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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance. As a business owner, you take a lot of roles, marketer, bookkeeper, CEO.
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But when it comes to small business.
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Insurance, Progressive has you covered. They offer discounts on commercial auto insurance, customizable coverages that can grow with your business, and reliable protection for whatever comes your way. Count on Progressive to handle your insurance while you do well. Everything else Quote Today, in as little.
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As 8 minutes, @progressivecommercial.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company.
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Coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third party insurers. Discounts and coverage selections not available in all states or situations. My name's Mackenzie and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care.
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For this autistic child.
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So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis and we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with.
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GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com gofundme.com this podcast is supported by GoFundMe.
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Join me, John Randall, at the North.
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American Banking Company Minnesota Golf Show, February 13th through the 15th. It's your chance to try out the newest clubs and equipment from the biggest names in golf. Improve your game with free lessons and.
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And when you're done, relax at the 19th Hole Lounge with your favorite post round beverage.
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The $100,000 putt is presented by MSP Plumbing Heating, committed to your comfort since.
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1918.
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Coming to you from the old outpost on the bleak, barren tarmac of University Avenue. Welcome everyone. Welcome to another show. My name's Mishke. I've got a good one for you. Today we're going to look at a creature. A wondrous creature. A strange, beautiful, weird little creature. Back in the 16th century in Europe, the demand for beaver hats was so great, so great that the beaver were wiped out all across Europe just because everybody had to have a beaver hat. How many beaver hats are we talking about? Those felt hats, warm, almost waterproof so popular an entire continent was wiped out of beavers. Then somebody came to North America from Europe. And you know what? They found gold in them thar hills. Beaver everywhere. Little dollar signs running around. And the ship started to come across the sea in waves. There's beaver in North America. The fur trade became North America's first major export. It fueled American development, including infrastructure. Competition for beaver rich lands led to the Beaver Wars. Have you even heard of the Beaver Wars? Nations fighting one another, getting the help of various native tribes, all trying to lay claim to North America's beavers. Because you could sell those pelts in Europe with a 900% markup. The very first multimillionaire in North America got rich from beaver. John Astor. That's how he made his millions. The beaver was on the official seal of New York cause it built it. The money from those pelts, the trade was driven further westward, more and more westward. The establishment of trading outposts all over the place. Beavers being trapped, killed, skinned, shipped overseas. Until the hundreds of millions of beavers were down to a few hundred thousand. Hundreds of millions to a few hundred thousand. They couldn't find the beavers anymore. Much like what happened in Europe, the beaver were gone. That's just one part of the beaver story and it's not even close to the most interesting part of of the beaver story. I'm holding a book here by Leila Phillip called Beaverland. That's what North America was. Beaverland. 400 million beavers or what I like to call hydraulic engineers working the land, literally making the country lush and filled with wildlife with the work they did. This book Beaverland has the subtitle How One Weird Rodent Made America. Now I already told you part of how it made America. It was the heart and soul of the first economy, the first dollars to come in that built this nation beaver dollars. But before those dollars ever came in, the lush richness of North America owed a debt of gratitude to the beaver. It's hard to believe, but the doggone creatures developed worlds worlds all over North America. Mini ecological metropolises with what they did with how they operated. They built the land, not just the economy. Beaverland How One Weird Rodent made America what I learned in Leila Phillips book Beaverland is that the beavers are a keystone species. Like the keystone in an arch. Remove that one and the whole thing collapses. That's the beaver. We had no idea what we were doing. Eradicating the beaver. It's the ticket to our entire life arterial water system. Our creeks, rivers, streams all of it above ground and below. The beaver is what's keeping it all healthy, and we almost lost it. Now we don't have close to hundreds of millions of beavers anymore, but we have millions again, not a few hundred thousand. When we figured out how badly we were screwing up by the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, things changed slowly, but they changed. And the beaver made a remarkable comeback. It is a remarkably adaptable animal. Yes, you guessed it. I'm here today to talk all about