Publisher Description
An intimate and revelatory dive into the world of the beaver—the wonderfully weird rodent that has surprisingly shaped American history and may save its ecological future.
From award-winning writer Leila Philip, BEAVERLAND is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, though history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers.
Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver’s profound influence on our nation’s early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. In her pursuit of this weird and wonderful animal, she introduces us to people whose lives are devoted to the beaver, including a Harvard scientist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, who uses drones to create 3-dimensional images of beaver dams; and an environmental restoration consultant in the Chesapeake whose nickname is the “beaver whisperer”.
What emerges is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, BEAVERLAND reveals the profound ways in which one odd creature and the trade surrounding it has shaped history, culture, and our environment.
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An astonishing, intrepid compendium about the world according to beaver, including social, cultural, and ethnographic history, juxtaposed with personal narrative. Philip brilliantly paves the way for us to enter this unlikely shaper of our nation as she follows naturalists, researchers, trappers, and local historians, as well as visiting her own backyard pond. She dives into many avenues of research, including the enslavement of Native Americans, the cunning greed of John Jacob Astor, the obsession of Dorothy Richards who lived with 14 beavers in her Adirondack house, and the lifeways of indigenous peoples. Every inch of the way we know we are in good hands. BEAVERLAND is poignant, impeccably researched, and as artfully put together as any this ‘wired rodent’s’ houses, with an eye toward the beaver’s role in the anthropogenic disaster of our changing climate and damaged ecosystems.
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Gretel Ehrlich, author of Unsolaced and The Solace of Open Spaces
