Amherst Reads Transcript

Geoff Giller ’10: Alright, my name is Geoffrey Giller, class of 2010, and I’m here with Ben Goldfarb who is class of 2009 and has a book coming out, or just had a book come out depending on when you’re listening to this, called Eager: the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. And we’re going to talk about beavers, and the process of writing a book like this. So I’ll let Ben introduce himself a little bit, then I’ll start with some questions.

Ben Goldfarb ’09: Okay, thanks Geoff, and I’m really excited to be on here with you and to be chatting with all the fine Amherst alumni out there. So like you said, I’m the author of Eager: the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, which is a book about beavers, believe it or not, and their incredible world-changing environmental impacts and all of the ways in which restoring beavers, which were historically trapped out for their furs, can help us tackle environmental problems from drought to biodiversity loss to pollution to even climate change. So it’s a pretty optimistic, hopeful book about the ways in which our gravest mistakes can be rectified, and I’m excited to talk about it with you.

GG: Great. So the first question I have is: why beavers, and when did you first realize beavers were more than just big rats with flat tails?

BG: [Laughs] Well, they’re not not big rats with flat tails. Honestly, some of my earliest beaver encounters were on the bike path behind Amherst College. Anyone who’s ever walked that bike path knows there are beaver dams and ponds and wetlands galore back there.

GG: Well, now you’re just pandering to our audience.

BG: [Laughs] Totally shamelessly. And yeah, I remember one evening, maybe it was sophomore year of college, walking back there with my parents and coming upon a beaver that had actually pulled itself out of the water and was just sitting on the bike path eating the inner bark of a branch in basically broad daylight, which was really remarkable. And I had a number of encounters like that where I got to observe beavers up close and personal, which initiated my interest. And many years later, I was living in Seattle working for a magazine called High Country News, which is a magazine that covers environmental issues throughout the American west, so I was working as a staff writer for them, and I happened to meet this wildlife biologist named Kent Woodruff, and Kent is the director of this thing called the Methow Beaver Project in Central Washington in the Methow Valley, and basically what Kent’s project does is live trap beavers that have been chewing down people’s trees or flooding people’s yards with their dams and ponds, so instead of killing those beavers, those quote-unquote “nuisance beavers”, they trap them alive and they relocate them to public land, land that’s owned by the people, by the government where the beavers can create some ponds and create some great wildlife habitat and really do some good for the landscape. So Kent took me to some of these sites where they had relocated beavers, and I was just completely stunned by how dramatically beavers had transformed these places. You know, you’d see this thin trickling stream downstream, then you’d get to the beaver pond and it was just this amazing complex of marshes, and swamps, and dead trees, it was really nothing like what we’ve been taught that a stream “should” look like. I think most of us picture a stream, we picture this clear, rapid thing bubbling over the rocks, that you could wade or jump right across. And of course, beavers create streams that are very different from that, that are swampy and broad and full of dead and decaying vegetation. But in many ways, what I came to realize with Kent’s help is that those kinds of streams are often more natural than the clear, clean, straight streams. So I think it was that realization, that a lot of my conception of a natural ecosystem was actually inaccurate in some ways, I think that was what I found so compelling.

GG: So do you think it was at that point, before you even started the book, that you became a beaver believer and can explain exactly what that term means?

BG: [Laughs] I would say I’m definitely a beaver believer. I’m a totally unrepentant beaver believer at this point. So beaver believer are this growing coalition of people, from scientists to government land managers to even farmers and ranchers who basically are convinced beavers are incredibly important for all kinds of ecological reasons, including the ones I mentioned, especially water storage. And I think the beaver believer movement has the most adherents in the American west, where rainfall is much scarcer, water is much more important, and rarer on the landscape, and any entity that’s capable of storing and saving some of that water is very valuable. So beavers of course do that, better than anything. Beavers build their dams, and they create these ponds that instead of letting water run off the landscape right away, these ponds store back water and gradually release flows throughout the summer and fall. So they’re really keeping water in these streams that might otherwise be going dry. So I think most of the beaver believers in the country live in the American west, where water is so scarce and so crucial. So yeah, I think it was that experience with Kent that at least began my conversion to the cult of beaver believerhood, and as I traveled the country interviewing more people and experiencing for myself the incredible benefits associated with beavers, I just went further and further down the beaver rabbit hole to the point where now I’m basically incapable of talking about anything else, I’m sort of this obsessive beaver acolyte who just won’t shut up…

