Episode 6 - Builders: Beavers

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry. And I'm Emily Wakefield, and we are your hosts for More Than a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

SPEAKER_04: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

SPEAKER_03: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the more than human at the center of each episode.

SPEAKER_03: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

SPEAKER_04: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

SPEAKER_03: 1:58

Imagine a fish and game agent faced with a dilemma in the late 1940s in a small mountain town in Idaho. This isn't just any mountain town. It's the one lodged in my deepest memories. McCall is a place where I learned to ski. I tumbled down the mountain with my best friend in high school after taking the city bus up early on Saturday mornings. Only about 2,000 people live in this town year round and that's been pretty steady for a long time. mostly because the snow in the winter can be six, eight, 10 feet high piled on the sidewalks. This means that there's an ice sculpture festival in mid-February and that it's home to at least half a dozen winter Olympians. But the heart of this town is a lake, Payette Lake. which is named after a French fur trapper. So you're picturing this town in the late 1940s with ponderosa pine trees around the lake's edge, more than 100 feet tall, sandy beaches, and this lake with crystal clear, really cold water has two main lobes to it and a peninsula that juts out in the middle that's now a state park. There's a little outlet at the southmost part of the lake that gives way to the Payette River, some of the best whitewater rapids in the world. But on the southeastern shore, a lumber mill had just burned down again. At the same time, recreation on the lake is advancing, docks are being built, boats appear on the shorelines. The skiing, of course, in the wintertime I mentioned is matched with water skiing that starts to emerge during the summer. In the turmoil of December, Deciding how or when or where to rebuild this timber mill. a family of beavers moves into the spot. The beavers are, of course, a natural element of this place, but their appearance proved an immediate nuisance because of their beaverly ways and the beaverly things they were doing. They were cutting down trees and clogging ditches. They were spreading the water out of the lake and onto roads and even paths. So, This fish and game agent you're picturing has freshly returned from World War II after having served in the Air Force. His name is Elmo Heater, and he has a creative solution to this nuisance beaver family. He knows that the genuine habitat in need of beavers lay just over the next mountain range. Beavers are notoriously hard to locate. They don't come when they're called. They dislike being strapped to a mule or a donkey to go over the mountains. I don't think the donkey appreciates that much either, but Heder had tried it. So instead he decided to take another approach, if the beavers could be dropped out of airplanes into the wild lands near the Salmon River in what's known as the Chamberlain Basin or affectionately called the River of No Return. The problem to solve was how to hold the beavers. You can't deal with a roaming beaver inside the airplane and then release or activate the parachute while preserving the lives of the beaver. Heater was on it. He solved this problem by inventing a box, a collapsible wooden beaver suitcase with one-inch air holes in the sides and tied together with a cord that would collapse and open on impact so the furry little beavers could scurry away unharmed. McCall has a well used but small airport and heater tested and worked on the box there multiple iterations and one test beaver. who he named Geronimo. In 1948, Heeder transported 76 beavers live into remote areas using the boxes and the parachutes. He dropped them from about five to 800 feet up in the air, and only one observed casualty occurred when a beaver escaped the box about 75 feet up and jumped, but did not survive. So the other 76 scrambled out of the box, ran off into the woods, and lived beaverly lives. Heeder wrote about these escapades for the Journal of Wildlife Management and went back to the area the beavers had been dropped in in 1949 and declared the transplantation successful. He saw dams and lodges and other evidence of happy beavers in Chamberlain Basin. Peter estimated the cost per beaver was$30, less if the parachutes were retrieved and reused by Forest Service agents, and they were. So this is a great story, a great example of how you can't make history up. This really happened. It's so unbelievable. And you can actually watch these beavers jump out of airplanes on YouTube. You can see the link in our show notes. But in addition to being unbelievable, what's so cool about this story is it's a moment in time where you can see history at work and you can see the global forces and the echoes and absence of other forces in a particular time and place. The parachuting beavers, in other words, give us a chance to think about what animals might have experienced and why. But more than that, they give us a chance to think about how history manifests in these unbelievable stories. So, for example, underemployed parachutists. That's World War II on the home front, on the domestic landscape after the conflict. This idea of a faster, cheaper, safer method of transport using parachutes only could have been possible in the context of war surplus, which is where the parachutes came from. Another piece of the history that's happening in this story is that the beavers came back to McCall on their own because of what had happened before. The demand for fur trapping had stalled, the overexploitation and the desire by the French to create a fur desert to keep the British out of places like Idaho. had stalled, right? It had stopped by the 1940s as nations got distracted by other things. You can also see the lumber industry, the timber industry, and less so in how I told it, but the mining industry waxing and waning and booming and busting with impacts and effects, not just for people, but for other species as well. Idaho's pretty late to colonization and the frontier. It could be sort of a frontier on a frontier, but that means there's all So lots of amazing habitat left between the peaks, right? That's the Chamberlain Basin that Heater knew to bring the beavers back to. And that basin was hard to reach. Roads were nearly impossible to get there. And still, in Idaho, there's only one two-lane road that goes from northern Idaho to southern Idaho. All of that is politically and socially constructed, we could say, right? Idaho only makes sense in an abstract context. It doesn't make sense in an environmental one. And this story helps us to understand that. Recreation is another force that we see burgeoning in this story. Parachuting or skydiving for fun didn't exist yet, but Heater gives us an example of foreshadowing of how that might happen. But