In 1997, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality notified Stephen Tvedten that he was in violation of regulations because of two unauthorized dams built on his property, and gave him six weeks to remove them. Tvedten did not build those dams, nor did a named tenant build them. It was the beavers who did it. Tvedten was an expert on pest control, and had written several books on eco-friendly ways to manage pests. He knew his beavers. So he wrote a letter to the department in response. The letter did its job, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality dropped the case.
The letter brought Tvedten some notoriety over the years, never more so than when Letters of Note published it in 2012. When that post went viral, MLive interviewed Tvedten, who said he was more famous for that letter that he dashed off in ten minutes than for anything else he's ever done. Tvedten died in 2018. His letter was selected for a Letters Live show in New York, read by Peter Dinklage.