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WORK TITLE: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://bengoldfarb.com
CITY: New Haven
STATE: CT
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Amherst College, B.A.; Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, M.S.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Environmental journalism, editor, fiction writer, lecturer. Sage, editor in chief; High Country News, correspondent, 2014-16.
WRITINGS
Contributor of environmental journalism to various publications, including Orion, Mother Jones, Guardian, Science, Washington Post, High Country News, Outside, Smithsonian, Audubon, Boston, Scientific American, OnEarth, Pacific Standard, Yale Environment 360 Grantland, Earth Island Journal, Hakai, Conservation, Ensia, Modern Farmer, VICE News, Independent, Green Futures, World Wildlife, Nature Conservancy, and Last Word on Nothing.
Contributor of fiction to various publications, including Bellevue Literary Review, Allegheny Review, Stringybark Stories, Motherboard, and The Hopper. Contributor to the anthology, Cosmic Outlaws: Coming of Age at the End of Nature.
SIDELIGHTS
Award-winning environmental journalist and fiction writer Ben Goldfarb writes about wildlife conservation, marine science, and public lands management. He has published articles in Science, Mother Jones, Guardian, and High Country News. He also writes fiction for Bellevue Literary Review, Motherboard, and The Hopper. A 2018 North American Congress for Conservation Biology journalist fellow, Goldfarb edited and coordinated the Solutions Journalism Network’s “Small Towns, Big Change” project that produced solutions-oriented coverage of social and environmental issues. He is also editor-in-chief of the environmental Sage magazine at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, from which he earned a master’s degree in environmental management.
In 2018, Goldfarb published his debut book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, which sings the praises of beavers, the second largest rodent and a keystone species who build dams and are essential to healthy ecosystems. Goldfarb traces beavers from their appearance thirty million years ago when they were the size of hippos, through their habitats in North America, Britain, and Europe. He admits their importance to the fur trade in colonial America, even though their decimation eroded streams, dried up wetlands, and destroyed habitats for numerous species from salmon to swans. Also hunted in Europe for meat and medicine, beavers were categorized as fish by the Catholic Church so they could be eaten during Lent.
The core of the book are the Beaver Believers, a group of scientists, ranchers, and everyday citizens who are restoring beavers to their natural environments and encouraging the return of healthy ecosystems. Beavers are vital in the fight against flooding, wildfires, drought, and climate change. Goldfarb’s stories of the Beaver Believers “lend personality to an affectionate portrait of these ‘hardy rodents,’” said a Publishers Weekly contributor.
In an interview with Kate Wheelingjun online at Pacific Standard, Goldfarb explained: “I just want people to appreciate the incredible role that these animals played in the development of our landscapes and our history as a people and a culture. I think that lots of the ecological and hydrological problems that we’re confronted with now can be, to some extent, addressed with more beavers.”
In this intriguing debut, Goldfarb reinforces that beavers are continent-scale forces of nature that play an important role in sculpting the land and “It’s a wake-up call that needs to be answered,” according to Becky Libourel Diamond in BookPage. Felicity Morse reported in Spectator: “This is a book densely packed with knowledge and research… his enthusiasm for the subject shines through. By the end it’s hard not to become a beaver believer yourself.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, July 2018, Becky Libourel Diamond, review of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, p. 20.
Publishers Weekly, May 14, 2018, review of Eager, p. 44.
Spectator, September 1, 2018, Felicity Morse, review of Eager, p. 31.
ONLINE
Pacific Standard, https://psmag.com/ (June 26, 2018), Kate Wheelingjun, author interview.
Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental writer whose journalism has appeared in Mother Jones, Science, The Guardian, Orion Magazine, High Country News, Outside, Audubon Magazine, Pacific Standard, Hakai Magazine, VICE News, Yale Environment 360, and many other publications. His fiction has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Motherboard, and The Hopper. He has spoken about environmental storytelling at venues including Stanford and Yale Universities, the American Fisheries Society, and the North American Congress for Conservation Biology.