the transitions on the lake, the skiing, the water skiing, the swimmers, building docks where beaver dams had been, it's a transition to an amenity-based economy. And the narrative of the skydiving beaver is an actor in that. in part because it's a story of gentrification, right? And what that means is that it's a story of outsiders coming in and pushing away those that had been there a long time, like the Beavers. So another part where we can see the history, and this is perhaps my favorite one, is the role of Idaho Fish and Game, right? The role of the state in making decisions over the wildlife. Many people recognize that in the Intermountain West, the federal government owns the real estate, right? The federal government's the largest agency. landowner, Forest Service land, or also Bureau of Land Management lands make up the vast majority. Nearly two-thirds of Idaho, 64%, is owned by the federal government. But states own the wildlife, and the caretaker of the critters is the state of Idaho in this case. And so a state-aid Idaho Fish and Game agent like Heeter gets to experiment on parachuting beavers. And Heeter knew his region. He described the The Chamberlain Basin is being pure wilderness, untouched by humans. We can unpack what that actually means, but it meant that he knew it was the perfect neighborhood for beavers to go on their beaverly way. The problem, again, was transportation, right? How to get them in there when beavers don't have a railway or a bus station. But Heeter knew his animals and his descriptions of transplanting young animals so that they go on and build a family is vaguely reminiscent of of frontier narratives for settlement, right? And his idea that transplanting them in July or August also gives them a chance to settle in before winter. So the parachuting beavers is one of my favorite ways of thinking about why beavers make history. And one reason they do so is the particular features of a beaver. What it is and what it does are unique and critical and interconnected. And part of what makes the beaver an agent of history is its beaverliness, right? The things that it does. It's this furry 50-pound butterball with a big flat tail, webbed feet, and enormous orange teeth. on a small rodent head. Beavers are fast swimmers, but they're slow and kind of lumbering on land. They build lodges to spend the winter in, protected from the elements, but they have to swim through a pond or a lake into those lodges where they store up all of the tree branches and limbs that they feed on all summer. Beavers are drawn to the sound of running water and they can't resist it, sort of like me and Michelle on a patio with a cold beverage. It calls to us and we're so tempted to crawl over there. Just like that, the beaver wants to plug up whatever running water it can hear. And this makes me think about a class that I teach that has to do with beavers. Beavers and beaver analogs is the subject of the class. And I began to teach this because Boise has a beaver dilemma. Urban beavers clog canals and irrigation ditches. They cut down expensive vegetation in yards and in city parks, and they plug up that water. They stop water in ways that inconvenience residents and managers. And part of this is what historian Peter Allegona calls the accidental ecosystem, right? The types of urban environments, landscape, the long water with ample greenery and parks that are good for humans are also simultaneously good and desired by wildlife, especially beavers. So unfortunately, today, the parachutes are put away and the solution is often to trap and kill beavers in these parks. It doesn't have to be the solution, but it's often been the default fault. And one issue is seasonality. Beavers become a nuisance in an urban setting in the winter when they go to the easiest landscape to cut down. But you can't relocate a beaver into a rural area in the winter. They'll just die without food or become a quick snack for a mountain lion. And so our friends here at Idaho Fish and Game have been looking for a solution. And one solution is what they affectionately call Beaver Jail. Beaver Jail is a holding facility for relocation. And the beavers that get trapped out of nuisance calls go there and they're scrubbed down. They have sort of a beaver spa day. They're checked for parasites and cleaned. They're held there for a while to make sure diseases aren't rampant. And then ideally, they find a date and the pair is released into a watershed that's in need of beavers. This is a working solution and it's been happening in really exciting ways But it doesn't deal with the overwintering part. And that's a solution I'm trying to engage my students in figuring out. So beavers are important in rural areas because they reconnect water with the landscape. As we know, the inner mountain west is arid. It's a literal desert in most places, down where Michelle lives, but also up in Idaho. And the mountains stretch over this and provide important habitat. But the vast majority of Messick or wetland property... Rivers and stream-based lands are owned by individuals, and all that land is disconnected from its public, but also disconnected from the management of those landscapes. And there's really important work by restoration ecologists and also managers that's happening to bring beavers back for all kinds of reasons, overgrazing, climate change, invasive species, wildland fires, rivers and streams. have become channeled deeper away from the landscape to the point when we imagine a stream to be straight naturally, but it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, healthy streams are lazy. I have a rancher friend who points out that nature is by design inefficient, and that's a good thing. Straight streams are like structurally starved bowling alleys, and one tool to make them less straight is not a bulldozer It's not a shovel. It's not a drone or an engineer, but it's a beaver. And a beaver can do its magic to make nature less efficient like she wants to be. Make it slow down and give the land exactly what it needs. More time with the water on the landscape. And in part, what humans need to do is mostly get out of the way of the beavers, right? So one thing we can do is see beavers as a form of technology that comes in and out of favor historically and as a proxy for other goals or of a way of thinking about other episodes, other things that need to happen on the landscape. So if a parachuting beaver is a form of repatriation or restoration, it's important to think about what's happening in the process and how coexistence can really be managed in the meantime. Humans and beavers have been building together for a really long time. And the more we ask ourselves to what extent Humans are mimicking beavers rather than beavers mimicking humans, especially engineers. The more we learn from them and the more we're able to understand how we can coexist and make peace with our beaverly friends. And here I'd like to bring in some experts to help us think through this a little bit more.

