6
Free Play
Beavers
After a few weeks of living in the lodge’s embrace, three young Beavers are ready for the plunge. Attended by their parents and older siblings, they dive through the lodge entrance that leads from the inner sanctum to the watery world outside. One young Beaver hesitates, unsure, less confident than his siblings. His family urges him on. This reassurance is just what is needed, for within a few moments, he dives down and out. Before long, all three babies are slapping and splashing without knowing how or why, just that it feels good. Siblings and parents circle near, watchful. Keeping an eye on their young and looking out for a Wolf or Coyote at the same time requires attentive presence. It’s easy to lose track of danger in the midst of the children’s first day of outside play. The furred water babies, chasing, diving, watching, and wondering at the fantastic new world, laugh with joy in the way only Beavers can.
Play is pervasive in Nature1 and is found across Animal phyla.2 Young Wildlife lives are filled with social play as part of their self-development and self-organization. Ethologist Gordon Burghardt, who has studied species as diverse as Crocodiles, Snakes, and Bears, describes play as something that is initiated under stress-free conditions. It is voluntary, functionally incomplete, extensively modifiable by the players, and iterative, but not stereotypic (referring to repeated gestures and actions that emerge from and are related to stress and discomfort).3
Self-directed free play is spontaneous and pleasurable, with rough-and-tumble activities including climbing, wrestling, and chase involving the entire body-mind complex. It is imaginative and invented on the fly, and it does not include organized sport or children’s activities that adults direct. Play occurs when the person is relaxed, promoting a sense of belonging and a feeling that all is right in the world.4 Free, self-directed play is also fundamental to growth. All Animals play when they feel safe and well.5 When play is absent in a young Animal’s life, it signals illness, fear, anger, or other states that keep the individual disconnected from the rest of life.6 Play is one way for the young to learn how to be a member of their species.7
Recently, scientists have started to pay more attention to play and how it influences brain development. Self-directed play has epigenetic effects, affecting expression of more than 1,200 genes.8 It activates both subcortical and neocortical areas that are responsible for diverse cognitive processes and spatial reasoning.9 Social and self-directed play and exploration prompt secretion of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is vital for neuronal growth and maintenance.10 Dopamine, the energizing hormone indicating positive anticipation and prosocial enhancement, is also secreted during play.
Effects of play extend to other aspects of life and living. Social free play cultivates empathy and increases sensitivity and perceptions of emotions in others.11 This affords opportunities to balance autonomy and social engagement. By developing appropriate patterns of self-regulation—emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically—a growing child becomes increasingly well-tuned to their community, culture, and overall environment. Better tuning leads to better functioning, better social skills and understanding, and better ways of navigating the environment in which they live. Self-initiated free play with others is integral to humanity’s evolved nest heritage.12
Industrialized human societies, however, have turned away from play to a work-dominated culture, encouraging even its very young to labor instead of play. As our Animal kin demonstrate, however, play and work are intertwined. Although Wildlife must work very hard to make a living, play is central to their lives, in the young and the old—even among those regarded as exemplar workers. A good example is the Beaver. Perhaps above all species, other than the “busy Bee” or the Ant, Beavers are considered to be the most work-oriented species. “Hardworking” and “tireless” are almost synonymous with Beaver life and culture.
The planet’s second-largest rodent (South America’s Capybara is the biggest) has played an amazing, positive, and essential role in cocreating healthy lands and water.13 The plentitude of Beavers in Canada and the United States, before their mass eradication, had an enormous effect on stream morphology and aquatic processes. Beavers sculpted both large and small rivers throughout Turtle Island (North America) into a complex mosaic of pools and networks of anastomosing channels. North America was no untouched garden when colonizers arrived. Its beauty and peaceful coherence reflected the prosocial relationships that Indigenous humans and Wildlife cultivated with the rest of Nature.14 Beavers are just one of Nature’s cadre of artists whose hands—and, in this case, teeth—have been instrumental in constructing the awesome landscapes that first greeted European eyes.
At the center of Beaver culture is a dynamic compound co-constructed with Nature and perfected over millions of years. The central purpose of this complex, made of branches, water, leaves, and mud, is to ensure the safety and well-being of Beaver communities. This physical nest comprises four main parts: the lodge, a pond, canals, and the iconic dam.