the beaver. I have had on an author of a book who wrote about spiders, nothing but spiders, just spiders. I have had on an authority of a book that was only about bats, just about bats. Bats are nothing but bats. And I loved it. And now the beaver, which puts the bats and the spiders to shame with how needed, how necessary, how extraordinary it is outside of people, the only mammal that creates its own world, its entire habitat. It's like a God. It builds a world. It starts with a dam that pools up the water, then it builds channels that sends the water out in all directions, that hydrates the land. Next thing you know, all sorts of things are growing that weren't growing before. All sorts of creatures are coming in that weren't there before. The ground gets lush, the ground gets wet. The creatures come in. It's a wildlife sanctuary, all started by beavers. And they do it again and again and again and again and again. And they clean the water and they prevent floods, and they prevent forest fires and they prevent drought. They are a wonder, a natural wonder. They should be on the seal of the United States before any eagle. They're on the great seal of Canada. That North American nation gets it. God, I love beavers. When they build a dam and they slow the water and they elevate the water table and they create these diverse habitats for fish, for birds, for amphibians, for mammals. When they create these wetland wonderlands, when they promote biodiversity, when they clean the water, enhance the water, when they create these drought resistant habitats, when they help the aquifers, they're doing it all free of charge. They're engineers working for all of us for nothing. Their habitat profoundly influences all the landscape around the habitat. Changes in the landscape can last for years and years and years. And yet still around this country, there are people who see them as rodents the same way they see a mouse as a rodent. Kill it, get rid of it, it's a pest. That's right. First it was a pelt when it was dominating the American economy. And then even after it was brought back. It then got called a pest and people still think of it as a pest and they call someone in to help get rid of the beaver. I don't want them taking down my trees. Pest control, this is Dick Swanmire. Got beavers over here. Could you come kill em on our way. You didn't read Beaverland, did you? Never heard of the book. Good. Lela Philip was a contributing columnist at the Boston Globe. She teaches in the environmental studies program at the College of the Holy Cross where she is a professor in the English department. She is the author of award winning books and this book right here is one of, if not her best, how One Weird Rodent Made America. Back with Leila after this. There was an assisted living operation locally where a fella, a resident, had fallen out of his wheelchair and he was kind of crumpled up there against the wall and the workers said don't touch him, don't touch him. We're not allowed to pick them up. We're not insured for that. If we injure our backs we have to just leave them there and we can call 91 1. While they were dilly dallying waiting for an ambulance, this poor soul was crumpled up in such a way that unbeknownst to everyone else, he was suffocating and he died at the Wellshire. You know what they do? They pick the person up. And if an insurance company were ever to say to them, we can't insure you if you're going to be picking up these people who fall over because of the workman's comp issues with getting injured picking them up. The Wellshire would say, buh, bye, we'll get another insurance company because the people we care for come first. End of story. One of many reasons why I ask you folks to tour the Wellshire before you ever consider placing a loved one with dementia or Alzheimer's anywhere else. The Wellshire of Bloomington and Medina. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with a name your price tool from Progressive you can find options that.
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Fit your budget and potentially lower your bills.
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Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Ra. I get my vehicles from Fury Motors. Learn more@furymotors.com. Welcome to the program. Lela Philippe.
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Thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled to be with you today. I also just have to say my heart goes out to all of you in Minnesota, what you're dealing with.
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Thank you.
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I think you're showing such strength, but it's just terrible what you've had to put up with.
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Yeah. It has been the most disturbing stretch in my memory, that's for sure. So thank you so much for that. But getting back to your book, 90% of the people listening to this show don't know 90% of what I learned in this book. And I didn't know 90% of what I learned in this book. So we have a listening audience, me included, with just this gigantic hole in our knowledge and about something that is pretty profound and pretty astounding and a very dominant part of the world we have come to call home here, the United States. I don't know how we went this long not knowing 90% of what's in your book, but I just don't think people knew about this. I've never heard it brought up. And I've been in many circles in life in the Midwest where the beaver has come up, where we've talked about the beaver, where we've sat and looked at beaver dens, where we've talked about its existence in nature, but we've put it in the same category as a squirrel. Look at that interesting little creature there. And there's a muskrat and there's a rabbit. That's about it. And then you read Beaverland and the whole thing explodes.