SPEAKER_04: 18:46

I think it's fascinating to think about the ways in which humans and beavers have coexisted for so long. And again, blurring that line between the natural quote unquote and the human. And of course, one of the goals of our podcast, in case you hadn't gotten that yet, is to increase the wonder that we all have and that we share about both the past history, but also the working of the more than human. And while we can study a lot about beavers, there's actually quite a bit written about beavers and history and a lot of indigenous knowledge shared about the ways in which indigenous communities in North America thought about the beaver. And there's all these cool stories that Emily and our guests that are coming up here in just a minute can tell us. Sometimes it's not easy to hear from the beavers themselves or really even to see them. In fact, we'll talk a little bit in the interview about everyone's encounters with beavers and, and just about everybody, uh, Emily, Layla and Asha, our guests, uh, we'll talk about seeing the furry little brown head, but not usually the whole body, unless you go, you know, to a zoo or something like that, but it's kind of hard to see them in the wild. We often see evidence of the beavers, uh, what they've done, the dams, the ponds that they create, uh, of course, you know, nod off, uh, tree limbs, et cetera, but we don't always hear from them. And so before we move into our amazing conversation with our guests, Lynn Phillip, who is the author of Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America, which is a New York Times bestselling book that was published last year, and also Asha Ramakumar, who is an animal rights lawyer and a former student of mine, and then, of course, Emily. I thought it would be really cool if we could just hear from a beaver themselves and some Incredible folks over at the BBC have captured some of the sounds of beaver. And I'm not entirely sure what this particular beaver is saying, but go ahead and take a listen. And you'll definitely hear their verbal communication, which sounds a lot like grunting to us. And you'll hear a little bit of them eating. And then, of course, you'll hear the splashing and get a sense of them living in their watery world. So I hope you enjoy that.

UNKNOWN: 21:03

Beaver.

SPEAKER_01: 21:09

So

SPEAKER_04: 21:20

now we'll return back to listening to humans talk about the beaver after hearing that cool excerpt from the beaver themselves. We've invited three guests here today. And Emily, go ahead and take it away.

SPEAKER_03: 21:34

We are so excited to bring in some experts to talk a little bit more about beavers with you. Our first expert is Asha Ramakumar, who is a lawyer, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, and an expert on the intersection of animal rights and reproductive justice. And we also have Layla Phillip, who is the author of Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America, which is a one It's a wonderful and amazing read that transverses many of the things that we want to continue talking about in terms of beavers. So Asha and Leila, have you had any memorable personal experiences with beavers that you could share with our wonderful listeners?

