BUSY PREPPING WINTER? 5/8: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2024
⏱️ 12 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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:08.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:10.0 | Continuing my conversation with Professor Lila Philip of the College of Holy Cross, she teaches in the |
| 0:17.4 | Environmental Studies Program, she's a professor of English, and her new book is Beaverland, how one weird rodent made America. This is the |
| 0:26.0 | story of 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, |
| 0:40.9 | with the environment. |
| 0:42.2 | And here in the 21st century now I learned from |
| 0:45.4 | the professor that the beaver is a fascination to science. |
| 0:51.0 | People studying our natural world and asking can we learn from this, what have we done wrong? |
| 0:57.6 | How can we restore balance given the 8 to 9 billion people on the planet 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 | Kastor Canidensis, and we ask, is a Beaver intelligent? |
| 1:18.0 | Professor, it's meant to be a provocative question 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 |
| 1:35.3 | environmental solutions and at the same time learn good evening again well |
| 1:42.2 | thank you well first of, I'd have to say that beavers have fueled the human |
| 1:47.6 | imagination and every continent that they've been found. So this question of beavers and how smart are they or aren't they has gone |
| 1:58.9 | way back to Aesop. So one of Aesop's fables is that the beavers are so cany that they can remove their testicles and throw them at hunters to divert them. |
| 2:09.0 | So there have been all kinds of theories about beaver cleverness that are not related to anything to do with |
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