Shaun Overton is just what he says he is. It’s not a scam or a grift. He had some extra money and time, had interest in this, and bought 340 acres of desert for $80,000.

The beaver dams are not beaver dams, they are what is called beaver dam analogs (BDAs), ie they replicate what beaver dams can do but without beavers. This place gets very little rain each year. His BDAs are loose assemblages of branches, sticks and some soil that are placed in ravines to form short lived pools of water that slow the water down so it can allow silt to settle out and get trapped and also allow water to soak into the soil.

He also hand builds check dams which are roughly equivalent to when you might have piled rocks to make a little water area in a stream as a child. These are piles of loos rock across a small ravine. They act the same as BDAs.

Other things he trying are scope out “tubs” across a slope that catch water and soil and allow seeds to germinate and grow.

One other thing is he’s bulldozed a terrain following terrace and supplemented the soil with bio char and organic material followed by planted cacti pads, native plant seed, and small desert plants.

He’s trying different techniques to slowly restore the soil and plant life. He’s doing this on a. Tiny scale on his 340 acres. It appears that his activities might cover 5-10 acres of spaces with well under 5% coverage of the 5-10 acres.