Leila Philip - Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America

Lyrically written, meticulously observed, and exhaustively researched, BEAVERLAND is going to break your heartand then heal it with compassion, beauty, and wonder. As Leila Philip shows, America owes much of our wealth, our landscape, and our cultural history to the beaver. Like the exploitation of Native Americans and enslaved people, our relationship with the creature Roger Tory Peterson rightly called natures foremost conservationist is complex, bloody, disturbing, and cruel. It is marvelous that the beavers themselves, and the dedicated people working to protect them, may be the ones to restore our broken land, and heal our wounded relationship with nature.

Sy Montgomery, New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus

We cant have enough books about this wonderful creatureand this one is particularly strong on the remarkable history of the animal in our continents history and imagination. A loud slap of the tail in approval!

Bill McKibben, bestselling author of The End of Nature

BEAVERLAND is wonderful, captivating, and illuminating. I learned so muchabout natural history, business history, the world of todays fur trappers, and the role of a large, strange rodent in Americas ecological future. Leila Philip is a skilled and engaging guide through this beaver-influenced terrain.

James Fallows, bestselling co-author of Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

Before the Anthropocene we had the Casterocene: a North American environment profoundly shaped by millions of beavers. In BEAVERLAND, Leila Philip takes us on a fascinating tour of the beavers effect on human history, and how, after its near extinction, we need to bring this rodent back for the sake of our ecosystems.

Frans de Waal, author of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

An astonishing, intrepid compendium about the world according to the 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 visits 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 fourteen 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 of this weird rodents houses, with an eye toward the beavers role in the anthropogenic disaster of our changing climate and damaged ecosystems.

Gretel Ehrlich, author of Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

BEAVERLAND may be the best-realized book about an American animal in years. A work of open-hearted and sometimes horrified discovery, it tracks the authors passion for her local New England beavers as it becomes a literary and journalistic quest to understand a classic continental story: how a world so extensively shaped by a singular animal collapsed when an economy destroyed them for money. Can returning beavers and their works save our future? However you answer that, this fine book is going to rearrange the furniture in your head.

Dan Flores, New York Times bestselling author of Coyote America

Leila Philips BEAVERLAND is an engaging story centered on a nerdy anti-hero, the beaver. While she states that beavers are weird, she makes a strong case that people in the beaver world are even weirder. This book weaves humor and storytelling with profound thoughts about nature. Dont miss the beavers parachuting into the Idaho wilderness.

Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Cod and Salt

BEAVERLAND is a model for 21st-century environmental writinga beautifully told story with lodes of well-researched history and ecology, and a lyrical ode to natural wonders that steers clear of romanticism and questions cherished environmental ideas. This book will surprise the hell out of you on nearly every page.

Jenny Price, author of Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto

Ranging across a continent and five centuries, BEAVERLAND explores our strange relationship with an odd creature capable of inexplicable engineering. In lyrical words and with deep insights, Leila Philip reveals how beavers shaped our environmentand how humans have unraveled their creation.

Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 17831850

Are beavers smart? asks Leila Philip in this captivating personal journey through history and streams that brings secretive creatures to life: beavers and those who trap them. The other animals that engineer their worldbeaverscreate complex, biodiverse landscapes while we do the opposite. This engaging tale of how beavers shaped Americas rivers and streams for millennia, and how their comeback is now helping restore waterways, invites us to wonder who, really, is the smart one.

David R. Montgomery, MacArthur Fellow, author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

In this engaging and informative book, Leila Philip tells the tale of North American beavers as seen through human eyes. Philip uses diverse vignettes, from Native American creation stories to visits with contemporary trappers, beaver believers, and scientists, to gradually build a story of beavers and humans through time. Plenty of basic information about beavers is presented in digestible bites along the way as Philip deftly evokes place, mood, people, and beavers.