Hey, it's Flora, and you are listening to Science Friday.

Beaver's are having a moment.

Hey! What's your name, beaver?

Uh, Babel?

You want to live here. You better learn pond rules.

What are pawn rules?

Oh, I am clear in the rest of the day.

The new Pixar movie Hoppers is about a girl who, thanks to some far out technology, is turned into a beaver.

Goofiness ensues, of course, but it's really a movie about humans coexisting with wildlife,

particularly oversized rodents capable of reworking landscapes in profound ways.

So we wanted to ask, what's the status of our IRL relationship with beavers?

It's complicated.

And we might want to give it some thought, because according to my next guest,

beavers could help humanity out if we let them.

Emily Fairfax has spent her career studying these animals, and she's also

the beaver science consultant on the movie hoppers. She's based at the University of Minnesota.

Emily, welcome back. Thank you. I'm super happy to be here. You've called beavers a geologic force.

What do you mean by that? Beaver's are a geologic force because the scale they operate at,

both in space and time, is enormous. Bevers are all over the North American continent. One

beaver family is changing and shaping two kilometers of a stream, huge territories. And they've

been doing it for seven and a half million years.

They've been modifying things for way longer than people have been building dams or canals

...