SPEAKER_02: 22:25

Well, shall I start? I guess it really was a memorable experience with the beaver that got me started writing Beaverland because, you know, full disclosure, I, you know, I discovered beavers by accident. So I was taking a walk with my dog in the woods and I heard the iconic beaver tail slap and I looked where the sound was coming from and what previously had been sort of like a kind of a brown area in the woods, just what I considered kind of a quiet area of the woods where not much was going on was just glinting silver with water. And then this small brown head was swimming back and forth and bam, she slammed her tail again. And I was just transfixed. And I think about that now as really a moment of awe. When I reflect back on it, just one of those moments that just takes you outside of yourself. And I didn't know anything about beavers at that time. But now that I know after six years of research that went into the book and and, you know, I've been on the road lecturing and talking based on the book for almost over a year now. And now that I know the science behind what's going on, the transformation of that. swampy area into a pond, the incredible hub of biodiversity that comes with beavers, I'm just more amazed than ever. So it still makes the hair on my arms stand up, to tell you the truth. I mean, it's just, they're amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 24:00

Yeah. Yeah, they are amazing. really exceptional creatures. And I think one thing that really struck me was I was at a Mount Auburn cemetery in Watertown, Massachusetts, and I was just sitting by a pond. And it's a very built up area. It's not in the middle of the woods. It's pretty populated. And there are people coming in and out. And I was sitting there and I saw something moving in just a little pond of water. And I thought it might have been a fish, thought it might have been a duck. And then I saw the furry brown head and I was floored because immediately I was like, how did you get here? Where did you come from? There's no real evidence of beavers in Mount Auburn Cemetery. It's just, you don't see the chewed trees. You don't see any kind of dams. You don't see any lodge. It's just really remarkable. And I think what stood out to me about that is they can be quite literally anywhere. There are allegedly beaver in Lincoln Park, very close to where I live here in Chicago. I have not yet seen them, but that's a really busy urban area. So they're in urban areas, they're in rural areas, they're in a cemetery, they're in the woods. And I just found that so remarkable.

SPEAKER_04: 25:21

Interestingly enough, Asha and I know each other from Tucson, Arizona, where you wouldn't think there are, we don't see flowing rivers much anymore. They sort of stopped flowing on the surface. Most of them stopped flowing on the surface by the mid-20th century because of groundwater pumping. And you think beavers really need that flowing water. Indeed, they do. But there are many beavers in the Sonora Desert, and they're making a comeback, which is really interesting. Groups are working hard to ensure that and to do some counts. They're doing better in Mexico than they are north of the border. But nonetheless, so, Asha, they're even in the desert, right, which is really interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 25:54

No, yes. Friends of mine in Phoenix had a beaver in their backyard and that had chewed down their, unfortunately, their citrus trees. But they came through the canal in Phoenix, which is just incredible. I mean, they're just so adaptable. They do so much with so little. It's just really amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 26:18

You know, I'm glad you brought up that issue of water going underground because it's I've been monitoring a beaver site here since the book came out. And what's fascinating about these young beavers is that they've actually restored an intermittent stream that had gone under and they pulled it back up. So what I think a lot of people don't realize is that beavers don't always dam running water. They can actually enable subsurface water to come back up, which is fantastic. just really incredible to think that they're actually helping the river system repair itself. So that's a whole conversation I hope we can sort of get into, how beavers are really part of a healthy river ecology in arid areas, as well as, you know, I live in the Northeast, which is woodland mostly and pretty wet, increasingly wet. In fact, we have problems with water. But if I can just loop back, because I think we often talk about beavers and what they do, because we rarely see them the animal, we mostly see maybe a head swimming and a tail slap, and then they go into their water world and we see their incredible constructions and the impact of their engineering. But I did have this experience going up, and I write about this in Beaverland, to Beaver Sprite, this beaver sanctuary founded by this incredibly eccentric, wonderful person, Dorothy Richards, who founded the beaver sanctuary in the 50s and 60s. And there, because the beavers are used to people, and they have been actually for generations, because two of Dorothy Richards' acolytes, Sharon and Owen Brown, have continued the sanctuary, we were able to get really close to the beavers. So it was the first time and one of the only times I've actually been up close to beavers where they're very relaxed around humans. And I was amazed by how gentle they were with one another. And I was really struck by the complexity of their social interactions, because I had sort of thought of them as these incredible builders, and if anything, a little bit ferocious. They can take down trees, they can build the largest animal construction on the planet, they can dam up millions of gallons of water, and here they were chittering and chattering with one another, and rarely do people get up close to beavers in that way. I write a lot about indigenous ecological knowledge in beaver land, and I did a lot of research about great beaver stories throughout the continent. And I think it's no coincidence that some of the oldest stories on the continent are stories of beaver, particularly great beaver. And, you know, we can look at those stories as carrying on maybe paleo memories of the actual great beaver, Castoriades, which was part of the megafauna, you know, those big, beavers the size of bears. But also we can think about those stories as understanding the scientific importance of beavers in the ecosystem. But also, increasingly, I've come to see how within many, many indigenous cultures, beavers are considered important teachers of values of connectivity, reciprocity. So even the building of dams, not as obstruction of but for all the actual connectivity that is actually created with dance, which may seem counterintuitive.