The Writer's Life
Ben Goldfarb: Coexisting with a Large Rodent
Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, July 20, 2018
photo: Terray SylvesterAn environmental journalist, Ben Goldfarb has written for Science, Mother Jones, the Guardian, Orion, World Wildlife magazine, Scientific America and Yale Environment 360. In his first book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green, $24.95), Goldfarb crosses North America to talk with scientists and activists about why the beaver matters--and what we can do to protect it. It's an amusing and insightful book that shows how key the beaver has been to the survival of not only other animals, but to humans as well.
Why are beavers so essential to North American ecosystems?
If you know nothing else about beavers, you're probably aware that they chew down trees, build dams and create ponds. Those ponds spread out water, fill up side channels, create marshy fringes and saturate the soil. If you were a trout, or a moose, or a wood frog, or a mallard, where would you rather live: alongside a straight, boring, featureless stream, or in a complex maze of deep pools, wet meadows, slow-water sloughs and woody islands? I'm taking that messy, diverse ecosystem every time! Water is life, and no animal captures and saves water like a beaver.
Of course, we humans rely on water, too, which means we need beavers. In Nevada, beavers are irrigating rangelands and helping ranchers feed cattle. In Washington, they're storing water to compensate for declining snowpack. In Maryland, their ponds are filtering out pollution before it can reach the sea. Beavers can even help address the opposite problem, the presence of too much water: In England and Scotland, where they've been extinct for hundreds of years, landowners are bringing them back because their ponds slow down floods. Beavers are sort of like landscape Swiss army knives--capable, in the right circumstances, of helping to tackle just about any ecological problem you can name.
What has been the biggest threat to their survival in North America?
It definitely hasn't been a great half-millennium to be a beaver! Historically, the biggest threat was the fur trade. Beavers have incredibly dense fur; they have as many individual hairs on a stamp-sized patch of skin as we have on our heads, which unfortunately means their pelts make very good hats. Beginning in the early 1600s, fur trappers wiped out untold millions of beavers for the sake of fashionable European headgear. Trapping was one of the colonies' most important industries, and the fur trade helped motivate historical events like the War of 1812 and the Louisiana Purchase. (It was also a catastrophe for Native people: white pelt traders were the source of the 19th century's worst smallpox epidemics.) For better and worse, American history would look a whole lot different without the beaver industry.
These days, the biggest threat is human conflict. Beavers, as anyone who lives near a wetland knows, can be a pain in the butt: they cut down valuable trees, flood roads and clog irrigation ditches. When beavers cause trouble, property owners usually call their local trapper to address the problem. Such "nuisance" trapping certainly isn't an existential threat like the fur trade was, but in many places it's kept beaver populations from fully recovering.
You met a number of colorful characters while writing this book. What is it about beavers that attract such interesting people?
You probably have to be a little eccentric to devote your time and energy to a rodent. Beavers tend to draw lots of laypeople into their orbit: some of the most dedicated "Beaver Believers" in the country are child psychologists, physicians' assistants and real estate agents. Part of the reason beavers fascinate people, I think, is that they're visible in a way that few other animals are. The average citizen will never see, say, a mink or a bobcat, but just about anyone can drive down to their local wetland and check out a colony of beavers, or at least see the animals' handiwork. Curious, passionate people make the best characters, and there's nothing like these hyperactive, social, industrious mammals to inspire passion and curiosity.
What is the status of the beaver in North America today?
Well, it depends how long your memory is. When you consider how close beavers came to extinction, they're doing spectacularly well. At the dawn of the 20th century, there were perhaps 100,000 beavers left in North America, and today there are probably something like 15 million. From that perspective, they're one of our greatest conservation success stories!
The really long view, however, is less rosy. When Europeans arrived on this continent, it contained as many as 400 million beavers; as one historian put it, "every river, brook, and rill" was chock-full of them. While beavers have returned like gangbusters to plenty of watersheds, they're still absent from many historic haunts. Beavers will never be as abundant as they once were, but we can do a lot more to welcome them back.
