BEAVERS AWAKEN SPRINGTIME! 6/8: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2024
⏱️ 7 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.
1903 Beaver Dam
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. I'm John B with Professor Lila Philip of the College of Holy Cross. |
| 0:28.0 | Her new book is Beaverland, how one weird rodent made America. Not only that but it's teaching America about the rivers. |
| 0:36.0 | The rivers that flood, the rivers that retreat in the drought, the rivers that are surrounded |
| 0:40.9 | by settlements that are either flooded out or too close when a flood comes. |
| 0:46.4 | The professor introduces us to Dr. Denise Birchstead and we go to the Yale-Myers Forest. And the professor invariably has an episode where she has to find a walking stick because she winds up in these wetlands |
| 1:00.0 | about to tumble into the water. |
| 1:02.0 | But here we are, we have a walking stick. |
| 1:04.0 | What are you learning from Dr. Birkstead, professor? |
| 1:07.0 | Well, I think the first thing that I learned from Dr. Birkstead, |
| 1:10.0 | who is a wonderful researcher and lecturer, is that a river is not just the Hudson |
| 1:17.4 | River or the Hussatonic or the Connecticut River. |
| 1:20.3 | It's really this intricate system of brooks and streams and creeks. It's every little trickle of water that's going through the land that's interconnected. |
| 1:30.1 | We need to think of the river system as almost like a fan of arteries and veins that |
| 1:36.4 | spreads out through the land. And once you think about the river system that way, |
| 1:42.2 | no longer just as one single current, but this multi-threaded, braided, |
| 1:47.5 | maybe messy interacting network of veins and lines of water, then I think you can start to understand why |
| 1:58.9 | beavers are so important because they will move throughout this system, swelling it into wetlands so that pretty soon all along that network you have |
| 2:10.0 | Beaver ponds that are like beads along a chain. |
| 2:13.0 | And then the water is allowed to slow down and sink down. |
| 2:19.0 | And that begins to really solve our current problems of water moving just too quickly through the |
| 2:25.6 | watershed so that it rips through and rips out the topsoil it it doesn't get cleansed, and it also means that our land is dried out. |
| 2:37.0 | So like last summer here in Connecticut, we had a lot of rain and then we had a drought because the rain just washed through |
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