I'm John Batchel with Professor Lila Philip of the College of Holy Cross.

Her new book is Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America.

The science of beavers is the science of geomorphology, effluvial geomorphology.

I don't say it fast.

That is, watching how rivers shape the land,

watching how land reacts to the river system. And we've learned from Professor Philip,

and she's learned from other researchers, that a river is a complexity of low-flowing water,

which can be in drought or can be in flood, the wetlands, what looks like a swamp or a marsh, and the meadow that is emerging from the swamp and the marsh.

The beaver manages all of that. And we go now to the White Mountains because Professor Birchstead did her work there 10 years before. And this is a 7800 acre experimental forest that Lila Philip traveled to. The part that got my attention was

sawgrass is a way of keeping people out in order for the animals to prosper.

I thought, you know, we don't need to go back 100 years for Indian legends.

We can make them up on our own.

So what does the forest look like, Professor?

Well, what was interesting to me, and it was such a privilege to go up there with

Dr. Berksdett and Dr. Bailey.

I mean, these are really such committed researchers

and they've done significant work. And also, I should mention about the Hubbard Brook watershed.

This is where acid rain was discovered. This is a really important, it's a long-term ecological research center. It's a tremendously important

place. And so it was at this place doing watershed studies that scientists discovered that

acid rain existed, and it's where they discovered the detrimental impacts of acid rain.

So it would have a historically incredibly important role in the clean water and clean air acts

and the health of our environments going forward.

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