SPEAKER_04: 29:49

Yeah, that might lead us into one of the questions that we wanted to talk with you about, Leila and Emily, you two. When you teach, I think both of you have a tendency to want to... include several perspectives and weave together several different versions of the stories that you tell. And Layla, you do that by reaching back in time, reaching across different cultures. Emily, you're obviously a historian, so you think similarly and you think about both the past and the present and different places and try to weave all of that together. What are you trying to do and why is it important for us to always think about the different versions of a story? story and the different ways that we can tell the past, the present, the life of the beaver, the life of the beaver with humans, with different humans in different cultures. What's the point of telling all those different stories from different time periods and weaving them together into a really beautiful kind of logical whole in many ways? I'm just wondering if you could talk about that.

SPEAKER_03: 30:53

Well, I think that the beaver sort of requires many different perspectives. And we were just talking about sort of indigenous stories about creation and the origins of the earth. And one of my favorite to read in class, which I do every time I teach the beaver class, is the Kootenai and Salish story, Beaver Steals Fire, which is an amazing sort of counterintuitive way of using the beaver. Because as we've talked about, the beaver invokes water, right? Or it invokes land and the dam building or the bridge building. But in this story, beaver actually steals fire. And it's beavers being in community, as Asha was with the other beings, the curlew and the sage grouse and the other beings on the landscape that the fire has actually brought for and brought forth. And I think that that's one of the ways that I always go back to of thinking about the beaver in community. And it requires to understand a community perspectives that transcend geography and time and that are also patient. And that patience is something that I think that the beaver also teaches us. And I think thinking about the scientific expertise that goes into beaver dam analogs and replicating the work of the beavers engineering prowess on the landscape has become this kind of revolutionary new and you write about this lately, right, this this new kind of restoration technique. Don't. bring in a bulldozer, bring in a beaver. And I think that there is something to that perspective that's really useful, but I also love the way it parallels. Maybe humans have been doing those things that beavers have also been doing, check dams and slowing down the water. And those practices are also beaver and human. And so I think playing with those different perspectives help us understand not just the beaver better, but also humans in really interesting and exciting ways as well.

UNKNOWN: 32:54

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 32:55

Thank you so much. I wanted to push it further, and I spent more time with the book. And I think the structure of the book is really intentional, if I can just talk about that just really quickly. So We were going to ask you about that anyway, so go for it. I began with an indigenous story, the story of great beaver from my region, the woodlands of the Northeast, which is a story of how the Connecticut River Valley was formed, an Algonquian story. I moved from that actually into a profile of a fur trapper, a marginalized group, a very controversial group. Both those moves were very intentional because I wanted to disrupt and kind of challenge readers to rethink what, first of all, who we position as the expert. In science writing, we often put the sort of Western scientist first, and then we backstory the Different kinds of information coming from different corners to support that. And that might be information from indigenous communities or from marginalized groups or, you know, groups that are considered not the expert. But I really... wanted to put those knowledge bases first. The wonderful thing about the story of beavers is that it's such a hopeful story because beavers are also one of the greatest 20th century comeback stories we have in terms of conservation because people worked so hard in the 1900s to bring them back. And many of the people who worked to bring them back were from the hunting, trapping community. So it's a complicated, paradoxical history. And I teach college students who are struggling with what they call climate anxiety and feeling like they're so terrified by the news they don't know what to do. And I think stories that can give people a sense of collective resilience and hope are really important. And I think the story of Beaver or the story of Great Beaver is resonating for a reason. Like we need that story now. For real. And it's not Pollyanna.

SPEAKER_04: 35:48

There's been some really powerful public policy changes decisions that have been made over the years that have, in fact, been helpful. And I think it is, in some ways, just as we watch, when we think about connectivity, I think that that collective response to our shared world is one of the only ways to address some of the issues that we're facing. And I think government is our collectivity, right, is our connectivity. It's the means by which we connect with one another, or at least one of the means. And so, Asha, I'm wondering, like, this is kind of your area. You think widely, you've been thinking this way since you You were like 17 years old about policy, about the role. That's true. I can honestly say that.