If there was one thing you'd want someone to take away from this book, what would it be, and why?
I hope readers come away from Eager feeling a bit more humble about humans' place in the world. We often get wrapped up in what the writer Derrick Jensen calls "the myth of human supremacy"--the certainty that no other species can possibly match our intellect, our sentience, our power to shape the world. Yet in many ways, we're not too different from beavers: we're both creative tool-users, we both prefer to settle in river valleys, and we both modify our environment to maximize food and shelter. Aquatic rodents: they're just like us. --Amy Brady, freelance writer and editor
Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist who covers wildlife conservation, marine science, and public lands management, as well as an accomplished fiction writer. His work has been featured in Science, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, VICE, Audubon Magazine, Modern Farmer, Orion, World Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Yale Environment 360, and many other publications. He holds a master of environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and is a 2018 North American Congress for Conservation Biology journalist fellow.
HOW BEAVERS CAN SAVE US FROM OURSELVES
Author Ben Goldfarb discusses his new book about the original architect of the North American landscape: the beaver.
KATE WHEELINGJUN 26, 2018
Illustration of a beaver, c. 1800.
Illustration of a beaver, c. 1800.
(Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Since I first picked up Ben Goldfarb's Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, I haven't been able to stop talking about these semi-aquatic rodents.
If you've interacted with me at all in the last several weeks, I might have mentioned that beavers have transparent eyelids so they can see underwater! That they secrete a musky oil that contains the active ingredient in aspirin! That a half-mile-long structure built by beavers is visible from space! That an ancient member of the beaver family the size of a small black bear once roamed much of the modern-day United States! (To find out just how seriously the U.S. considered using beavers as a defensive weapon of sorts during the Cold War, you'll have to read the book.)
But none of those facts are what converted me into a "Beaver Believer," as the group of scientists, land-managers, and environmentally minded folks who are working tirelessly to bolster beaver populations around the U.S. are known. It's not that beavers need our help—the animals are not even remotely endangered, though their numbers are also nowhere near what they were before Europeans arrived in North America—but we certainly need them.
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.
(Photo: Chelsea Green Publishing)
Beavers are not content simply to survive in the environment that nature provides them. Instead, the animals engineer it to ensure access to things like food and shelter, reshaping entire landscapes in the process. Sound familiar? Humans, for better or for worse, may be the most planet-altering species—but beavers did it first. To quote Goldfarb, "We are living in the world that beavers created."
Before their numbers were devastated by the fur trade, North America looked much different. For one thing, it was a much soggier landscape. Beavers don't just build lodges and dams, but entire wetlands. Thanks to the beavers' efforts, streams back up behind their dams, forming ponds, marshes, and swamps, filled with stumps and dead or dying trees and bustling with frogs, fish, and otters, to name just a few of the countless creatures that rely on beavers to make their habitat possible. Beaver ponds help store water, recharge aquifers, filter out pollutants, mitigate floods, and stop wildfires in their tracks.
Pacific Standard spoke with Goldfarb about why many naturalists, land managers, and average Americans have overlooked beavers' role in shaping our environment for so long, and why we'll need them in the future.
section-break
How did we overlook the role of beavers in shaping the North American landscape for so long?
Our conception of what North America should look like was permanently distorted by the history of the fur trade. When trappers showed up they found this continent that had been so heavily modified by beavers. You read these old explorers' accounts, and it's incredible how wet North America was. There were ponds and wetlands and beaver dams everywhere. When the beavers were eliminated, a lot of that beaver-built infrastructure was destroyed. I think that one of the reasons we don't fully appreciate the impact that beavers have had on this continent is that we trapped them out so early in the course of European settlement.
