BEN GOLDFARB on Beaver's Complex Inter-Weavings /92

In 1620, pre-colonization, there were an estimated 400 million beavers roaming and shaping Turtle Island. Most of us have forgotten, or maybe never knew, that we live on a land stewarded and engineered by the tireless workings of beaver. Before the fur trade, or as Ben Goldfarb coins “fur-pocalypse,” much of the American midwest was a soggy, wetland maintained by the work of beavers stewarding hundreds of millions of ponds and wildlife habitat. Beaver's build environments which serve as baseline habitat for almost every living more than human kin, from large to small, moose to salmon. What is the relationship between the destruction of beaver population and ecological collapse? How was the decimation of beaver directly linked with colonization & exploitation of the Indigenous people's on Turtle Island? We are honored to be joined by beaver believer, Ben Goldfarb this week on For The Wild. Ben Goldfarb is an independent environmental journalist based in Spokane, Washington, whose writing has appeared in publications such as Mother Jones, Science, The Guardian, and High Country News. He is the author of "Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter." Music by Fountainsun