BUSY PREPPING WINTER? 4/8: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip (Auth
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
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”.
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| 0:48.0 | I'm John Dash with Professor Lila Philip, the author of Beaverland, how one weird |
| 0:57.0 | rodent made America. |
| 0:58.8 | This is everything you never knew to ask about beavers. |
| 1:01.6 | Well, here they are are and that question arises in the 1930s |
| 1:07.0 | hard-scrabble America. We go to Little Falls New York with the professor. Little |
| 1:12.3 | Falls was once I learned these things from the professor. Little Falls was once, I learned these things from the |
| 1:14.8 | professor, it was once the cheese capital of America. Did Wisconsin know this? |
| 1:18.6 | Apparently, yes at the end of the Mohawk River Valley, but it attracted a young family and Dorothy Richards was |
| 1:26.6 | born there in the early part of this of the 20th century and she grew up to be a Beaver Whisper. Please explain Beaver Spied Professor. |
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