Trappers started showing up in North America in the early 1600s and basically devastated the continent's beaver population, and it's not for another couple hundred years that ecologists and naturalists show up to document what the continent's ecosystems looked like. So we have this very degraded sense of how North America should look and function from an ecological and a hydrological standpoint. It's sort of like the whole shifting baselines syndrome concept, where the degraded past gets normalized as present.
In Eager, you call beavers our closest "ecological and technological kin." What do you mean by that?
We humans tend to regard ourselves as kind of unique in the ways that we modify our own surroundings to maximize our own food and shelter. But beavers do that too. They build dams, they create ponds and wetlands that they use to protect themselves from predators, to irrigate their own food supply. They almost act as rotational farmers; they'll raise the water table to increase the growth of willow and other water-loving plants. That's one of the things that always drew me to them: They just remind me of people in a very real way.
Ben Goldfarb.
Ben Goldfarb.
(Photo: Ben Goldfarb)
You make the point that beavers are not endangered, they don't need us, but that we need them. What can beavers do for us?
One great example is water quality. There's a huge problem in this country with agricultural pollution with nitrogen and phosphorus from chemical fertilizers ending up in rivers and estuaries and oceans and leading to dead zones. It's critical that we keep that pollution from reaching the ocean, and beaver ponds are incredibly effective at settling out those pollutants.
But the biggest example is climate change: As the climate warms, more precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow. Instead of remaining in snowpack and gradually melting throughout the course of the spring and summer and fall and keeping rivers and streams wet well into the dry season, now all that precipitation is falling as rain. Any entity that can store water on the landscape, that can keep water high in some of these mountain headwaters in places like the Cascades or the Sierra, becomes incredibly valuable. What stores water better than a beaver? Basically nothing.
Why makes a beaver dam a better option than a man-made one?
Giant reservoirs like Lake Powell or Lake Mead, they're effective when it comes to just storing water, but of course they have all kinds of negative ecological consequences. We know that mega-dams disrupt fish migrations, that they release methane—they have these distorting impacts on the landscape. Whereas beaver ponds and wetlands provide amazing habitat for waterfowl, for fish, for amphibians, for all of these things that are harmed by human dams. So to me, beaver dams provide a lot of the same water storage benefits as concrete dams, but they do so in a way that helps sustain life rather than harming it.
So what's the downside?
I certainly heard a lot of skepticism about whether more beavers on the landscape is really a good thing. Beavers can be destructive and hard to co-exist with. They chew down valuable trees, they flood people's property, they clog up road culverts, they certainly do millions of dollars in damage every year. There are far more beaver haters out there than there are beaver believers like me. So one question I heard a lot was, "Can we really co-exist with expanded beaver populations?" A lot of what I try to do with this book is say, "Yes, of course we can." There are all kinds of non-lethal techniques that we can use to allow beavers to persist on our landscapes and in our waters while mitigating some of the damage that they do.
What do you hope readers will take away from Eager?
First and foremost I just want people to appreciate the incredible role that these animals played in the development of our landscapes and our history as a people and a culture. I think that lots of the ecological and hydrological problems that we're confronted with now can be, to some extent, addressed with more beavers. I don't want to portray beavers as some kind of silver bullet because, for example, climate change is obviously a problem that's so vastly beyond the scale of beavers to address that sometimes I feel a little bit silly suggesting it. But they can absolutely put a dent in some of these issues, like water storage. So they're not a panacea but they are certainly a help to us, and they're an incredibly cost-effective help. If you think about how much money we spend, for example, retrofitting irrigation infrastructure or installing new gray-water systems or no-flush toilets, this water-saving stuff can be pretty cost-ineffective sometimes. Getting more beavers on the landscape is something we can basically do for free.
I imagine you had some fun picking out the title for this book. Can you share some of the other titles you considered?
Obviously beavers lend themselves to puns. There's a million different dam puns: Give a Dam and Worth a Dam. There was Leave It to Beavers. I think at one point one of the editors calculated that there were something like 180 different permutations of title and subtitle. We went through every conceivable beaver pun before settling on Eager, which to me is a great title. I was happy with our choice.