GG: [Laughs]

BG: …about these flat-tailed rats. [Laughs]

GG: I definitely want to come back to the west, because that seems like it’s a large part of the book and not only the beaver believers out there, but the people who are very anti-beaver. But before that, early in your book, you kind of set the stage for the importance of beavers in the landscape, and obviously they’re important ecologically, but one of the things I was most struck by was their importance to the history of America. You know, in terms of their impacts in several wars, and where people went when they were exploring the Western frontier. And I was hoping you could talk about that, the ways in which beavers really influenced American history in a way people probably aren’t aware of, or at least I wasn’t aware of.

BG: Yeah, and I think along with timber and maybe cod, beavers are the most important natural resource in the early history of the United States. And you know, when the pilgrims showed up in Massachusetts, they owed lots of money to their creditors back in England. The only way they could repay those debts was by trading for pelts with the Native Americans, and shipping those beaver furs back across the Atlantic. So it was really beavers that made the Massachusetts Bay Colony possible. And from there, beaver trappers and traders spread across the continent, and really every important historical event before the Civil War had some kind of beaver connection. The Louisiana Purchase, for example, was motivated in large part by the desire to secure more beaver trapping grounds. The route that became the Oregon Trail was discovered by beaver trappers. And of course, there were lots of negatives that came with the beaver trade as well. Lots of the small pox outbreaks that completely destroyed Native American populations in this country were precipitated by beaver trappers, often inadvertently, coming in contact with Native populations in the course of trading for pelts and communicating disease. So, you know, in lots of ways the story of beavers is the story of early American history in all of its grandeur and destructiveness. Yeah, beavers and humans are just inextricably intertwined.

GG: So, you know, from reading your book I came to understand that the West used to be a swampier place in large part because of these beavers. And as you were saying, there’s a lot of beaver believers out west. But there’s a strong resistance to beavers as well, from farmers and ranchers and that kind of thing, and even from state and wildlife officials. So I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about why you think there’s such an entrenched, anti-beaver bias in places where it seems like reintroducing beavers would do the most good.

BG: Yeah, that’s a great question. Even in the northeast, there are lots of beaver conflicts and lots of beaver animosity. You know, Massachusetts, Western Massachusetts, the Pioneer Valley is one of the more beaver-y corners of this country and there’s a lot of people who really detest beavers, because they love to build dams in road culverts and they raise the waters around roads and often flood those roads, so there’s a really strong beaver resistance even in Amherst’s own backyard. You know, I think a lot of the antipathy towards beavers is just… in some respects, I think that we resent them because they’re so much like us in a lot of ways. Along with humans, beavers are really one of the only animals that modifies its environment to create its own… to maximize its own food and shelter and safety. Beavers kind of share our instinct to mettle and rearrange and sculpt. And you know, the problem with that – at least the problem from a human perspective – is that their vision of what “good habitat” looks like is very different from ours. You know, we sort of prize order, we like our streams nice and straight, we like our crops planted in parallel rows, we like our orderly subdivisions alongside the river, whereas beavers love creating what looks to us like chaos. You know, a stream with beavers in it has ponds and marshes and swamps, it has side channels branching off everywhere, it’s got jumbles of downed wood all over the place, it’s kind of a chaotic – or at least to us – a chaotic environment. So, you know, beavers and humans are sharing habitat, right? We both love river valleys, and nice low gradient streams, that’s the most fertile farmland. It’s actually the farmland left behind by old beaver ponds in many places. When the ponds fill up with silt and become meadows, you know, that was for many settlers where they chose to establish their homesteads. And as beavers recovered from trapping and returned to those places, all of a sudden you had millions of humans and increasing populations of beavers living in really close quarters. So I think that’s a lot of it, we and beavers share habitat and we share this impulse to mettle, and a lot of times our visions for the landscape differ pretty dramatically.