The dam is a cornerstone in the architectural Beaver complex. Dam construction reduces streamflow and creates a pond where Beavers build their lodges. To an untrained eye, a Beaver dam may appear to be just a random pile of wood and earth, but it is far more than that. Taking advantage of natural riverine bends, benches, and banks, dams take form bit by bit as Beavers bulldoze sediment and rock to form a ridge or build on one already in existence.15 Expertly cut branches, saplings, leaves, woody debris, and more mud are added for fortification. Sapling stems are fashioned into points by the Beaver’s iron-fortified yellow-orange teeth and deft five-fingered hands. These wooded buttresses are carefully oriented and pushed into mud on the downstream side to anchor the construction.
Beavers are amazing architects. The number, size, and type of dams in a colony vary with climate, stream dynamics, vegetation, and other factors. They are built to optimally conform to Nature’s contours. Sometimes, in mountainous regions where streams are narrow, Beavers’ successive dams are built in a staircase fashion;16 in other locales, “wings” and secondary dams are added and attached to the main structure to help with any overflow.17 Working with, not against, Nature’s grain is both more successful and more efficient.
Like any good engineer, Beavers maintain an attentive eye on dam integrity.18 Using their famous patterned and powerful tails as a rudder and webbed back legs to paddle, male and female Beavers patrol the length of the dam top to bottom, searching for and repairing any damage. Stream levels and patterns can shift radically with drought or floods and threaten pond and lodge strength and durability.
Safety is foremost. A strong dam is a crucial line of defense; it must be able to weather the elements during seasonal cycles and maintain sufficient pond depth throughout the year. The pond is not just a pretty fixture in the Beaver nest complex; it plays a core strategic role. Ponds extend protection from carnivores, such as Wolves, when Beavers are conducting their activities. The dam-pond-canal-lodge architecture allows Beavers to leave and return, from home to work, while retaining a relatively unbroken protective cover.
Pools have to be deep enough to cover the lodge entrance. These underwater doorways open into the pond below the surface, which reduces risk from attack by making it possible for Beavers to come and go protected by the cover of water. To deepen a pond and increase its efficacy, river bottom sediment is often excavated upstream. Some lodges have more than one entrance. This provides response flexibility in the case of an attack or other emergency. Beavers also dig interconnected canals—safeguarding underwater roads—that extend outside the pond to trails and slides leading to areas of forage.
Beavers are premier planners. They love contingency plans such as food caches.19 During winter in frigid locales, caches are sources of nourishment when streams freeze. The family pulls together large branches and small Trees to make a raft under which gathered foodstuffs are placed. Over time, raft limbs become sodden and then sink, pushing the food down to the stream bottom, where it lies until needed. Leafy Willow branches are added near plunge holes as handy snacks.
While Beavers also make burrows in riverbanks, all the effort that goes into dam and canal construction and maintenance is directed toward securing a safe home for the family. The dam-made pond and canals are functional mechanisms that make the heart of Beaver family and culture—the lodge—possible. A Beaver lodge may be built in open water or can extend out from a pond or riverbank. As with other aspects of Beaver life, there are as many variations on the theme as there are Beavers.
To create the lodge, Beavers artfully pile sticks and branches high enough to peak well above waterline, keeping in mind that the height of water will vary with the seasons. To increase structural coherence, protective capacity, and insulation, Beavers paste on river bottom sediments, always being mindful to retain sufficient porosity to permit free flow of air within the lodge’s inner quarters. Vents keep the lodge interior dry and supplied with fresh air. When water levels begin to drop, Beavers fortify the dam to keep the door covered and to maintain plenty of pond water for safe underwater travel.
Beavers are good citizens in the community. Beaver construction accommodates others in the neighborhood as well as their own families. Ponds are a rich habitat for diverse Fish and other aquatic fauna and flora, and the associated lodge can provide a handy and safe location for Bird nests, such as those of Canada Geese. When a pond drains, either after its residents have left or because of a shift in climate, nutrient-rich meadows and wetlands provide homes and resources for Frogs and diverse Insects, not to mention innumerable other organisms.20
Woven into this carefully designed architecture is the web of Beaver familial and friend relationships that turn the Beaver complex into a living, breathing, loving community. Similar to the cultures of Elephants and Sperm Whales, Beaver culture is nucleated by the family unit. Beavers live, work, and play in community. At any one time, a lodge is occupied by an extended family: usually an adult pair, young Beavers less than a year old, Beavers aged one to two years, and on occasion, Beavers older than two years. In large lodges, there may be more than one family group.21
Beavers openly show emotions—kissing and expressing deep love for their lifelong partner—and a commitment to care for their families and other nonpredatorial neighbors.22 After Beavers find and fall in love with their lifelong partner, and the female becomes pregnant, she will give birth to several babies after three months. Birthing is an event anticipated by the entire family. While lodge maintenance is ongoing, several days before the birth the lodge interior is readied by plastering it with mud, gnawing down protruding branch ends, and covering the nest floor with soft edible Grass or wood chips. Father Beaver and yearlings, while periodically leaving to retrieve food and supplies, spend extensive time in the lodge with the pregnant mother.