UNKNOWN: 36:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 36:29

you know, the role of government in our lives and specifically now you're a newly minted lawyer. So this is a new field that we're having here on the podcast, which is really exciting. So I'm wondering if you want to talk about, you know, are weavers protected by laws? What is their legal status? And then you can get more kind of meta and philosophical and thinking about what would it look like to give animals legal protection or standing, et cetera. Just talk maybe a little bit about that, about the realm of law, even the historical approach to this kind of stuff that I think might be one of the arenas where we can really begin to make significant new changes.

SPEAKER_00: 37:07

I am so excited to talk about this because this is like my favorite topic of conversation ever. And it's something I'm constantly thinking about. But to start off the very kind of nitty gritty level about, you know, whether beavers are protected under the law, I think there are two different buckets. One, like pot laws and policies that are directly targeted at beavers and then other kind of environmental laws that are tangentially related to beavers simply because beavers do so much to the environment that by virtue of their role they are affected by by policies such as like clean water act or you know things like that more kind of broad environmental policy changes the way Watersheds are managed, that kind of thing. So that's one axis. I think the second axis would be federal regulation versus state and local regulation. And by and large, beaver themselves are predominantly regulated on the state level. Different states have different laws about when you can trap beaver, how many you can trap, whether you can treat them as nuisance animals, whether oftentimes you can shoot them on the spot. there's a high variability on that. And so, you know, I think it's kind of hard to piece together because, and there's not a lot of cohesion in our understanding of how beavers should be treated under the law, which is actually a project that the Beaver Institute is trying to work on is, can we just like get together a list of like every law that has to do with beavers? Because it's voluminous. It's a lot. And it's very, very, nitty-gritty because it's you're going to end up with looking at you know various hunting licenses in each state so it's it's kind of it's a lot so that kind of answers it on on the local level and then at the federal level they're really this kind of echoes what we were talking about with respect to the way we conceive of american conservation american environmentalism which is that it has largely been focused on species level interventions. So that's where your Endangered Species Act comes in, which just had its 50th anniversary and less related to beaver, but related to animals, things like the Animal Welfare Act, one of the first pieces of legislation that are actually dealing with individual animals. So I think that's something in the animal law community that we talk a lot about is like sort of this shift away from thinking about animals and non-human animals as larger entities, but just as individual beings. And that is where I think this philosophical discussion comes in is because I think it's more, shall I say, palatable to talk about animal issues through a lens of environmentalism and through a lens of species and conservation with ends that are still fundamentally anthropocentric. So even the language of the Endangered Species Act is very much geared toward we need to protect non-human animals because maybe the cure for cancer is somewhere in the natural world. And ESA is not just animals, it's also plants and other things too, but it's through a very fundamentally anthropocentric lens. And I think the idea that individual animals themselves have intrinsic value simply because they exist in the world is a harder idea for people to grasp. The law is not for animals. And it's a very frustrating thing to be an animal lawyer because you're using tools that are just at best, imperfect. Like they're just, you're trying, you have to be super creative, which is part of what draws me to it. But the thing I kept feeling is like, this is just, it doesn't work. And I think it's hard because non-human animals kind of are somewhere in the middle because there's a case that we read in my animal law class where the judge was like, well, I know like a dog is not like a toaster, but a dog is also not like a human. So like, where's this quasi-property status? Where does that fit in? And there's a legal scholar at Arizona State University Law School named Karen Bradshaw, who wrote an amazing book called Wildlife as Property Owners. And if wildlife can be property owners and they themselves are property, how does that work?

SPEAKER_02: 41:42

You know, can I jump in? Because I think there's really an opportunity to learn from indigenous ecological knowledge and use terminology from that. I know it's being applied in river restoration now in interesting ways, and I've been tracking this. But if we think about, say, you know, Western science acknowledges the importance of a beaver with the term keystone species. So... Because the keystone brick of an arch, if you take it out, the whole arch falls. And so Western science acknowledges that if you take beavers out of the landscape, the whole ecology falters. And so in some ways, Western scientists acknowledge the importance of the beaver. But if you use the term from indigenous ecological science and say beavers are a keystone relative, then I think some of your... immediately conservation and science are mixed and our responsibility to this animal is relational. And it's no longer the conversation between a dog and a toaster, is it? It's more complex. But I think you laid it out in such an interesting way, Asha, about how the law is for humans. It really doesn't apply for animals because we really need a radical change in terminology. I think our conservation movement has been separated from science.