GG: Mhm. One of the ways that it seems like people are having problems with beavers is obviously beavers create dams and that floods an area, that’s sort of what they’re trying to do, but as you talk about in the book that can cause problems with infrastructure both with farmlands or with railroad tracks, I think, is one of the examples you use--

BG: Yeah.

GG: -- and so one of the solutions… because you talk about how if you trap a beaver and remove it or kill it, more beavers are just gonna come in.

BG: Right.

GG: So one of the things you discuss is these things called beaver deceivers, which I’m hoping you can describe that a little bit, and also talk about why you think there’s some resistance, or such resistance, to the use of these things which seem like a great solution. Even among state and federal officials, they’re kind of resistant to what seems like a good solution to this problem.

BG: Yeah, so a beaver deceiver is a kind of flow device, and a flow device is basically a system of pipes and fences that regulates the height of the beaver pond. So let’s say you have a house with a yard and a stream going through the backyard, and one day a family of beavers shows up and builds a dam and creates a pond, and all of a sudden your backyard is underwater, which is a pretty common scenario in a lot of places. And you say, you know what, I really like these beavers, I like watching them work, I appreciate all of the birds and amphibians that have come to colonize my backyard since the beavers showed up since beavers create this great wetland habitat, so you know, I like the beavers but I don’t really want my backyard underwater, that part is not so much fun. So what you can do is install one of these pipe and fence systems, which basically you pass the pipe – in most cases – you pass the pipe through the dam, and you’re effectively creating a leak in the dam so that water is moving from the pond through the dam downstream. And beavers, beavers are usually kind of confused by this, they’re not really accustomed to their dams being penetrated by these black, strange plastic devices, that’s not really a familiar concept to a beaver. Sometimes they do kind of figure out the pipe is the problem, so when that happens usually it makes sense to put some kind of fence or cage around the two ends of the pipe so they can’t plug the pipe up with sticks and mud. So basically, you’re effectively creating a leak in the dam with one of these flow devices, and that basically drains the pond to a level that you find acceptable and the idea there is that the beavers can stay put because you’re not removing them and you’re not draining their pond entirely, you’re just draining it to a point that you can tolerate and that hopefully the beavers can tolerate too. So you know, this is a really great solution, there’s lots of data showing it’s very effective and it actually saves a lot of money, too, because as you said, Geoff, trapping is sort of this treadmill, right, you take the beavers out but as long as the habitat is good for beavers there’s always going to be another family moving in, and you’re kind of trapping in perpetuity. Whereas, you know, with one of these pipe and fence systems, you put it in once, you do a half hour of maintenance a year, and you’re basically good for the next decade. As for why they haven’t been more enthusiastically adopted, it’s a great question, and I think a lot of it is this very entrenched mindset that lots of these agencies that manage beavers have these very long-term contracts with trappers, you know, this is the way they’ve always done it, they’ve always removed beavers and they’re always going to keep doing that because that’s the way they did it. And I think there’s just kind of resistance to anything that’s new and potentially threatening to the status quo. But, I do think the flow device solution is being adopted much more widely. And, again, Western Massachusetts is kind of one of the leaders in that. There’s a guy named Mike Callahan who lives in Southampton, very close to Amherst, who is one of the country’s leading experts in non-lethal beaver coexistence and management. And he’s done a fantastic job kind of spreading the gospel. And even that same bike path I referenced earlier, that bike path that runs behind Amherst, if you walk down that bike path, if you go out behind the tennis courts and make a left onto the bike path, and walk for fifteen minutes, you’ll actually see one of the first flow devices in the state of Massachusetts. So Amherst is really, in some ways, kind of ground zero for the propagation of this cool technique.