There are layers of evolutionary underpinnings that contribute to how and who a Beaver becomes. As Mammals, Beaver infants are dependent on mother’s milk and require extensive periods of companionship care. Similar to many Bird species,23 Beavers lie somewhere along a developmental continuum, having both precocial and altricial traits. Baby Beavers, for instance, are born with open eyes, can eat solid food in a few days, and are, while a bit awkward, ambulatory. Young Beavers nurse and remain in the lodge for four to five weeks before emerging into the watery part of their world.24
Every species has evolved its unique nest—processes and structures that provide their babies with a microenvironment perfectly suited for optimal growth and health—and the Beaver is no exception. The physical Beaver nest is exquisitely tailored to meet the baby’s internal and external needs, as well as to provide companionship care for baby Beavers. The lodge provides what all young require and what is essential to early care: warmth; food; responsive, loving relationships; safety; and more—in essence, companionship care.
Similar to infant Brown Bears born in the den, time spent in the Beaver lodge is an intense period of development and learning for young Beavers. They learn verbal and body language, social mores, how to groom, and emotional and social intelligence—abilities to regulate their feelings and interactions with others appropriately. They stay in proximity with parents and siblings in the intimate quarters of the lodge, which provides the first stage of evolved Beaver nesting. If a baby somehow falls into a plunge hole, a babysitter is always at hand to scoop him out and back into warmth and safety. Infant Beavers can swim, but they are too immature and buoyant, lacking the fur’s waterproofing oil that develops later and protects them from cold water. When an adult’s or adolescent’s babysitting shift is completed, the babysitter remains until their replacement arrives. Infant Beavers not only learn from their parents but also learn from their one- and two-year-old siblings. This is another example of communal care that provides well-rounded sources of information and affect. Just like human children in evolved nest conditions, Beavers learn by observing and then pitching in, growing into community membership.25
The next stage is a journey to water life, where young Beavers learn how to stay submerged and begin to get acquainted with the pond habitat. When they do take to the water, youngsters are always accompanied by family members as they explore and hone their swimming, foraging, and perceptual skills. At two years of age, the young Beavers begin to expand the family business: dam and lodge building.
While much of the Beavers’ family focus is on the care of the young, there are many tasks to accomplish. The family is kept busy “washing” Grass bedding or adding wood chips to the lodge floor. This entails scraping it out from the lodge floor, soaking it in water until it is clean, and returning it inside.26 In addition, family members bring back nutritious food, fortify the dam, and last but not least, spend time socializing, grooming, snuggling, and playing. A lot of learning occurs through play, both the self-directed variety and that conducted with other members of the group. Play engages the young in Beaver ethics and manners, which cultivate inner and social trust. Naturalist Enos Mills, founder of Rocky Mountain National Park, provides a snapshot of young Beaver play:
Beavers have great fun while growing up. . . . They nose and push each other about, ofttimes tumbling one another into the water. In the water they send a thousand merry ripples to the shore, as they race, wrestle, and dive in the pond. They play on the house, in the pond, and in the sunshine and shadows of the trees along the shore. . . . Beavers grow up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the brilliant flowers and great boulders, in the piles of driftwood and among the fallen logs on the forest’s mysterious edge. They learn to swim and slide, to dive quickly and deeply from sight, to sleep, and to rest moveless in the sunshine; ever listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water, living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich autumn’s hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days.
Perhaps intending to underscore his own appreciation of play and leisure and remind other humans about the nature of a good, nested life, Mills goes on to add: “Justly renowned for his industry, the beaver is a master of the fine art of rest.”27
Today’s human world has lost this culture of spontaneous play and a sense of its importance. Much of today’s industrialized, technology-centered human culture remains dominated by a work ethic. Everyday life and social interactions are pressured by career demands, for both economic and cultural reasons. Unlike traditional, Nature-based communities where play, Nature, family, and daily tasks are integrated, the rearing and care of children are “managed,” rather than nurtured, in order to fit around work schedules.28 Children’s time and activities are increasingly structured and intensified via schoolbook learning, with the result that playtime is diminished.
