Some readers spring remember that this spring we entered a very dark period where the website went away involuntarily. I was scrambling day and night to win it back but all of the images had suddenly ‘disappeared’ when a clever tech offered to make things easier. (Word to the wise. Clever techs don’t always make things better,)
In my scramble I met a vaguely reasonable voice at bluehost who was slightly less erratic than his co-workers. He warned me against trusting techs with good ideas and said, without a hint of irony, “Some of these guys haven’t even been here a year!” He cautioned, and leaned in proudly “I’ve been here 13 months!”
I must have burst out laughing at that point because he was very surprised at the noise and I was equally surprised to find he wasn’t being ironic. It eventually took a smart girl and her supervisor all day to fix the problem, but I never forgot that line because no matter who you tell, maytag repair man, electrician, comcast installer, it always makes people laugh.
Well, this morning Ben’s book gets reviewed by a similarly qualified science blogger. I’ll just post the title and leave it at that.
Get that? Since 2017? Who would put that on a website as a tag line? Ye olde science blogger. Here’s Ben’s review:
Book review – Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
I cannot deny that the first thing that came to my mind upon seeing this book was Leslie Nielsen’s slightly smutty beaver joke in Naked Gun.
Wow. That’s his open? Hilarious and soo original. He must have had many, many dates in college.
Shame on me, as environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb presents a serious, incisive book that shows just how important beavers and their dams are for biodiversity, ecosystem health, and hydrology. If humans are now said to be a geological force to be reckoned with, birthing the term Anthropocene, our persecution of beavers led to the loss of another geological force.
You can tell both that he didn’t much care for the subject or Ben’s brilliant language-laden prose. But he cared more than he expected to and wrote about it here.
We meet Mike Callahan, a former physician-assistant at a methadone clinic who invented flow devices: low-tech beaver-proof structures of pipes and fences that partially drain a beaver pond to prevent catastrophic flooding of nearby roads and properties, now highly in demand throughout the US. There is Nick Weber, a scientist who has been imitating beavers by constructing artificial dams that have beneficial effects on the hydrology of landscapes and are not infrequently colonised be returning beavers, giving them a leg-up when re-establishing themselves. Or Heidi Perryman, whose non-profit Worth a Dam has been ceaselessly campaigning for the benefit of beaver-dom, dispelling many myths and misconceptions in the process.
Ohhh we get a mention! Be still my heart – oh wait. It is.
Though I have always had a superficial mental image of beavers as those dam-building rodents, I found Eager to be a revelatory and very interesting book. The regular castorid puns and rich alliteration might not be to everyone’s taste, admittedly, but overall my feeling was that the prose flowed off the pages into my eyeballs. Eager is clearly far more than a dry, scholarly treatise on the subject. In my opinion, Goldfarb here successfully advocates the beaver’s cause while also writing a beautiful book.
So you liked it? I think I’m going to call this the ‘mighty white of you’ book review. Yes Ben did write a FASCINATING and earth changing book, and beavers are literal earth changes and worth so much more than a Lesie Neilsen pun. Although maybe you’re right when you think of it.
Calling vagina’s beavers makes since because, after all, vaginas made the world as we know it and so did beavers. Ahem.
Our friends to the north Jim and Judy Atkinson of Port Moody B.C. were excited to install a flow device yesterday. Hurray! And Brrrrr! I guess this means that DOF will stop cutting out the dam every five minutes. Adrien of Fur-bearer Defenders did the deed with Jim’s able assistance. Kudos to both of them.
