This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor.

Continuing my conversation with Professor Lila Philip of the College of Holy Cross,

she teaches in the Environmental Studies program. She's a professor of English.

And her new book is Beaverland, how one weird rodent made America.

This is the story of the beaver in North America, discovered as colonial Europe discovered America,

as a source of trade and capital formation, as a source of wonder for what it can do to the environment,

with the environment. And here in the 21st century now, I learned from the professor that the beaver is a

fascination to science. People studying our natural world and asking, can we learn from this? What have we done wrong? How can we

restore balance given the eight to nine billion people on the planet? Now dealing with the

onerous climate change story, at the same time we want to live better lives. So we go to the beaver, castor canadensis, and we ask, is a beaver intelligent?

Professor, it's meant to be a provocative question immediately.

Everybody's going to think, what's intelligence?

But in the scheme of things, how have been, how have

beavers been regarded and what are we learning about their ability to construct radical

environmental solutions and at the same time learn? Good evening again. Well, thank you. Well, first of all, I'd have to say that beavers have fueled the human

imagination in every continent that they've been found. So this question of beavers and how

smart are they or aren't they has gone way back to Aesop. So one of Aesop's fables is that the beavers are so canny that they can remove their testicles and throw them at hunters to divert them.

So there have been all kinds of theories about beaver cleverness that are not related to anything to do with factual, even anatomy. Beavers actually have internal glands.

They don't even have external glands. But, you know, to think about this today, what we're

understanding now is that we really don't have up-to-date science on the animal itself.

Most of what we know about beavers has been based on studies of what beavers can do, which is

build. So they're brilliant at building things. And we've studied their dams and their lodges and their beaver damming complexes.

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