Free play has been marginalized in comparison to activities and goals designed to teach people how to “get ahead” in life. Similar to the commons, spontaneous play is frequently cordoned off and limited to certain spaces and circumstances such as “play time,” theater, formalized dance, jokes, or other collectively accepted exchanges. In a work-obsessed society, play is often ridiculed unless one is in a creative field or situation. Play is fragile; the flow of its intrinsic creativity can quickly shut down if there is associated pain, threat, or anger. In a highly stressed or traumatized population, play and playfulness of spirit can be easily quenched.
Although modern human society typically contrasts play with work, play is not the opposite of work. Extensive observations of foraging societies around the world demonstrate that creativity and “fun” are, as Jean Liedloff perceived during her sojourn with the Ye’kuana, blended with work in everyday activities.29 This universalism suggests that play is not just for kids, not just important in early life, but something that benefits everyone throughout life.
Neurobiologically, play is one of the best ways to grow the brain’s right hemisphere, even in adulthood.30 Social free play keeps one in the present moment, growing systems governed by the right hemisphere, which include self-regulation of various kinds and intersubjective responsiveness (emotional presence with others).31 Children who do not play enough are more likely to be aggressive.32 Similarly, adults who did not play often as children show high levels of aggression.33 Undercare in early life (lack of evolved nest components) is usually associated with an inability to regulate intense emotion,34 in part because nested care modulates neurohormones that are associated with the capacity to control thoughts, feelings, and actions at multiple levels, psychologically and physiologically (e.g., autonomic, neuroendocrine).35
Synchronization with caregivers and others, which play requires, helps a child organize self-regulatory capacities.36 All self-regulation systems are beneficially affected by play, such as impulse control, delay of gratification,37 and emotion regulation.38 Self-directed play strengthens neural networks in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is involved in regulating emotions and in directing executive functions such as solving problems and making decisions.39 Play facilitates the growth of an adaptive physiology—the ability to adjust to the situation at hand, such as increasing heart rate under challenge or decreasing heart rate when in a relaxing situation—as part of a healthy personhood.40
There are other ways that play acts to enhance a child’s health.41 Full-body self-initiated play fosters self-discovery through the development of self-manifesting-in-the-world through proprioception and exteroception. Young humans and Animals discover how their bodies work and how to use them, and in response, their motions and gestures provide feedback to their brains. While observational learning from parents, alloparents, and other relations in the community is vital, self-directed social play is crucial for brain development because it provides opportunities to try out new ways of moving, seeing, and interacting with others within the neighborhood. These interactive experiences fortify and expand neural connections; what is experienced in the external environment translates to the interior world. Play is a somatic, formative exploration that allows a child to build know-how for getting along in the social and ecological environment in which the child is living and interacting. Exciting—and sometimes challenging—explorative experiences communicate ongoing dynamic situational information to the brain, generating new skills and refining being and meaning.
Young Beavers watch their parents cut a branch and pull it into the water, and then they imitate the moves, making the same motion in the air. When a young Beaver watches her father swim by a Lily pad, pull it off, roll the pad up, and eat it, she learns how to do this herself by grabbing the stem and pad, wrestling with it, playing with it, and biting into the leaf.42 Over time, Lily play becomes a foraging skill. Through emulation and play, a young one fine-tunes motor skills, coordination, and overall health, integrating mind and body.
Importantly, self-directed social play fosters alteroception. It is intrinsically relational. Social play is a gentle way of cultivating patterns of cooperation (versus competition), effective communication, and conflict resolution—all skills and understandings that are essential throughout life. Playfulness contributes to social bonding and enhances a culture of peaceful cooperation. The players must cooperate or else play will stop. The goal of free play is to keep it going. Even when outside without other humans, a child never truly plays alone; the child is always interacting with their environment, the more than human. Such companionship is part of our heritage as members of the Earth community.
Before colonizers imposed their agenda of conquest, forced labor, acquisition, and division, communal life was a tapestry of storytelling, singing, sharing experiences, and playing. Play included more formalized games where competition was focused on increasing potential, not winning. Life was not seen as the poet Alfred Tennyson envisioned Nature, an existence of survival under constant threat and “red in tooth and claw.” Life was cherished, richly lived, and tuned to the needs of development and thriving, and play was part of it all.
