BEAVERS AWAKEN SPRINGTIME! 5/8: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2024
⏱️ 12 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.
1914 Beaver works
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I on the World. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:09.7 | Continuing my conversation with Professor Lila Philip of the College of Holy Cross, |
| 0:16.0 | she teaches in the Environmental Studies Program, she's a professor of English, and her |
| 0:21.1 | new book is Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America. This is the story of |
| 0:26.5 | the Beaver in North America discovered as colonial Europe discovered America as a source of trade and capital formation, |
| 0:36.7 | as a source of wonder for what it can do to the environment, |
| 0:40.8 | with the environment. |
| 0:42.2 | And here in the 21st century now, |
| 0:44.9 | I learned from the professor that the beaver |
| 0:47.3 | is a fascination to science. |
| 0:50.7 | People studying our natural world and asking can we learn from this, what have we done wrong? |
| 0:57.0 | How can we restore balance given the 8 to 9 billion people on the planet? |
| 1:02.0 | Now dealing with the onerous climate change |
| 1:06.4 | story at the same time we want to live better lives so we go to the beaver |
| 1:11.8 | castor Canidensis, and we ask, is a Beaver intelligent? |
| 1:18.0 | Professor, it's meant to be a provocative question, |
| 1:22.0 | immediately everybody's going to think, what's intelligence? |
| 1:25.2 | But in the scheme of things, how have beavers been regarded |
| 1:30.5 | and what are we learning about their ability to construct radical environmental |
| 1:36.7 | solutions and at the same time learn. |
| 1:39.7 | Good evening again. |
| 1:40.9 | Well thank you. Well first first of all, I'd have to say that beavers have fueled the human |
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