[nrfulton]

My take-away from this story is almost the opposite of yours. Nature provides a lot of valuable resources, and this story is a beautiful example of how failing to properly steward our natural environment can be extremely expensive.

> Instead, they were planning it, fighting bureocracy and wasting money for years.

I do not know anything about CZ or about this project, but jumping to "waste" seems excessively pessimistic.

It could just be that the agency's budget is finite and this project is low priority in the organization's capital projects prioritization. Just because they first planned this project 7 years ago doesn't mean they have been actively working on it continuously for the last 7 years...

This is common even in tiny economic units. E.g., I planned out our family's new furnace setup a couple of years ago, but probably won't actually allocate capital to that upgrade for another few years. In the meantime, I promise I am not spending all day every day thinking about our furnace. Just because a project takes 7 years from start of planning to finished project doesn't mean that there were 7 years of work there :)

> If the beavers built it in two days, it means that half a dozen men could have easily built it at an extremely low cost in a week.

That really depends on what you mean by "it".

I got to watch a beaver dam go up recently. Not the active work, but regular snapshots of the build site, as it were. I will use that as a case study.

If the goal here is to literally build a beaver dam, then probably you're correct. The dam I saw go up is small and built out of pretty small trees. Maybe 3-5 inch diameter. Softer wood. I think a small group of humans with very cheap tools could make quick cheap work of felling and moving the trees.

As for the dam itself, they'd figure something out. But I am skeptical that most teams would be able to build a like-quality dam out of felled trees and found materials. Beavers are dam good at what they do.

More importantly, though, building a more typical modern human dam in that same location would not be cheap or fast. You would easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cutting and blasting a path before you could even get concrete to the worksite. There's no way the entire project would be done in a week. It definitely wouldn't be low cost no matter the schedule. Getting it done in a few weeks would be... probably possible, but a logistical tour de force and astronomically expensive. This is all just talking about the actual work, ignoring government permitting entirely.