FRIDAY, April 17

7:15 – 9:00 pm Evening Presentation at the Paxton Theater – be sure to arrive no later than 7 pm to provide plenty of time for parking and walking to the theater.

State of the Arc : Nancy Stranahan, Director of Arc of Appalachia

Beaver 101 - I 2025 the Indomitable Beaver delivered the Arc a Clear Message: "You are not in charge!"

Ethan King, Land Stewardship Manager at the Arc's new Regional Hub stationed in Hocking County, will tell the story of how Arc staff members have recently (and involuntarily) come under the instruction of a master engineer, the Beaver. You will learn how effectively beavers are transforming the biodiversity of the natural communities in our Arc preserves, and how inevitable it is that emancipated beavers run up against the resistance of neighboring landowners. Ethan has a bushel of stories to share - some of woe, some humorous, but all of them demonstrations of beavers’ remarkable restoration skills. Here at the Arc of Appalachia, we are pronouncing 2025 as the inception year of our beaver-driven curriculum, while 2026 is hereby announced as the "Year of the Beaver," a year in which we pass on our education to others. As you will see by the program's end, beavers' greatest gift to humanity can be boiled down to simply two things - the cultivation of humanity's humility and an invitation for us to become contributing community members - two very un-American traits, may we say!!

SATURDAY, April 18

7:00 – 9:00 pm Evening Presentation at the Paxton Theater – be sure to arrive no later than 6:45 pm to provide plenty of time for parking and walking to the theater.

Ohio's Wetlands - Going, Going, Gone

Nancy Stranahan, Arc of Appalachia Director, will share how most of us in modern-day Ohio - even some of our region's most knowledgeable naturalists and biologists - suffer from "wetlands amnesia." Ohio, once considered a wetlands state, has been so thoroughly drained, and drained so long ago, that most of us cannot comprehend the immensity of what we have lost. In this short presentation, you will learn about our region's most invisible natural community and what we can do to bring wetlands back to both our consciousness and our landscapes.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Aaron Hall : The Beaver - Quite Possibly North America's Most Astonishing Animal

Keynote Speaker Dr. Aaron Hall, an aquatic biologist and the Program Director for the nonprofit Beaver Institute's BeaverCorps, is traveling to Ohio from Ontario to share with us his extensive knowledge on beavers, touching on the species' natural history and ecology, as well as cultural history and human psychology. Aaron's life is deeply engaged in trying to preserve a land canvas for this powerful, dynamic animal. We will learn how beavers rose from abundance to near absence in North America, the people who helped save them, and beavers' determined resistance to being permanently extirpated. We will learn what it means to have largely lost what is a keystone species across an entire continent and how such a devastating loss unfolded in our nation's early history. People are half of the story. Aaron will be sharing stories of the complex conflicts that can occur when beavers and people try (or in many cases, when people don't try) to share common territory. His daily vocational quest, as well as his personal passion, is to help people recognize and appreciate the immense benefits beavers bring to the health and biodiversity of natural communities whenever their human neighbors are willing to accept their immense water-altering activities as the life-transforming gifts they are.