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Beavers really did make America and they really are so wonderfully weird. And I think that's part of why we don't acknowledge them. You know, it just was much more comfortable to think about an eagle or a bison, strong and powerful, but this 36 inch rodent really was important in making the continent ecologically. And also we've had this long social history with beavers. So it really blew my mind to see to what extent the fur trade, the beaver pelt, was really the first economy in North America for the Europeans that arrived. It starts the first economies here because of beaver pelt. If you could get it to London back in the 17th century, had a markup of 900%. So the fortunes that could be made here were real. There was a real need for beaver fur in Europe because the beaver hat was still a very valuable piece of clothing. And they had killed all the beavers in Europe. They'd run out of them. So when it was discovered that there were beavers in North America, it was like, holy cow. Ships came flying across. And then what resulted was one of the first environmental devastations of our continent because we wiped the beaver out. Almost by 1800, the beavers are gone. And I tell the story of John Jacob Astor, the first American multimillionaire, literally, who got his start trading beaver pelts and the wharves of Manhattan. By the time he's built his empire in 1811, founding Astoria in Oregon, the first port on the Pacific to start global trade. That way, they've wiped the beavers out. He doesn't care because he's so rich by then, he's just going to ship out other things. But the reason beavers were so important and made the continent of North America is that they go to a stream or a creek and they build a dam which slows the water down and the water swells out. And people have seen a beaver pond, maybe in the woods. You have beautiful woodland areas out there in Minnesota, and they will do this again and again on a stream system, at least a series of three dams in a row. And that creates visible basins of water like beads on a string. But what's even more significant is that underneath each of those visible basins of water, the beaver pond we can see, is a huge wetland that goes into the ground. Here in the east, the average beaver pond is about a million gallons, and there's at least three times as much water being held in the soil, the wetland around and underneath. So the math of water retention gets big really fast. And when you slow rain down by having a stream system where water is slow and sinks down into the aquifer, it's cleansed as it goes down, and it's there as this huge repository of water. If there's a drought, you've got this sponge under the ground that can rehydrate the stream. And if you have a flood, you've got this spongy area that will absorb more water. So it may seem counterintuitive, but those messy looking beaver ponds in the woods that some people love and some people don't are this extraordinary stream system of resilience. Extreme flooding is mediated, droughts are mediated, and tremendous biodiversity is coming up from below the ground through the microbial life there. So there's about 100 times as much water under the ground as we can see. And life in that underground water, the microbial life, is the start, really, of the food web. And so we think about biodiversity as being all these beautiful creatures we see above that we count on for survival, but those creatures count on this microbial life that comes from below. So the more you think about beaver ponds and the damming systems that create them, the more valuable they are to the ecology. So it was all that water in the soil of North America that would lead to the Great Plains and the Great Boreal forests. They really did make America ecologically. So when they were wiped out by 1800, geomorphologists call that the great drying. The river systems contracted. Many of the problems we have today with drought and flood and rising heat are actually caused by a degraded stream system. So on one hand, it's a dark story of over extraction, but also, and this is one of the really fun things I wrote about in the book, is they're one of our greatest conservation comeback stories. And they show that we humans, we're pretty stupid a lot of the time, but we also can make smart choices. And there was a big effort to bring beavers back starting in 1900, and Beavers have rebounded. And so everywhere that beavers are now working in the stream system, we have environmental ecological restoration happening for free. Furry engineers working 247 repairing our stream systems.
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That's pretty incredible if we think in terms of the economy, the money that flows in making America wealthy. The beaver brings in a lot of money, and the interest in this part of the world grows and the money to be made here grows. And we have a situation where the beaver makes it onto the seal of New York. It's that dominant a figure. It's almost as though it's the sign of a dollar bill. We could have the beaver back then instead of the S with the line through it. The beaver represented big money. And America was where people came to make their fortunes. So we have the beaver making America economically originally, but before the money ever is made here, if someone were to look at the topography of North America, they would have seen the beaver having made large parts of North America with its work, that its work alone, just doing what beavers do would have created much of what we saw. And that was the first lesson for me, was that what beavers make is not a dam. They make a world. They make an entire world. It's as though they create a. A mini metropolis, an ecological metropolis. They create whole worlds where an astounding amount of life appears. All kinds of life, microbial life, plant life, animal life, mammals, birds. And I didn't realize how much the line how one weird rodent made America really means Made the land. Made the land what the land was before they were almost eradicated. And you have shown examples of what happens when beavers are there, what the land looks like, and what it looks like when they go away. It has the effect on me of seeing what land looks like before a forest fire and what after. I mean, it can be that dramatic. It can appear as though the life has been pulled out of the land. And I don't know anybody who has ever been able to articulate for me the power of this rodent to change their world that greatly. The dam, I think you would argue, is the beginning. And then the canals that they dig, that shoot out from, that help the water move in all sorts of different directions. And pretty soon there's this huge area, this. This village, this world with so many things going on in it. You almost wonder if these beavers weren't hired by everybody else to do this for them.