About
Hi, I’m Ben: environmental journalist, editor, and Beaver Believer.
Screen Shot 2017-03-08 at 9.35.07 PM
My writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The Guardian, Science, The Washington Post, High Country News, Outside, Smithsonian, Audubon Magazine, Boston Magazine, Scientific American, OnEarth, Pacific Standard, Yale Environment 360 Grantland, Earth Island Journal, Hakai Magazine, Conservation Magazine, Ensia, Modern Farmer, VICE News, The Independent, Green Futures, World Wildlife, Nature Conservancy Magazine, The Last Word on Nothing, and other publications.
I’m also the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, and available for order here).
Previously, I edited and coordinated the Solutions Journalism Network‘s “Small Towns, Big Change” project, an award-winning multi-newsroom collaborative that produced solutions-oriented coverage of social and environmental issues. I also served as editor-in-chief of Sage Magazine, award-winning environmental publication at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. And from 2014 to 2016 I worked as a correspondent for the western magazine High Country News.
My fiction has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Motherboard, the Allegheny Review, The Hopper, and The Stringybark Stories. My non-fiction has been anthologized in the collection Cosmic Outlaws: Coming of Age at the End of Nature. I’ve spoken about environmental storytelling at venues including Stanford and Yale universities, the American Fisheries Society, and the North American Congress for Conservation Biology. I hold a Masters of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a B.A. in English and Environmental Studies from Amherst College. I’m happiest with a scuba tank strapped to my back or a fly rod in my hand.
EAGER
Becky Libourel Diamond
BookPage. (July 2018): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
EAGER By Ben Goldfarb Chelsea Green $24.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781603587396
ECOLOGY
As descriptive phrases go, "busy as a beaver" is right on target. Most of us probably don't give much thought to the second largest member of the rodent family, except perhaps when they become a nuisance by felling trees and plugging waterways in residential areas. But did you know just how integral beavers are to the environment?
In his intriguing debut, Eager:
The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb details the multitude of ways beavers impact the landscape. Their dams help create wetlands and water storage, reviving aquifers for farms and ranches and providing homes for a diverse assortment of flora and fauna. Without beavers, wetlands and meadows dry up, streams are altered, and countless forms of wildlife become homeless. Through interviews with experts in the field, scientific studies, statistical analysis and his own experiences crisscrossing the U.S. and the U.K. to witness beavers up close and personal, Goldfarb explains how restoring these "ecosystem engineers" to their natural habitat can save tens of millions of dollars each year and help combat drought, climate change and other environmental issues.
Goldfarb delves millions of years into the past, explaining how much North America's terrain has changed since its colonization. Trappers seeking lush beaver pelts brought these "hairy banknotes" to the brink of extinction. But conservationists saved and even reintroduced beavers to some areas in an effort to restore the land to its former status, and today a fervent group of "Beaver Believers" help spread the news that we need to live in harmony with this keystone species.
As Goldfarb reinforces, beavers are "nothing less than continent-scale forces of nature, in large part responsible for sculpting the land upon which we Americans built our towns and raised our food." It's a wake-up call that needs to be answered.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Diamond, Becky Libourel. "EAGER." BookPage, July 2018, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544601882/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=44e266ea. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544601882
Beaver believers
Felicity Morse
Spectator. 338.9914 (Sept. 1, 2018): p31+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
by Ben Goldfarb
Chelsea Green, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 240
The British experience of beavers is somewhat limited. Most of us haven't been lucky enough to have spied an immigrant rodent in the wilds of west Devon, or paid a visit to Knapdale and Alyth in Scotland. Instead, we've only met beavers in storybooks, notably The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where in the warm, homely hut of Mr and Mrs Beaver, the Pevensie children are first introduced to the prophecy of Aslan, over fish and potatoes and a sticky marmalade roll.
