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.

Not only that, but it's teaching America about the rivers.

The rivers that flood, the rivers that retreat in the drought,

the rivers that are surrounded by settlements that are either flooded out or too close when a flood comes. The professor introduces

us to Dr. Denise Burtstead, and we go to the Yale-Myers Forest. And the professor invariably

has an episode where she has to find a walking stick,

because she winds up in these wetlands, about to tumble into the water. But here we are.

We have a walking stick. What are you learning from Dr. Birchstead, professor?

Well, I think the first thing that I learned from Dr. Berksdsted, who is a wonderful researcher

and lecturer,

is that a river is not just the Hudson River or the Hussetonic or the Connecticut River.

It's really this intricate system of brooks and streams and creeks.

It's every little trickle of water that's going through the land that's interconnected.

We need to think of the river system as almost like a fan of arteries and veins that spreads out

through the land.

And once you think about the river system that way, no longer just as one single current,

but this multi-threaded, braided, maybe messy, interacting

network of veins and lines of water, then I think you can start to understand why beavers are so

important because they will move throughout this system, swelling it into

wetlands so that pretty soon all along that network you have beaver ponds that are like

beads along a chain. And then the water is allowed to slow down and sink down. And that begins to really solve our current problems of water moving just too quickly

...