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That's a great image, but I think you're right. There's no other creature in the animal kingdom apart from humans that actually constructs their world. And lucky for us, the beavers need a water world. That's where I think they're increasingly valuable to us as we go forward, because water is the story of the century. We're not going to have enough of it. So the more we can harness the work that beavers do, we'll never get back North America when It was Beaverland. 400 million beavers from Florida to Alaska, from California to New Jersey. We have too much infrastructure, we've changed too much of our river systems to ever do that. We're not going to move Hartford or major cities, but we can have beavers in many, many places where I think we have culturally thought we couldn't because we just thought of them as a pest and as a pelt. They're much more valuable to us as a live animal than as a pelt. I spend a lot of time with fur trappers, as you know in the book. And I have a great respect for one fur trapper in particular that I profile in the book. Herb Sabansky just taught me a great deal about many things. And I think there still can be some hunting and trapping just the way there can be fishing. And we don't run out of fish. But it has to be really balanced carefully now because we are at a moment where we have altered so much of the planet.
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Yeah, I think where beavers have done their work, fishermen have often been happier than had the beavers not been there. People who are duck hunters owe much to the beavers in terms of creating a world that they could play in as sportsmen.
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And I think we're learning more. There are interesting restoration programs starting all over the country and actually throughout Europe in many, many parts of the world to harness the work beavers do, because people everywhere need water. So if you take the beavers out, your river system just starts to go down. And that's why they're considered a keystone species. That medieval arch that had that keystone block in the middle, that supported the arch, you take that brick out and the whole arch falls. Keystone species, like a beaver is like that for the river. You take them out, and the whole ecology of the river starts to fall apart. But you put that beaver back, and the river, it repairs itself, it restores itself at an extraordinary rate. And I think that was one of the things I wanted to share in this book, was it's easy to get into kind of a point of despair about the extent to which we're living in environmental degradation. And we really need stories of hope to see what we can do. Because when we can see a story of the natural world that's not just about escalating carbon emissions, when we can see a snapshot of the natural world, the power of it to repair itself, we can realize, as citizens of this earth, whatever country you're in to help enable that healing and live better. Live better in the moment and survive in the future.
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You're in your late 40s, maybe your 50s, maybe your early 60s. You've accumulated some wealth, but not enough to feel confident managing it alone. Maybe you're approaching some major transitions, nearing retirement, receiving an inheritance. Maybe you've sold a business. Maybe you're going through a divorce. You know you should be doing more with your money, but you feel overwhelmed by the options. You want a smart person with confidence, skill, knowledge to help you. You want Josh Arnold. It's not Merrill Lynch. It's not Charles Schwab. It's a guy who's been doing this successfully for over 40 years, and fortunately for you, in your neck of the woods. He's the best. He's a phone call away. He doesn't cost you a dime for 50 minutes of visiting with him. Talk to him for 50 minutes. Let him impress you. If you end up working with Josh after that, I'm buying you lunch. And That's a promise. 952-925-5608. Investment services offered by Josh Arnold, Investment Consultant, LLC. A security and investment advisor. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. All investments involve risk. Tommy Mischke is a paid endorser. You know that dream you sometimes have where you're trying to talk but nobody can hear you? That's what banking at a national chain sometimes feels like. You're Standing there waving your arms, explaining why your business had a rough quarter, why you need that loan despite what the algorithm says, why your situation is unique. And on the other side of that bulletproof glass sits a policy manual. Here's the thing about North American Banking Company they don't have bulletproof glass. They have Bob and Susan and Mike. They know the winter destroyed your landscape revenue. They remember when you opened your second location. When you walk in, someone says your name. When you need a decision, it's made by someone who lives 11 blocks from you, not 11 states away. North American Banking Company has six Twin Cities locations and they have every fancy service the big guys have, but none of the soulless efficiency of talking to someone reading a script in a call center who's never even seen a Minnesota winter. North American Banking Company member, fdic. Equal housing lender. I've always thought everybody is an environmentalist. And by that I mean everybody in their apartment, in their home, in their cabin, wherever they are, they are creating an environment that makes their life possible. Whatever they're doing, they're creating an environment that enhances their existence. What gets missed so often, why we live in a world where we say that person over there is an environmentalist and this one isn't, is because one person sees the dominoes and the other doesn't. They're both environmentalists. There isn't a parent who has had a child that wants that child poisoned when drinking water. So everyone's an environmentalist, but we do a very poor job, I think, lining up the dominoes figuratively and showing people why this move right here will one day end up with the dominoes hitting your front door in a way you're not going to, like, take it to the beginning. When a beaver makes a dam. What is a beaver doing right then and there? What is it trying to do? Why does it want a dam?
