Now that was a day,
Do you realize if this quote is referring to yearly take that works out to be something like 10,000 beavers from just Northern California alone? No wonder the furpocalypse worked so well. I had to study up for my interview with Ben for Terra Verde radio. (Reviewing the California papers because I have not thought like that since 2012). It all turned out to more hectic than I wished because I also had a huge professional task to do that day plus getting my computer ready for a trip to the junk heap. The new one arrives tomorrow and hopefully everything will transfer seamlessly and I’ll figure out how the hell windows 10 works.
Anyway all the craziness meant I wasn’t sleeping well so I think I may have been a little manic in the interview – I might have talked to much or too fast. But Ben was great in his calm inspiring way as usual. The show is supposed to air in two weeks and I’ll link to it so we can diagnose my performance, I’m always reminded of a Paula Poundstone comment when I get chatty in an interview. “I did an hour an a half last night and I could have done more, but the club had really bad security and a lot of the audience got away”.
Later that night I got an email from BYU radio in Utah asking if I’d do a radio interview about my recent article in the city creatures blog and then an email from Mt Diablo Audubon asking me if I would present. So yes, it was a crazy day. The real surprise Then I got a notice that Ben’s book was being reviewed on Psychology Today, and I realized what was going on.
He’s just trolling me now.
The Secret Lives of Beavers and Why These Architects Matter: An interview with Ben Goldfarb about his new book called “Eager”.
Beavers are amazing and under appreciated animals. I’ve seen them on a number of occasions and enjoy watching them go about their daily activities. Regardless of their incredible importance to the health of various ecosystems, beavers have been decimated by humans using horrific methods. In his new book called Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, award-winning environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb carefully shows why killing beavers is so often ecologically unsound. The description for this important book begins, “In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat…Ultimately, it’s about how we can learn to coexist, harmoniously and even beneficially, with our fellow travelers on this planet
As I read Eager, I realized that beavers have, indeed, been under appreciated, and I was thrilled that Mr. Goldfarb could take the time to answer some questions about these amazing and ingenious architects who have played a major role in shaping our world. Our interview went as follows.
It’s a fun, mildly touchy-feely interview, so go read it all for some surprises, including his thoughts about what subjects he wants to tackle next. For obvious reasons this was my favorite passage.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell readers?
It’s easy to get wrapped up in what beavers can do for us: the water they can store, the pollution they can filter, and the wildfires they can mitigate — the whole suite of ecosystem services. I certainly treat beavers as a restoration tool throughout the book. But it’s also vital to value them for their own sake. They’re such unique creatures, capable of surpassingly innovative work; they’re also highly social, inspiringly cooperative, and impressively strategic. Their all-too-human penchant for meddling with their surroundings makes them easy to empathize with. Beavers are a reminder of how much we don’t know about animal minds, how complex wild behaviors can be, how much agency our fellow creatures still possess. They are buck-toothed, paddle-tailed checks on our smug sense of human supremacy.
Yes, indeed they are Ben. Thanks for that.
