BUSY PREPPING WINTER? 6/8: 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
⏱️ 6 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 | I'm John Bachelore with Professor Lila Philip of the College of Holy Cross. |
| 0:09.5 | Her new book is Beaverland, how one weird rodent made America. Not only that, but it's teaching America about |
| 0:16.1 | the rivers. The rivers that flood, the rivers that retreat in the drought, the rivers that |
| 0:21.6 | are surrounded by settlements that are either flooded out or too close |
| 0:26.0 | when a flood comes, the professor introduces us to Dr. Denise Birchstead and we go to the Yale-Myers Forest and the professor invariably has an |
| 0:36.7 | episode where she has to find a walking stick because she winds up in these |
| 0:39.9 | wetlands about to tumble into the water but But here we are, we have a walking stick. What are you |
| 0:45.9 | learning from Dr. Birkstead, professor? Well, I think the first thing that I learned from |
| 0:51.1 | Dr. Birkstead, who is a wonderful researcher and lecturer, is that a river is not just the Hudson River or the Hussatonic or the Connecticut River. It's really this intricate system of brooks and streams and |
| 1:06.2 | creeks. It's every little trickle of water that's going through the land that's |
| 1:10.7 | interconnected. We need to think of the river system as almost like a fan |
| 1:16.1 | of arteries and veins that spreads out through the land. And once you think about the river |
| 1:21.9 | system that way, |
| 1:23.8 | no longer just as one single current, |
| 1:26.4 | but this multi-threaded, braided, maybe messy |
| 1:30.9 | interacting network of veins and lines of water, then I think you can start to |
| 1:39.4 | understand why beavers are so important because they will move throughout this system |
| 1:45.2 | swelling it into wetlands so that pretty soon all along that network you have |
| 1:51.6 | Beaver ponds that are like beads along a chain and then the water is |
| 1:56.1 | allowed to slow down and sink down and that begins to really solve our current problems of water moving just too quickly through the watershed so that it rips through and rips out the topsoil it doesn't get cleansed and it also means that our land is is dried out so like last |
| 2:19.7 | summer here in Connecticut we had a lot of rain and then we had a drought because the |
| 2:25.0 | rain just washed through the river system and we didn't get the benefit of it. |
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