Ben says that the nice part of writing a book, and spending 20 months of your life dedicated to getting the chapters just right, is that later, when it’s done and you’re published you can carve off chapters as excerpts or wholesale and release them to other publications, which serves the dual purpose of promoting the book and paying the rent while you’re waiting for royalties to roll in.

I, of course, wouldn’t know about either. But I’m happy for both because this morning we get another chunk from Outside magazine which gamely tackles the wolves phenomenon.

In ‘Eager,’ Ben Goldfarb Champions the Beavers

In an excerpt from his new book, Goldfarb explores what wilderness looks like with and without nature’s most overlooked architects—and why they have more in common with wolves than you think

If you care one whit about wildlife, you’ve probably seen the YouTube hagiography “How Wolves Change Rivers.” If you’re not among its 39 million viewers, here’s the gist: After the destruction of Yellowstone’s wolves, the story goes, unchecked herds of elk grazed the park’s streamside plants to nubbins. Denuded riverbanks slumped into their channels, leaving behind bare, incised, eroding waterways.

Wolf reintroduction in 1995 changed all that. Not only did Canis lupus thin the herds, wolves also frightened their prey away from narrow valleys, deathtraps whose tight confines made elk easy pickings—a dynamic dubbed “the ecology of fear.” Safe from hungry elk, riparian aspen and willow thrived. Wildlife from flycatchers to grizzly bears returned to shelter and feed; eroding streambanks stabilized; degraded creeks transformed into deep, meandering watercourses. Wolves had apparently catalyzed a trophic cascade, a process in which the influence of top predators—lions in Africa, dingoes in Australia, even sea stars in tide pools—ripples through foodwebs, changing, in some cases, the vegetation itself. “So the wolves, small in number, transform not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park…but also its physical geography,” enthused the video’s narrator.

“How Wolves Change Rivers” transfixed me when I first saw it. I wasn’t the only one: I’ve since heard the Yellowstone wolf tale repeated at conferences, seminars, and even on the lips of baristas in Scottish fishing villages. “This story—that wolves fixed a broken Yellowstone by killing and frightening elk—is one of ecology’s most famous,” wrote the biologist Arthur Middleton in the New York Times. And it’s a great story: imbued with hope, easily grasped, bespeaking the possibility that our gravest mistakes can be remedied through enlightened stewardship. We live in a world of wounds, quoth Aldo Leopold, but we can also play doctor.

There’s only small problem with the vaunted wolf narrative, Middleton added: “It’s not true.”

Don’t you just LOVE that chapter open? What a perfect way to invite the reader to sit up, pay attention, and read more. Which you can, and definitely should. Ben has a writing style that will keep you turning pages even if you care less about beavers than a city manager or the average caltrans worker.

But of course we know you care much, much more.

So what makes the salvational story incomplete? Well, for one thing, it elides the role of another species—an equally influential animal that, like the wolf, was for decades almost entirely absent from the park. Over 20 years after wolf reintroduction, most of Yellowstone’s streams are still missing their true architects.