths—such as that beavers were once dominant in the American landscape, and if we welcomed them back, we would have less drought and fire—and pairing those truths with a deep sensitivity to the lives and concerns of the people who live on the land.

Perhaps this has no place here, but when I was your professor and you spoke of Lydia, your high school sweetheart who was in college far away on the East coast, I could hear in your words and see in your affect how deeply in love you were, and how loyal and honorable you were. When you were my TA one quarter, Lydia came with you on a field trip that we were running together, in the Columbia River Gorge. She was everything you had said. And now I have also met all but one of your children, whom both of you are raising to be full of curiosity and integrity, on land that you yourself grew up running almost wild on.

When Evergreen blew up on Bret and me in 2017, you were one of the first people to show up for us—virtually, that is, for you had graduated several years earlier. There was much distressing in that time, and surprising. People whom we thought were solid abandoned us, and others whom we hardly knew stood up in our defense, but some were no surprise at all. Of course you were staunch in our defense. Of course you were. That is the kind of person that you are.

When Bret and I lived in Portland you came to visit and gave us a tour of some of the beaver wetlands within the city, places that had been invisible to us. Previously subtle, now they were obvious. When I wrote about the beaver in early 2023, I hoped to draw attention not just to them, but to your work. And after writing my piece, I asked if you had any photographs of beaver that might go nicely with it. You directed me to someone on your Board, a photographer. That’s when it all went to hell.

She found me guilty of “spewing transphobic and hurtful garbage,” and engaging in “intentional disrespect” of others on twitter. Citing “respect and integrity” as core values of the non-profit that you had started, she then launched a war. I was not inside those battles, but it went badly very quickly. The mob had come for you, and there was nothing I could do to help. Everything you had built was at risk, because one of your Board members insisted that you acquiesce to a mob of her creation, and apologize for the opinions of your friends.

You didn’t.

And yet the reach of the mob is long. It comes with many heads and ravening claws and crazy eyes and it has secret meetings behind closed doors with those who have not yet chosen a side.

“You’re not one of them?” it asks of the uninitiated.

“Surely you’re on our side?” it continues, a scaly paw gripping the leg of its interlocutor, who has begun to grow wary.

“You wouldn’t want us to have to do this to you, now, would you?” The last question is rhetorical.

The toolkit of the mob is vast. In your letter to me you speak of the ultimatums and hostages, and when that didn’t work, the follow-through, via a whisper campaign as to your character: high-profile media projects died on the vine, grants were rescinded, and insinuations were made to people with whom you had built relationships over years. Some of those people then quietly disappeared from your sphere. Scared. Cowardly.

This mob, spun up from nothing by righteousness and vitriol, had as its only claim that you are the one living a life of hate. Funny, that.

And so from the ashes of The Beaver Coalition, you have formed Project Beaver. The Beaver Coalition is dead. Long live Project Beaver.

Yours in friendship and admiration,

Heather

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March 3, 2024

Dear Heather,

There was sunlight on the leaves outside your office at The Evergreen State College, refracting a rare green brightness into the second-story cube of glass and concrete, causing a fuzzy shadow to catch just behind the skull that sat on a smooth pine side table. A suspended moment, and I pivoted the spare chair to face you and your desk—to make my pitch. Later, after you’d agreed to this proposal, after the logistics of flights, buses and boats necessarily mediated by currency and clocks, another memory of sun on leaves.

A pygmy three-toed sloth dozed above in the canopy of a mangrove—her butt resting on a forking branch, one loose-elbowed arm stretched casually to a nearby limb. From my perch midway up that squat, saltwater-dwelling tree, I watched her at her afternoon nap—lulled into the present moment by the beauty of this novel reality. A gentle sea breeze rocked us. Less accustomed to sleeping in trees—I took out my pocket notebook. Two pieces of cardboard with a stack of thick drawing paper between; a spiraling black wire bound it together. There was an image of a fox on the cover. In the white space below its chin I’d written “Be aware.”

The beautiful thing about observing other animals is that they don’t talk; their behavior speaks to their motivations. Even the fox who chases its tail to lure in rabbits—or the duck who pretends a broken wing to lure away the fox—are honest in their deceptions. The arc of their actions tells a truth about their intent. Humans are no different really; we just talk a lot too. Our deceptions, often reliant on what is said, become as transparent as those practiced by foxes or ducks when you tune out the words and pay attention to actions.