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The beaver needs water to survive. It's basically an aquatic farmer. They're herbivores. So the more water there is, the more water vegetation there is, the more food they have. That's number one. And then number two is they are brilliant swimmers, but they're pretty awkward. On land, they're pretty much like walking chicken nuggets. In the woods, they build canals to spread that water into the woods because lots of aquatic vegetation will grow that they eat.
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And then they want the water deep enough so that they cannot have it be entirely ice. They want to be able to all winter long be in that water. And for that it has to be, what, 3ft?
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Probably a Little deeper where you are, where winters get even colder. They've evolved to build their lodge surrounded by water so that predators can't get to them. So bears and coyote, bobcat, lynx, fox, all these things would like to eat a beaver. So they want that pond. They don't hibernate in winter. It's pretty amazing. They have this blood chemistry that slows down, so they go into something called torpor. So they literally need less oxygen than in the summer, and they just eat a little bit from a food cache that they have stored. So that's why you'll see beavers in the fall gnawing extra amounts of sticks and twigs and branches. They'll denude whole trees, and they'll drag those branches and make like a haystack under the water. And they'll eat that until the ice melts.
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When they build this dam and create this pond and then begin to build these channels, because they're water creatures and these are their arterial roots, they also create then this wonderful, rich, lush habitat stretching out in all directions. Because of the way they're sending out the water and trapping the water and then also allowing the water to soak into the ground below, as you have said, creating this kind of sponge land. This, I think you said, is it three times as much space holding water three times the size of the pond?
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Yeah. Underneath. Imagine just a big sponge under the ground that you can't see. It'll rehydrate the stream if there's a drought, or it'll soak up more water if there's a flood event.
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The dominoes that are falling just with what we've said so far, are water that would normally go rushing by is being slowed and slowing. It is good. This dam they've created slows the water, cleans the water, creates conditions where it's less likely for there to be flooding, less likely for there to be forest fires, more likely for creatures all around to thrive. And each of those creatures is another domino that affects other dominoes down the way. And it ends up growing exponentially to the point where this world, this metropolis that the beavers are creating has dominoes going in all directions. And as we have learned often too late, the dominoes hit the front doors of houses and cabins and human beings. And that's when people wake up. And in your story in Beaverland, you talk about how we didn't know this and we all but got rid of them. 400 million beavers in North America, and at one point, we were down in the 19th century to maybe 100,000?
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Yeah. Nobody exactly knows. But I just want to back up a step because I think it can be counterintuitive for people to understand how flooding an area can create floodwater storage. Just to give you a sense of the big numbers of flood storage that are created by this underwater sponge that the beavers create in their wetland and through the canals, there was a study that I cite in the book in Milwaukee, not that far from you all, they calculated that in something like 60 colonies of beavers, if they put them up in the upper watershed where there was no infrastructure, no worry about anybody's septic being flooded or roads being flooded, this is just conservation land that the state owns. Within 25 years, those beaver colonies would be able to store 1.7 billion gallons of water annually. That's all water in the headwaters of Milwaukee that would come down and flood Milwaukee. It was actually the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage Department that funded the study, and they calculated that the stormwater storage would be valued at $3.3 billion. So the light bulb is turning on for municipalities and communities because they're realizing that it costs a lot of money to deal with stormwater, to deal with flooding, the damage from flooding. Much better to let the river system do what it naturally knew how to do, which is to slow water down in its headwater so that it doesn't build up in massive surges below. And, you know, the official climate narrative misses the water cycle as a solution to helping cool our planet. Our planet is heating up at a rate which is making everything harder. Droughts are more severe. Storms are more severe, flooding is more severe. But 95% of the heat dynamics of the planet are actually governed by water. So by only concentrating on greenhouse gas emissions, we've lost track of solutions that are much more local, much more doable by many communities, which is that wherever you rehydrate the land by repairing the river system and you get more water, in a moist Earth, the Earth actually cools itself. It's a pretty exciting thing to think about, because I think the doom and gloom of rising planetary heat and all the problems we're facing, there are natural solutions by just rehydrating degraded lands that we can do.