Needless to say, beavers don't eat marmalade --they don't even eat fish. Yet these tree-chewing, dam-building rodents are still useful, hospitable creatures, and not just for their pelts, although that's something humans have occasionally forgotten over the years.
There's a lot of history to them. They evolved 30 million years ago--here long before we appeared on the scene around 300,000 years ago. That means, rather excitingly for imaginative sorts, humans were around when beavers the size of hippos roamed from Florida to Alaska.
Eager is peppered by facts like this, as we follow the environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb on a historical, ecological and geographical journey across North America, Britain and Europe, exploring the role of beavers as a keystone species. Remove such a species and the entire ecosystem suffers.
Eager is the story of why the American (and to some extent European) landscape looks the way it does--because of those mountain men and fur trappers who rampaged across North America 400 years ago, killing beavers for their soft fur and mindlessly altering the topography of the continent simply because of the European fashion for beaver hats.
This flat-tailed creature was hunted in Europe long before that, prized not only for its pelt but for meat and medicine. Beavers were categorised as fish by the Catholic Church, so permitted to be eaten on Fridays and during Lent. And their anal sac secretions contain salicylic acid--the active ingredient in aspirin--as a result of all their willow-munching.
But Goldfarb seeks to show how beavers are so much more than this; creating meadows, re-forming rivers, mitigating floods, helping salmon populations, even halting climate change. Yet, maligned and misunderstood by modernity, this creature has continued to be trapped, shot and killed by those who see its natural architecture at odds with human habitation.
The beaver (sometimes affectionately referred to by Goldfarb as 'smelly meat packages') not only has this unknowing power to transform landscapes, benefiting humans and wildlife alike, but can also turn ordinary citizens into animal evangelists: beaver believers, if you will.
These are some of the characters you meet in the book--people, who for one reason or another, have been drawn into the beaver's orbit and built their enthusiastic home there, convinced the world could benefit from working with these aquatic rodents. There are volunteers so enthralled by the beaver that they have dedicated a festival to him (or her--beavers are very difficult to sex, but the male expresses an anal liquid that smells like motor oil while the female's gland juice smells more like cheese).
There are also the ecologists, fluvial geomorphologists, farmers, scientists, salmon fanatics, ranchers, Scottish aristocrats, animal husbandry eccentrics and wildlife biologists. All these characters, as described by Goldfarb, are making the case for beavers as a natural ally of humanity.
This is a book densely packed with knowledge and research. For anyone unfamiliar with ecological terminology, it can present difficulties, though Goldfarb does his best to explain the jargon. But his enthusiasm for the subject shines through. By the end it's hard not to become a beaver believer yourself.
Caption: As a result of willow-munching, beavers secrete salicylic acid--the active ingredient in aspirin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morse, Felicity. "Beaver believers." Spectator, 1 Sept. 2018, p. 31+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A553628072/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63eacf7d. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A553628072
Goldfarb, Ben: EAGER
Kirkus Reviews. (May 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Goldfarb, Ben EAGER Chelsea Green (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 7, 20 ISBN: 978-1-60358-739-6
Unlike a children's book that makes beavers seem like cute little dam builders, this one takes a serious look at the creatures and their critical importance to ecosystems across North America.
Goldfarb, a freelance environmental journalist with a master's degree in environmental management, takes readers from the days of the fur trade, which drew trappers and then settlers across the continent and saw beavers killed by the millions, to current conservation efforts. As he reports, the disappearance of beavers altered the landscape dramatically, drying up wetlands, killing off species, fostering erosion, and changing the courses of streams. While the focus is on North American beavers, the author also offers a brief look at a sister species in Great Britain and conservation efforts there. To research this book, Goldfarb traveled widely with scientists, activists, naturalists, wildlife managers, engineers, cattle ranchers, and beaver rescuers and re-locaters, and he shares his findings in lucid and entertaining prose. Beavers, he writes in his introduction, "are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There's a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon runs, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year." The author consistently convinces readers of the truth of this assessment. It's vital, he writes, that we learn to coexist with these ecosystem engineers because they can help restore our rivers, forestall the loss of biodiversity, and reduce the damages of climate change. An eight-page photograph insert further brings beavers and their world to life.