You will remember we were warned not to associate with the indigenous people of Escudo de Veraguas by a PhD employee of the Max Planck Institute, who bragged about how he’d hired Noriega’s personal bodyguards (the deposed dictator of Panama) to protect him while he was on the island. He told us we would probably get robbed, how the Indigenous get violent when they drink, that there was a cemetery on Escudo as an outcome of their drunken fights. He only accessed the island using the powerful motorboats provided by the Smithsonian Institute, which enabled him to reach the island without stopping at any of the indigenous communities on the adjacent mainland.

We stayed in one of those communities, Kusapín, for over two months. The Ngäbe people were welcoming and curious. Nobody from the international research institutes had bothered to tell them that the sloths on that island were special or endangered. The Ngäbe asked for our findings in Spanish so they could use these to enact protections for the pygmy sloths in their indigenous Congress. They asked us why the other foreign scientists didn’t coordinate with them. We were the first to spend expedition dollars on local room and board, on guides and boat captains. And we never saw alcohol or drunkenness.

Later, as we were preparing our paper on pygmy sloths for publication, two PhD employees of the London Zoological Society reached out and asked to see the draft. They were getting ready to launch a “large conservation project” on Escudo de Veraguas; a vision that included stationing rangers on the island to protect it from the indigenous people of the area (an old tactic in a new location). I shared how we’d counted the sloths and would be publishing those population numbers, and advised them to coordinate with the locals. They assured me they had it handled, thanked us for sharing our methods, then went quiet. A few months later, after one of those same ex-bodyguards had dropped them back in civilization, their flashy media hit the internet proclaiming “We've collected data for the first time to get an accurate picture of how many pygmy sloths are left in the world."

It was a lie. And that man with all the trustworthy credentials who looked into the camera to claim this triumph, he knew it was a lie, as I’d emailed him the requested details on our earlier research just months before. Yet he looked into the camera with all the steady conviction of an expert and lied. While the deceptions of a fox are in the honest service of life—its own and its young ones—the tricks that people practice on each other are often base self-promotion. In this case it backfired. You wrote their supervisor, as did another mentor at that time—the renowned marine mammal researcher John Calambokidis. The liars outed, they quietly transitioned to other conservation projects.

Later, a famous television show by the BBC showed a pygmy sloth swimming in the seawater “to find a mate” as David Attenborough narrated. In all our time on Escudo, we never saw a sloth swim…The film crew that captured this magic footage was on the island just a few days, yet, somehow, they happened to spot and film a sloth swimming for land. The multiple camera angles and lighting are perfect, and the underwater shot from below as the sloth swims overhead—amazing!

Conservation is big business, a high-definition venture that features heroes using science to save cute animals. For this business model to work (and oh boy does it), the story is more important than the reality, the words more than the actions. The people who are still on the land find themselves cast as the villains in a play they haven’t auditioned for, uprooted in the name of conservation while the trustworthy experts catalog their “natural resources.” A sloth may get dropped over the side of a boat in service of a photo op.

With Project Beaver, we are attempting a different business model—one that is accountable to reality before words. Instead of spinning up stories to pull at heartstrings, our “product” is simply our good work in the real world. When we do tell a story, it will speak to our best understanding of reality.

This may not work. It is a special human who gives money to better the world for life. There aren’t that many of these people and organizations compete for their attention—since attention equals donations. In the race for attention, those who focus their resources on producing glossy media will win. However, there is a growing community of philanthropists for whom “telling the story” isn’t enough—they want their money to contribute to a better planet and they are tired of being emotionally manipulated for funds.

These are the people who are behind Project Beaver, and our agreement is simple; they entrust me with their money and I use it to support our mission in the most effective way I can. We listen to the people who are still on the land. We aren’t shy about using hypothesis-driven field science. We prioritize understanding reality.

In the end, being “canceled” was just noise, and it will probably happen again (and again)—to me, to you, to anyone who points out that the king is running around naked. If the punishment of cancellation is that truth-tellers are banned from that digital space where humans curate their own promotional deceptions; then great. Getting canceled only frees us from the distractions and subtle power games of that emperor’s court. It is an honor to accept this merit badge in Dumbledore’s Army—as a Yankee Doodle committed to the truth of the living world.

Jakob

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Please, dear readers—consider supporting Project Beaver—for our North American ecosystems, and for a man who has demonstrated his integrity, and dedication to truth, beauty and science, over and over again.

You can also follow Jakob on Substack and X.

There is life after cancelation. We can stand up for truth. And we can stand up for one another. In fact, we must.