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Yeah.
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We might not be able to stop greenhouse gas emissions, but we can keep areas around us wet and moist.
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Yeah. And again, with multiple groups benefiting. If you have a creature whose work cuts down on devastating droughts, devastating wildfires, devastating floods, the drying up of biodiversity, helping with cooling the planet, if you have one creature whose work is free, they're out there just doing what they're doing. They're unpaid engineers whose work. Whose work is actually more skilled in many areas than engineers would be. You have, you know, the sewage department there having a problem with floodwaters in Milwaukee and doing this study. You're saying, wait a minute, what are they doing? They're studying beavers. Well, I don't understand it. And they realize, as you say, that if they repopulate this rural watershed around Milwaukee with beavers and just leave them, you're not funding them, you're not paying them, you're not giving them assignments. You don't give them a supervisor. They do their thing. And when you said within 25 years, they could create enough wetlands to store 1.7 billion gallons of water a year with an economic value of $3.3 billion annually, and that they're doing this for nothing, it's the best deal going. You take this all over the country, all over North America, this model. There isn't another creature that can provide so much benefit so quickly just doing what it does to all living things.
- [40:15]
B
Which kind of makes it surprising that we've had culturally such a hard time appreciating the beaver. One of the things that's been really heartening about this book is to see how people have enjoyed it and spread it. And it became a New York Times bestseller by readers that was reader driven. So I think people are realizing it's just so helpful in this time where so many things feel like they're going wrong at once in our world to think about things we can do, which in this case is pretty much supporting the natural world getting out of the way and I guess resetting a little bit our attitude toward the natural world, we think we have all the answers and solutions. Often if we step back and we observe and we watch and we learn, we're smart. At the end of the day, we want to survive. We can find a lot of solutions. The thing that is challenging for people is we do have a cultural history of just killing beavers when they start to flood things that get too close to us. So I think it's really important that there's been a move to educate people with alternative solutions. If your local road might be flooded by a beaver dam, you can put something called a pond leveler in to lower the water so that you don't have to kill the beavers. You can have the beaver pond. You can still have your road. In other situations, I've seen communities actually make much more informed choices. One place where there it's a place dog walkers like to go. And it was a soccer field, and it's being flooded. And so the first response was, okay, we got to kill the beavers because they're flooding our soccer field, and we want our soccer field. And then the community took a look, and they realized the soccer field was actually built in the floodplain of the creek system, and it was going to flood anyway with the extreme kind of storms we get in the northeast. So they took a pause and they actually found a different location for the soccer field. In other words, they didn't say to people, you can't do what you've always done. Once people saw that it didn't have to be one or the other, they were more ready to compromise. That said, there are times when beavers can't stay where they are. Septic system in the floodplain, we're not going to move the septic system, so beavers can't do what they're going to do. In those instances, it might not work, and the beavers have to be moved out. Sometimes they actually have to be trapped. And if they do have to be trapped, my personal feeling is I'd much rather a fur trapper come in and do it who's going to actually harvest the fur, do it ethically, do it in sync with the life of the beaver. So, for example, her landowners would call him and say, I need these beavers removed. But he would never, ever trap in the summer. He said it was just cruel because there would be baby kits that needed parents. He would only trap in the winter when the kits were big enough so that if he took out a parent, they could survive. That kind of understanding of the beaver doesn't come with just a pest removal service. They'll just remove the beavers anytime and throw them in the dumpster. So in a kind of paradoxical way, I began to value the fur trappers that I met and the service they were providing where they were working.