SPEAKER_00: 43:08

In terms of animal rights, there are many, many strategies that have been used. And to answer the question about standing, you know, it's really difficult because know and i think that this will change with ai but you know we can't communicate reciprocally with non-human animals and have a conversation with them ask them what their needs are ask them what their preferences are though i think we know more than we like to admit to ourselves i think animal non-human animals are very adept at actually communicating to us what they are feeling what they need you can Layla, as you were saying, you can see how different beavers are when they're relaxed versus in a stressful environment. They tell us what their preferences are. I think we choose to not listen in many instances.

SPEAKER_03: 43:54

My first beaver encounter was in Tierra del Fuego, southern Chile. And it was not a native species, right? Beavers were flown in from Canada and let go. You can watch the video on YouTube by the Argentine Air Force, right? And set free in this landscape that was paradise for them, but that has been ultimately sort of cataclysmically destructive for the southern beach forests. And Laura Ogden is an amazing anthropologist that writes about hope and wonder at the end of the world is what she calls it. And she means the end of the world in terms of climate change, but she also means the end of the world because Patagonia has so long been portrayed from Magellan onward, right, as the end of the world. But she goes through these sort of dramatic reenactments of beavers on the landscape and what to make of them and should they be exterminated? Do they have rights? Do they belong there since they've been there for multiple generations? And what does it mean to be come native to a place, not just to be native to a place. And so I think thinking with them about these tensions of our world are both diasporic in their nature, but they're also really bound by the limited perspectives and limited terminology that has been embraced through the 20th century. And so the more thinking that we do in roundtables like this, where we can bring different disciplines together and have that conversation, I think the more it illuminates these opportunities for how these creatures help us think more holistically, not just about the past, but also about the future as well. I

SPEAKER_00: 45:31

think we so infrequently think about our duties to the natural world, our responsibility for that also. I think this is the very American colonial culture exploitive lens with which it's what can the natural world give us rather than this idea of we owe a duty to other beings. And I think that that is where other paradigms are really useful, like indigenous frameworks, like even Navajo or in Ecuador, there's an understanding of like Mother Earth is an entity in herself that we owe something to. And I think that that is reframing that we need to have because it's like, well, what are our responsibilities

SPEAKER_04: 46:22

also? Yeah, that's great. And I also think that there's something to be said about maybe the entree into doing that rethinking is to undo some of this binary thinking that queer ecologists are sort of suggesting that it's long past due that we, that we embark on in Western culture, right? That we, instead of thinking about nature as out there or nature, something beyond the human and the human body, we begin to think about humans as natural so that the things that we do are not outside nature and are somehow unnatural, but are actually part of the ecosystem just in the same. And we can sort of see those similarities with beaver. Yeah. the actions that they take in their ecosystems, right?

SPEAKER_00: 47:03

I think that that binary is fundamentally harmful because we are animals. And I think this is what's so appealing to me doing animal rights work is just thinking of myself as an animal also with very primitive needs and very, you know, I see this when I look at my cat. I'm just like, you know, she is sprawled out, body open, just whatever feels good. And it encourages me to do that because that feels good to me too. But yeah, I mean, I think seeing ourselves as separate is painful because it's hurtful to us in ways I think we don't realize.

SPEAKER_02: 47:43

I can say without hesitation that beavers change the way I see the world. And I found them in my own backyard. And it was one of the things that I really wanted to share in the book with readers that I did find them in my own backyard. In fact, I found them in the kind of what I would consider kind of broken landscapes of the East, where much of the area that i was walking through is basically an environmentally devastated landscape where you know we're still the the woodlands are coming back after hundreds of years of massive deforestation and then overcrowding and a lot of a lot of environmental problems but so i think it was really important to me to locate the book in connecticut and to start there and keep circling around my beaver pond to go back to the structure of the book and to sort of show the reader that you can find it all right wherever you are. It was really actually hard initially to find a publisher for Beaverland. And so it's been incredibly gratifying for me to see the book take off, to get it, it got on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks because of readers. You know, it's been reader driven. And I think people get the power of the story. I mean, I think what I'm trying to say is I would love to say it's because I'm such a great writer, but I think it's the power of the story and this moment that people realize that we need to start looking where we are. We need to find the hope in the natural world. I would consider Herb Sabansky, who I profile actually, who sadly passed away, to be a very dedicated conservationist and environmentalist. But when I started the book, I would have thought I have nothing in common with this person. I was afraid to even have a conversation with him. I must have sat in the car for 20 minutes before I got up the nerve to go into my first fur trapper group because I thought we're just crazy. this is way too scary to talk to people so different. But I think we really have to also learn to talk to fellow humans as well, or we're not going to be able to solve our problems. So I just want to throw that out there.

