BEAVERS AWAKEN SPRINGTIME! 3/8: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Beaverland-Weird-Rodent-Made-America/dp/153875519X
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.
1937 Beaver Dam
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | this is CBSi in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Professor |
| 0:08.0 | Lila Philip, the College of the Holy Cross, she teaches in the |
| 0:12.0 | environmental studies program and that's what we're talking about |
| 0:14.6 | the Beaver Kasser Kanadensus and once upon a time the beavers were as big as bears but that's several |
| 0:21.5 | million years ago leading up until the end of the Ice Age. |
| 0:25.7 | We're talking about the beaver that is recognizable in colonial America. |
| 0:30.6 | And now we're in the late 19th century. A man named Louis Henry Morgan in 1855 and then again in 1862 has converted in his obsession from the trout to the beaver and he's on an expedition in the Lake Superior |
| 0:48.5 | Basin to photograph a beaver dam. Professor, this is a story you can't make up. |
| 0:55.0 | Morgan is a character. |
| 0:57.0 | What did he make of this Beaver Dam? |
| 0:59.0 | What were his thoughts? |
| 1:01.0 | Thank you. |
| 1:02.0 | This is one of my favorite sections of the book and he is such an amazing American figure because he's such |
| 1:10.3 | a study in contradictions. So Louis Henry Morgan, you know, he's one of America's first |
| 1:17.2 | ethnographers and anthropologists. He was also an industrialist, so he was a railroad investor. |
| 1:25.2 | You know, he managed to write actually what is still considered one of the most |
| 1:29.4 | important and earliest ethnographies of the Iroquois people. And he goes out to visit his |
| 1:35.0 | his friend, one of the Eelis who's building a railroad line |
| 1:40.0 | to mine for iron ore near Marquette, Michigan. |
| 1:45.9 | And as you point out, well, he's a big trout fisherman, |
| 1:49.0 | and while they're fishing for trout, |
... |
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