First a followup from yesterdays cool story about the foundation that funds flow devices. Mike Callahan says this:
Yes, his estate’s foundation has been critical in helping to fund flow device installations in western MA over the past 9 years or so. The Robert Theriot Foundation grants have been hugely successful in incentivizing towns and property owners to try nonlethal management. It has been the spark that got the ball rolling in an area that was traditionally trapping only. The grant is administered by the MA Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals which they do at their own cost. See ://www.mspca.org/animal…/berkshire-beaver-grant-funding/
In fact, this flow device grant program has been so successful that it was one of the main reasons I started the Beaver Institute. My hope is that our nonprofit can raise grant monies to incentivize flow device installations across North America! Now to find a grant funding source….. :-
Wow!
Here’s the program website. Click on the image for the link. And think for a moment about the wonderfully small world we live in.
Now onto today’s business. I see Ben Goldfarb’s national geographic article got picked up by NatGeo Australia. So that’s gotta to be $ in his pocket. Also his book got a dynamic review from the editor of the Baker City news in Oregon. Obviously the editor feels about this book the same way the exact same way you felt about your second boyfriend in college. He’s crazy about it and loves it more than any book he ever read and he hates himself for loving it a great deal. Over and over.
We can all understand that, right?
COLUMN: Book highlights the many benefits of beavers
I recently read a book-length ode to the beaver, and as is typical with such works I was in some passages caught up in the author’s adoration and in others a bit fatigued by his fandom.
Mostly it was the former.
This isn’t just a book-length account, but an actual book. And a fine one. Indeed I don’t recall enjoying more any book about wildlife biology and natural history that I’ve come across in the past few years.
Besides their potential to keep smaller streams from going dry — obviously a benefit for fish and other aquatic species but also potentially a boon for downstream farmers and ranchers — beavers’ constructions can also contribute to higher water tables and to lower water temperatures.
It doesn’t seem to me an exaggeration to describe beavers’ capabilities as miraculous.
And yet, by the time I reached the halfway point of Goldfarb’s book I became just slightly annoyed. Not enough to stop reading, to be sure — the story was compelling, and Goldfarb’s prose a pleasure, from start to finish.
But his constant extolling of the beaver’s virtues began to strike me as a bit of overselling. The thesis was just too pat — that the slaughter of America’s beavers in the 18th and 19th centuries, though absolutely lamentable, transformed idyllic places into wastelands, and that merely restoring their populations can cure so much of what ails our parched and eroded lands.
You see what I mean? He loves the book. LOVES it like his toes curl when he stretches out with it on the couch. But its just too darn lovable, and makes those rotten beavers, whom he also says he loves, too lovable.
The poor man is in a quandary.
I don’t mean to suggest that Goldfarb ignores the potentially problematic effects of beavers — the flooded fields and clogged culverts and submerged paths.
But it seemed to me that the author’s confidence that relatively simple, if not always cheap, solutions exist for every beaver-caused problem minimizes the reality that the world into which he — and I — hope beavers will once again thrive is quite a different place than it was when fur companies were decimating the populations.
I understand that some people think of that bygone era as not only different but better. Yet even if you consider as scars the roads and cultivated fields and homes and parking lots that replaced beaver ponds, it is not realistic to act as though these things are unimportant.
I know I know. You thought when I alluded to that tempestuous romance of your college years I was joking or exaggerating in that way I sometimes do. But no. He’s honest to god in a classic approach-avoidance conflict with this book, and possibly with Ben himself. Scouts honor.
There is of course nothing wrong with passion. Indeed it is often an admirable quality, one that encourages so many of us to do good work in the world.
This is a man pulling on his jeans in the morning and thinking maybe things went too far. I recognize the signs.
But I am ever suspicious of the mixture of hyperbole and simplicity that sometimes accompanies passion. Which is to say I’m skeptical of anyone who boasts of all but universal solutions to vexing and complex problems — which, after all, is what very many problems are.
At this point he goes on to describe two similar situations that people get passionate about but are kind of meaningless. He stops just short of mentioning that girl he let get away. There’s nothing wrong with passion. It’s just TOO passionate.
And although I both appreciate and largely share his excitement about what beavers can do for mankind, I believe I would have enjoyed his book even a bit more if was a trifle less breathless in its affinity for the wondrous rodents.
The problem Ben is that you are too positive about the positive thing you’re talking about! He needs more doubt and negativity in his gospel! You’re a trifle too breathless for the man. You need to breathe more. Breathe more.
Something tells me that this man didn’t breathe a whole lot while he was reading. He’s an editor and it shocked and shamed him to read such remarkable prose. You are the writer he always dreamed of being.
No wonder he’s not sure whether he loves you or hates you.
Finally a last visit to our good friend Leopold Kanzler in Austria, who posted this luscious photo of mutual grooming this morning and called it “Die Umarmung” or”The hug”,
