3/8: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
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3/8: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Beaverland-Weird-Rodent-Made-America/dp/153875519X
From award-winning writer Leila Philip, BEAVERLAND is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, though history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers.
Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver’s profound influence on our nation’s early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. In her pursuit of this weird and wonderful animal, she introduces us to people whose lives are devoted to the beaver, including a Harvard scientist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, who uses drones to create 3-dimensional images of beaver dams; and an environmental restoration consultant in the Chesapeake whose nickname is the “beaver whisperer”.
What emerges is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, BEAVERLAND reveals the profound ways in which one odd creature and the trade surrounding it has shaped history, culture, and our environment
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Bachelord, professor Lila Philip, the college of |
| 0:10.0 | the Holy Cross. She teaches in the Environmental Studies Program and that's what we're talking |
| 0:14.5 | about. The beaver, Caster Canadensis. And once upon a time the beavers were as big as bears, |
| 0:20.7 | but that's several million years ago, leaving up until the end of the ice age. We're |
| 0:25.8 | talking about the beaver that is recognizable in colonial America. And now we're in the late |
| 0:31.8 | 19th century. A man named Lewis Henry Morgan in 1855 and then again in 1862 has converted |
| 0:40.6 | in his obsession from the trout to the beaver. And he's on an expedition in the Lake Superior |
| 0:48.6 | Basin to photograph a beaver dam. Professor, this is a story you can't make up. |
| 0:55.3 | Morgan is a character. What did he make of this beaver dam? What were his thoughts? |
| 1:00.6 | Thank you. This is this is one of my favorite sections of the book and he is such an amazing |
| 1:07.9 | American figure because he's such a study in contradictions. So Lewis Henry Morgan, |
| 1:15.2 | you know, he's one of America's first ethnographers and anthropologists. He was also an industrialist, |
| 1:21.6 | so he was a railroad investor. You know, he managed to write actually what is still considered |
| 1:28.9 | one of the most important and earliest ethnographies of the Euruchois people. And he goes out to visit his |
| 1:35.9 | friend, one of the Eli's who's building a railroad line to mine for iron ore in near market |
| 1:44.9 | Michigan. And as you point out, while he's a big trout fisherman and while they're fishing for |
| 1:50.0 | trout, they can't get anywhere because they keep having to go over these magnificent, |
| 1:54.9 | to lift the boats over these magnificent beaver dams. And he falls in love with these constructions. |
| 2:01.8 | He's just fascinated by the beaver dams and he makes it his mission for the next 15 years to |
| 2:09.2 | document and map them. And he produces a book called the American Beaver, publishes it in 1868. |
| 2:17.0 | It is the first authoritative account of the beaver in North America in the United States anyway. |
| 2:24.7 | And it is still considered authoritative. And it's tremendously important because what he was |
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