SPEAKER_04: 50:04

Just in terms of time, I might wrap us up here a little bit. I'd love to think about you know, even the picture on the front of your book, Layla, the cute little tail and, you know, thinking about the weird rodent, the orange teeth, all the things. So they are kind of, they are silly and they waddle and they've been known as problems, but they are so much more than silliness and so much more than a problem. And so I'm wondering if all three of you could just sort of share a the ways in which in your work, in your teaching, Emily, in your research and writing, Leila, and in your thinking about your career and about your activism, Asha, how do you rectify the seriousness with the silliness? How do we ensure that the message to a public audience is that we have much to learn from this weird rodent who is very obviously like so many of the animals the plants in this amazing continent made America. So I'm just curious if you could like wrap us up by talking a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_03: 51:12

I'll go quickly and hopefully briefly, but I go full in for the silly. I really do. I mean, my husband cannot tell people I teach a class on Beaver with a straight face, right? I mean, like it's just so, there's so many ways of thinking about the Beaver's pop culture references, the ways it exists in the world, the funny songs about it, the stickers, all the things about the Beaver. And that for me is the disarming part of it to have a better conversation. it's so silly that to say that, that it becomes a what, you know? Oh yeah. And did you know they parachuted? And did you know, like all these things that you can't, make up are a way of pulling back from this, like paralyzed by the crisis. And that's why I started teaching the class. And that's why I started sort of thinking about them. I mean, Layla was talking before about translocation and the tension around that. Well, like we call it beaver jail and the beavers go get a spa rubbed down before they get moved to a different water system. Right. And so like, again, that's like going full in for the beavers are like us and we're like them. And these are the silly ways that make the world wonderful. And that, I think, as an opening way to make things more serious tends to work better. And I think it just sort of makes life more than just a series of declension narratives, really. I

SPEAKER_00: 52:39

love that. I'm happy to go next. I think I have a very similar feeling and I think there is such a lack of joy and just being able to be in awe and feel that is I think incredibly empathy building. because to be able to just look at something and just feel that, I feel like you feel this kinship and this bond when you see animal, non-human animals doing silly things. Like it just is, I find it really moving. I mean, I just, I love it. I love, I mean, I think that's why people love like cat videos and people love seeing animals just being themselves and doing the things that, are silly and i i just i love it and i think i have i have these uh that i keep in my bag like i love just telling people that i am a beaver believer because as emily said like people are like what and people kind of look at you funny and they're just like why beaver and then it gives me a great opportunity to talk about how wonderful and amazing they are and I have proudly converted many people in my life to just think about beavers, but I think most people don't in their day-to-day life. I don't think their mental real estate is as occupied by beaver as perhaps the four of us. But I think that there's actually too much seriousness. And I feel like if we were more lighthearted and leaned in more to humor, then I think we would all be better for it.

SPEAKER_02: 54:20

So maybe I'll go back to my title, which was very controversial when I told the publisher this was the title and among a lot of people. So Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America. And to me, I wanted to do two things. One, I wanted it to be humorous. Obviously, it's tongue in cheek because you just have to read the first couple of pages and you realize that I'm head over heels crazy about beavers. You know, the first line of the book is, I think there's an element of the sacred and the beaver. But I actually wanted to... like lean in very heavily to the importance of beavers in our history because beavers really did make this country. I mean, they jump-started transatlantic trade. It was the lust for beaver pelts that got ships racing across the Atlantic to come here. By the 19th century, they had revved up the engines of capitalism here. Our first multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, you know, got his fortune with beaver pelts So I really wanted to like kind of establish our long social history on this continent, you know, from colonization on with beavers, because I think it was just blew my mind that I didn't learn about them in school, you know, and that we think of our American icons as the bison and the eagle. Like we readily think of these majestic, powerful animals and associate them with America. But it's actually the beaver that did a whole lot more. This hilarious, weird, eccentric, adorable 36-inch rodent with four ever-growing orange teeth. I mean, I just love the fact that, you know, we're so into power and strength in the American empire. And then it's all based on a rodent. And I thought it was really, like... Thank you so

SPEAKER_04: 56:44

much. I hope so. and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than a Podcast.