GG: Oh wow, I didn’t realize there was one so close to the campus, that’s awesome.

BG: Yeah. Yeah. So any students who are listening to this, go out the back door of your dorm some Spring evening and go check it out.

GG: I wanna talk a little bit about the experience of working on the book and doing the reporting you needed to do for it as well. So obviously you covered a lot of ground, you have parts of the book that are set in New England, parts of the book that are set in California, parts of it that are even set in the UK. And there’s a couple reporting experiences that jumped out to me, and I’m happy to… I’d like you to talk about the ones that are most memorable for you, but especially I’m hoping you can talk about the time you were attacked by a beaver.

BG: [Laughs] Yeah, I’ve tried to block it out of my memory, I have some post-traumatic stress syndrome symptoms there, but… yeah. I don’t know if I’d call it an attack, it was more like a mild… mild bit of aggression from a beaver, which was totally justified on the beaver’s part. So basically the story there there was that, as you said, I went to the UK for part of this book, so in the UK beavers were trapped out hundreds of years ago, completely eliminated. Here in the US, we always had kind of a remnant population that was able to reestablish after the fur trade eased up a little bit, but in the UK all of the beavers were wiped out. So in the last several years they’ve began to reintroduce beavers, to England and Scotland, and these are European beavers so a different species than we have here in North America, but you know… basically indistinguishable for the layperson. What they’ve been doing in England is importing beavers from Germany and Norway, and before you can release one of these imports into the wild, it has to go through this quarantine period, and most beavers do the quarantine period at this particular farm in Southwest England, which is sort of like… the immigration detention center for lack of a better term, for beavers that are entering the UK. So I visited this farm and I had the opportunity to enter the enclosure of one of these beaver detainees, and I got right in the beaver’s face and I started taking its picture, and it started growling at me which was kind of an unfamiliar sound, a sound I’d never really heard a beaver make before. But I very foolishly ignored that sound, and the beaver lunged at me and gave me a little nip on the ankle, definitely not using the full force of her teeth because they obviously have very powerful chewing muscles in their jaws and really chisel-like teeth, beavers can do a lot of damage if you’re not careful. But this was more of like, a warning nip, “get the heck out of my enclosure and leave me alone”. Which I promptly did. So the beaver was totally justified in assaulting me, and I definitely harbor no ill will toward the beaver, and if you’re listening to this definitely do not touch or pick up or approach beavers too closely because they can deliver a pretty powerful bite which I fortunately did not experience the full brunt of.

GG: I think in the book you mentioned the only known fatality from a beaver was some guy was trying to take a picture with it and it severed his femoral artery, is that right?

BG: Yeah, a guy in Belarus picked up a beaver and the beaver just bit right through his thigh. So that is sort of case in point why you shouldn’t go around manhandling beavers.

GG: Yeah. Another reporting anecdote that stood out to me is one you were visiting Half-Tail Dale, which is a--

BG: Oo, yeah.

GG: --a beaver, and I believe you were invited to smell him if I’m remembering correctly.

BG: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s right. So, Half-Tail Dale was a beaver in Central Washington, that was kind of a captive of the Methow Beaver Project that I described earlier. So one curious thing about beavers is that beavers do not have external genitalia. You can imagine if you’re an animal that spends all of its life swimming through underwater piles of sticks, you don’t really want anything that can snag. You know, you don’t want any dangling appendages that can get hung up. So beavers have no external genitals, all of their reproductive anatomy is internal. Which makes it basically impossible to tell a male beaver from a female beaver, visually. The only way to do it is you have to smell the beaver. And what you have to smell in particular is the beaver’s, uh, anal secretions. So beavers have anal glands that they use to secrete this substance, which they use to mark their territories. It’s a very strong smelling substance. Beavers have amazing noses and they communicate quite a bit of information via these secretions that they leave around. So what you have to do, is you basically squeeze the little anal gland which is this little pink nubbin of flesh on their underside, and you kind of squeeze it until it squirts out a dollop of the anal fluid, and then you smell it. And if it smells like cheese, it’s a female, and if it smells like motor oil, it’s a male. Or at least that’s what I was told. When I actually smelled poor Half-Tail Dale’s secretions, I just got a very powerful whiff of beaver, I probably could do a few more to really get the olfactory sexing technique down. But it was definitely quite a potent aroma, for sure, and I feel bad for Half-Tail Dale who was subject to a very inexpert sexing at my hands.

