Book Review: 'Beaverland,' by Leila Philip - The New York Times - 0 views
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That beaver was simply doing what beavers do: altering their surroundings to create a more hospitable place for themselves.
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beavers share something rare with humans. We build; they build. We change the landscape; they change the landscape. “Beavers,” she writes, “are the only animals apart from man that radically transform their environment.”
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Indigenous people may have hunted beavers for their meat and their fur, but they maintained taboos against overhunting, and some tribes, like the Blackfeet, considered them sacred animals that must never be harmed.
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The Europeans, however, knew that rich aristocrats back home in drafty stone castles were willing to pay huge sums of money for warm beaver pelts, and so upon their arrival in the New World the fur trade proceeded accordingly — decimating the beaver population nearly to the point of extinction.
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this global fur trade coincided with what American geomorphologists call “the great drying,” the three centuries between 1600 and 1900 when the country’s rivers and wetlands shrank and in some cases disappeared.
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dams are also why some ecologists insist that beavers may be able to help remedy the effects of climate change. Beavers build dams, which create ponds, which create ecosystems. They move water, and so could help alleviate both droughts and floods. They create “beaver meadows,” in which flowing water isn’t necessarily visible but is nevertheless there, as if absorbed by a giant sponge.