Filled with hard facts and fascinating people (and animals), this is an authoritative, vigorous call for understanding and action.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Goldfarb, Ben: EAGER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538293979/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f075f2c3. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538293979
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
Publishers Weekly. 265.20 (May 14, 2018): p44+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
Ben Goldfarb. Chelsea Green, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-60358-739-6
In this diverting volume, environmental journalist Goldfarb sings the praises of beavers, who, though "targets of a multicentury massacre" and besieged by urban sprawl, still manage to "flourish ... not only in Walmart parking lots, but in stormwater ponds and golf course water hazards." He sheds light on beaver habits and habitats in the United States, England, and Scotland, focusing on the roles they play within ecosystems and likening them to "ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem." Chapters deal, for instance, with how beavers approach infrastructure and build dams by laying foundations with "mud, stones and sticks set perpendicular to the stream's flow." Goldfarb also acknowledges the mischief beavers can create, recounting the tale of a beaver who gnawed through fiber-optic cable and knocked out cell phone service in Taos, N.Mex., and a beaver "barging into a Maryland department store and rifling through its plastic-wrapped Christmas trees." Goldfarb also calls attention to the work done by dedicated wildlife biologists, scientists, land managers, and other self-proclaimed "beaver believers" like Heidi Perryman, founder of the nonprofit Worth a Dam, a "comprehensive clearinghouse for beaver science and coexistence techniques." These folks lend personality to an affectionate portrait of these "hardy rodents." Illus. (July)
Caption: Half-Tail Dale awaits a mate at the Methow Beaver Project's rodent love motel, from Ben Goldfarb's Eager (reviewed on p. 47).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter." Publishers Weekly, 14 May 2018, p. 44+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539387447/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9cceb97b. Accessed 21 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539387447
EAGER
THE SURPRISING, SECRET LIFE OF BEAVERS AND WHY THEY MATTER
Ben Goldfarb
Chelsea Green Publishing (Jun 27, 2018)
Hardcover $24.95 (304pp)
978-1-60358-739-6
Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb’s lively and educational Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter shows why beavers should be respected as “ecosystem engineers.”
Goldfarb is a fan of beavers, but he admits that they are not loved by all. To some, he writes, “beavers still appear more menacing than munificent.” This book is an excellent antidote to that attitude. It traces the history of beavers, tying their evolution to the colonization of North America, and shows their positive impact on the natural environment. Goldfarb also uncovers how humans who recognize beavers’ importance help by relocating them to areas where they can do the most good.
In addition to being enlightening, Eager is filled with unusual beaver-related stories. One can learn about “the world’s largest collection of beaver-themed” items (it’s located in Martinez, California), and “one of the largest beaver relocations ever undertaken” (it took place from 1986 to 1999 to the north of Yellowstone National Park).
Perhaps most interestingly, Eager addresses both the positives and negatives of the beaver-human-ecology relationship in a thought-provoking way. Goldfarb ponders important issues, suggesting, for example, “whether it’s appropriate to build artificial beaver dams in national parks is an ethical question as much as a scientific one.” He also discusses the possible downside of beaver-based restoration: “The landscapes where beavers can do the most good aren’t always ready for them.”
The author perceptively and eloquently concludes that, while beavers were almost obliterated in the early twentieth century and were saved by humans, now “it’s we who need their help—to store and clean water, to rebuild flood defenses, to repair degraded rivers, to revive biodiversity.”
Eager offers rare insight into the history of beavers and their behavior, qualities, and characteristics. Even more importantly, Eager explores the animals’ complex relationship with humans, and the essential role they play in developing ponds and streams that support wildlife.
Reviewed by Barry Silverstein
July/August 2018