Because play requires a neutral or positive mood, joyful play can spark positive moods in others and can invite participation. All of the elements that contribute to ethical engagement—presence, reverence, synchrony, empathy, perspective taking, and play—take courage.43 They open one up to change through full engagement with another, encouraging trust of self and others in a space of vulnerability. One’s sense of self expands beyond the unit of the individual to a more porous and pluralistic sense of self. Significantly, fourth century BCE Greek philosopher Plato considered play essential for moral development; without it, he maintained, children will not grow up to be the model moral citizens of the state that they need to be.44
In our ancestral environment, play, like joy and love, is a multiage experience involving all generations. Because babies are ready to play from birth, a child’s community of carers must be ready to play themselves in order to set in motion the beneficial effects of play. Similar to Beavers, a human baby receives diverse inputs of social interaction from siblings, cousins, nonkin of various ages, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents; hence, the baby receives diverse sources for brain and body development. All engage indirectly with the child through role modeling and directly through play.
The decline of Western society’s engagement in play has paralleled the decline of the play-filled lives of Beavers. Dramatic increases in human populations; possessive appropriation of land and water; toxins in air, land, and water; and relentless killing and harassment have made it nearly impossible for Beavers and other Wildlife to continue their traditional ways of life. Food is scarce, water is scarce, and procurement of life’s essentials is increasingly more dangerous with the proliferation of roads, houses, and human intolerance.
Beaver numbers in North America were an estimated sixty to four hundred million before European occupation of Turtle Island.45 These aquatic artists ranged from coast to coast, from Alaska and the far north of Canada’s subarctic to California and northern Mexico. Similar to their cousin, the European Beaver, who was also nearly hunted to extinction,46 North American Beaver populations were decimated for their fur and meat, then later because they were regarded as impediments to human progress.47 After the demand for fur decreased at the start of the twentieth century and Beavers started to recover from centuries of slaughter, their persecution continued. Instead of being pursued for their pelts, Beavers were trapped and killed as pests.48
Together, private landowners and government agencies almost eradicated the species across the land. Beavers were shot and killed for doing what they do to make a living and care for their young: gnawing down Trees, flooding fields when building their dams, and interrupting unyielding human control of land and water. In one bizarre instance, the Idaho Fish and Game Commission trapped Beavers live, boxed them up, and dropped them by parachute into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area.49 Only very recently have scientists begun to appreciate that Beavers are highly intelligent, discerning architects of ecosystem health. Beavers are not the problem; rather, Bavarian biologist Gerhard Schwab asserts that the problem is “the overuse of landscape by man.”50
The settler-colonizer attitude toward Beavers and other Wildlife radically contrasts with that of Native Peoples, as described by Chief Luther Standing Bear (Teton Sioux):
From Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, there came a great unifying life force that flowed in and through all things—the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals—and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man. Thus all things were kindred, and were brought together by the same Great Mystery. Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them. And so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue. The animals had rights—the right of man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man’s indebtedness—and in recognition of these rights the Lakota never enslaved an animal, and spared all life that was not needed for food and clothing.51
Indigenous perspectives52 and the traditional ecological understanding of Nature53 account for the fact that the 80 percent of Wildlife species that have not been driven to extinction live on the 20 percent of planetary lands overseen by First Nation or Indigenous peoples.54
Western scientists are finally taking to heart what singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell wrote: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”55 In the wake of mass Wildlife and Plant genocides and attendant ecosystem collapse, modern humans are now realizing how important Beavers and all our Animal and Plant relations are. They help us all. Play helps us all. Our Animal kin and play are both part of our longtime heritage as a species. By cultivating and teaching children care and respect for Animal kin, human young can build their own understanding of the world as unprivileged members of the natural community, and in so doing reclaim their humanity. We must put into practice what ecophilosopher and writer Derrick Jensen calls the time when the “beavers come home”: “In the time after, the beavers come home, bringing with them caddisflies and dragonflies, bringing with them ponds and pools and wetlands, bringing home frogs, newts, and fish. Beavers build and build, and restore and restore, working hard to unmake the damage that was done, and to remake forests and rivers and streams and marshes into what they once were, into what they need to be, into what they will be again.”56