GG: [Laughs] Are there any other reporting stories from your time working on the book that stand out most in your mind?

BG: That’s a good question. I really loved… I think a lot of the quote-unquote “beaver believers” are the kind of people you’d imagine, right, people who work in conservation, who have scientific backgrounds, who spend lots of time with nature and care really really deeply about environmental issues. But I think one of the cool things about the beaver believer movement is because beavers are so good at storing water in arid places, a lot of the most enthusiastic beaver believers are people you might not expect. Lots of conservative ranchers, in particular. Or at least ranchers in conservative places, like northern Nevada. So to me, that was really a highlight, was spending time with these cattlemen who were not what you’d picture when you’d think of the prototypical environmentalist, who nonetheless have become really wholehearted beaver believers because they recognize how important these animals are at storing water, at irrigating these pastures, at creating forage for their cattle. Some amazing stories about these ranchers in Nevada, when they experienced drought, lots of the guys who didn’t have beavers actually had to remove their cattle from the land because there was just no water source for their cows. Whereas the guys who did have beavers were able to weather the drought much more successfully. So to me, I thought that was a really memorable experience, was talking to some of these good ol’ boys in northeast Nevada, who turn out to be unbelievably great stewards of their beaver populations because they recognize the benefits so clearly.

GG: I also want to cover the process of writing a book in general. This is your first book, you’ve written many feature articles for magazines before this – how was this process different from writing those feature pieces?

BG: I loved working on this book. You know, one of the things that always kind of frustrated me about magazine writing was how much you had to leave out. You’re always writing for a word count, right, and inevitably so much of the most interesting material ends up on the cutting room floor, because a lot of it might be fascinating but it’s sort of tangential to the immediate story you’re trying to tell. Whereas in the book you can really follow your curiosity down whatever rabbit hole you happen to stumble upon. So one example I always like to think about is that beavers for a long time were actually hunted in Europe for their castor sacs, which is an organ that produces the smelly substance they use to mark their territories. And that substance has actually been used as a medicine, it’s been used as a flavor additive to soft drinks and ice cream, it has all of these sort of… other values. So for a long time, beavers were actually hunted for their castoreum, these castor sacs that were believed to be medicinal. So there was this myth that was actually perpetuated by Aesop, that if a beaver was being pursued by castor hunters it would chew off its own testicles, because Aesop thought that the castoreum resided in the testicles, and then throw its testicles back to the hunters to basically say “hey, let me live but here are my balls”. Just take what you need and let me live in peace. So this is a completely nonsensical story in many ways, I mean, we just talked about the fact that beavers don’t actually have external testicles to gnaw off, and the castoreum isn’t in the testicles anyway, so… so this makes no sense on many levels. But it was this widely cited urban legend about beavers. So that’s the kind of thing that if I stumbled upon an anecdote in the course of writing a magazine story, I’d probably stick it in the scrap heap and just mention it at a cocktail party or something. But in the book, because space is not so limited, that kind of weird detail can go right in. And I love that, I love being able to include all of the things that I find interesting or funny or curious. And I think the readers respond to that, too, those are actually the kind of bizarre details that people remember from books like this one. So I loved the feeling of completeness, being able to go where my curiosity took me and include everything.

GG: Yeah. Were there any sort of downsides to writing a book versus writing a feature? When we talked at some point over the course of that, you mentioned some anxieties you had, and there was one point, I understand that you were worried about how you had described certain stream restoration techniques and had to be talked down by your spouse Elise.

