Related previously:

Reintroductions of beavers into the wild in several parts of England (2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43241589

Beavers back in London after 400-year absence (2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30708819

This was being discussed twenty or thirty years ago.

One of the most obvious problems (apart from the weather itself) is that flood plains and meadows have been built on in many places.

beavers are a geological force, and along with several other large animals shaped much of surface of our planet, which is where we evolved and prospered, and there is a strong case to be made that our own interactions with the landscape used to be in many ways complementery to a full thriving ecosphere, which has of course become extractive, and exploitive in non sustainable ways

The first thing that came to mind is the Monty Python line, "If we just built a large, wooden badger..."

What a headline