BG: [Laughs] And shout out to Elise, my spouse, who has been a really great partner throughout all of this. I think that’s very real, that when you write a book, you know, you’re writing… at least you’re trying to write this lasting, definitive document, that will be used as a resource for people for many years to come, and with that comes some pressure of representation. I think that for many people, this book will be the place in which they learn about what a beaver is and what a beaver does in the landscape, and how we might work with beavers to achieve some of these ecological benefits I’ve been talking about, and… you know, when you’re trying to write the definitive take on something, there is a lot of pressure there, I think. Because this is the information source for people. So I definitely had doubts of concern or anxiety or fear that, am I describing everything properly, you know, are there sources for this book that are going to feel misrepresented by part of it, I certainly hope not. I tried really hard to review all the material in the book with my sources to make sure I was capturing their work accurately, because that’s one of the hard thing about being a writer is you’re telling other people’s stories. You’re the conduit through which people who have worked for decades on beaver issues, who know more about beavers than I ever will… I am the imperfect mouthpiece through which they speak to the world, and that can be kind of intimidating sometimes, but it’s also what it means to be a writer or a journalist. So I’ve tried to make peace with that.

GG: Yeah. Well, you know, as a reader I can say that reading this book has definitely changed how I see the world around me, like every time I see a stream I sort of wonder if it should have a beaver dam on it--

BG: The answer’s always yes, Geoff. Always.

GG: [Laughs] Yeah, I think so too, having read the book. And reading about… or knowing about some of the water woes out west, it really seems like beavers can be a significant solution to that problem. So it seems to me that this book could have a real impact not just on how people see the world around them, but also on sort of strategy and policy gets made with regard to water policy out west. Is that something you’re hoping for as a result of this book?

BG: Yeah, definitely. I think that my goal with this book was to make it… I mean, I think the primary audience, the fundamental audience, is the layperson. The person who, like you, cares about the environment, has a pretty good foundation in science and ecology, but ultimately is not a water manager or a beaver expert and is just curious about the world around them and wants to learn more about these really amazing animals and how they’ve shaped our world. So I think that’s my primary audience, is that lay audience, but then there’s also this secondary audience of experts – people who work in water management, or wildlife biology, or conservation, and can actually use this book, potentially, to inform their decisions. So that was kind of the balance I was trying to strike in writing this, was how do I make this book fun and accessible and funny enough to engage a lay person, while also making it technically sophisticated enough for an expert audience that might actually be able to use it in some way. So I guess the readers will tell me how well that balance was struck, but certainly that’s something I think about a lot is the ways in which this book can inform policy. Right now, I just did a radio spot for a public radio station in Colorado that was doing a story about this libertarian gubernatorial candidate in Colorado who basically has like, one plank in his platform, which is we need more beavers to store water in Colorado. And that’s the entirety of his candidacy, is built on beavers.

GG: So he’s got your vote.

BG: He’s got… you know, I may agree with none of his other policies, but he’s got my vote. If he has other policies, he may have no other policies, I’m not even sure. But, you know, this guy is obviously a little bit fringe, I think, but it is pretty amazing and exciting to see this political candidate whose candidacy is built on beavers. And maybe that’s a sign that these strange, niche rodents are actually entering the zeitgeist a little bit.

GG: Yeah. Well, let’s hope so.

BG: I definitely hope so. I’m doing my part, Geoff. Or trying to.

GG: Well, thank you Ben for talking to me about the book. Once again, it’s called Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Publication date is July 20^th, is that right?

BG: Yeah, I think… I think that it’s moving up, the date is in flux, but I think June 27^th is now our official publication date.

GG: Okay, great. Well, if you hear this before then, you can preorder on Amazon and elsewhere. If not, you can wait ‘til it’s out and buy it also on Amazon or through your local bookstore.

BG: Yeah, local bookstore, direct through the publisher, lots of options for acquiring this.

GG: Alright, well, thanks again, Ben. Great talking with you.

BG: Yeah, thanks a lot, Geoff.