- [43:45]
A
Seems to me there's often a hunter, a fisherman, a trapper you can find who gets it. He gets that this is an interdependent world that I love and enjoy the natural world and want to continue to and want my kids to and my grandkids to. And there's a way to operate where it can work for everybody. And then there are people who don't get it. And that's in all walks of life. You find the people who get the bigger picture, who have a more sophisticated take on how it all works. And then you have the people who grab it and go. I think what you spoke about earlier when you said it's kind of surprising that we're learning this so late with the beaver. It's not surprising to me in this regard. The most sophisticated take that I've ever come across when it comes to life in general is the ability to see the interconnectedness of everything and the relationships between. To never look at one thing as one thing, even human beings, but to always see it in community, that this affects this, that this helps, that, that this by working with that over there creates this for them. And it's this world of relationships, Endless, endless relationships. I don't believe from the founding of this country to today, that has ever been the dominant view. That there is this swirl of things working with each other always and every single thing is a part of something else. So all decisions have to be made with that sense of relationship always. That's just not how we have operated. We screw up, we wipe out the buffalo, we wipe out the beaver, we screw up badly. And then you're right, then we're very clever about fixing things. We're good at fixing things. That's our one gift. We're very clever people. We're just not people with great insight to begin with or great foresight. Those are our weaknesses.
- [45:48]
B
You said something really important there and I just as you were talking, I was thinking somewhere along the line we were taught this false story, which was that the ecology was competing with the economy. And actually the root of ecology and economy are the same eco from Oika's home. And in the ancient Greeks, the economist was actually somebody who managed the house, managed what the resources were. And you can't have a thriving economy if you have an unsustainable ecology. And I think we used to be more in balance than now. In some ways you're right. We do have a dark history of over extraction, but we also have a history. I mean, I grew up on a farm and my parents knew that if they wanted apples, they had to take care of the trees. They couldn't just keep grabbing apples, the trees would die. And I think a good farmer knows you take care of the land and the land will take care of you. I mean, I think that is actually an American value we've lost touch with.
- [46:55]
A
I think there's a difference there. It's almost selfish there. Because what you're pointing out is in order for our family to thrive here, here's how we got to operate. There was no family farm where the buffalo was. There was no sense of taking care of our own. There was grabbit. And so that's why I say you have to push the dominoes down right up to the front doors of people until they see how it selfishly matters to them. Your family was taking care of its own. They weren't looking seven generations down. They were doing what you or I would do or anyone would do. The natural environment presented to them taught them how to take care of their own. But we don't have enough of that. Certainly when they came over and looked at the beavers there to be taken, dollar bills everywhere, no one needed to think in terms of their family. No one needed to think in terms of this is our little backyard. I guess you have to get to the point of feeling like a steward, to think like your family thought where it is, your land, your world, your environment, then you take care of your own. If we had that view across the board, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.
- [48:09]
B
The great beaver story that I open the book with is actually an Algonquin teaching story about the dangers of hoarding resources. And there are many, many stories in Algonquian culture which spread into the Great Lakes. You know, you can't survive if you destroy your home. And I think we need urgently to reset our relationship to the natural world and recognize, like you're saying, if we want to survive the challenges we are facing now and are going to face even more, with extreme storms, with rising heat, drought, flooding, lack of biodiversity, we have to learn to think in a more sustainable way. We have, as a species, so much technical power at our disposal. We. We have everything we need to make the change for a better future, to have clean water, to have clean air. And it's just we have to shift to a more relational way of thinking, which is for our own good.
- [49:12]
A
You know, selfishly, the reason books like yours are so important is you show the dominoes. You have to show them. This isn't intuitive. I had a man on months ago who wrote a book. He talked about the prairie being North America's rainforest. Now, he literally meant that what the rainforest does ecologically in South America, the plains do here. And we drive by and look and we see nothing. Literally nothing. In fact, we would describe to the person riding shotgun, look at all that nothing. And what they're learning is the survival of the natural world in the United States is tied into that prairie. The dominoes start falling as we plow up that prairie. And who the hell would ever know that this stuff is, in a way, counterintuitive and so sophisticated that everybody almost has to become a scientist or an amateur scientist to see all these relationships. That's why I said earlier, the most sophisticated view of life there is is the understanding of it all in relationship. But that takes a fair amount of work. I mean, I had to read your book. That's no small thing. That's 300 pages. I had to read before I woke up to that.
- [50:37]
B
I'm glad it made sense to you because it was sort of a complicated story to tell. But I also think it's just very simple. You know, we like to think about dominion over the natural world. And if we just stepped back and thought about collaboration with the natural world, everything could change. And you know, on that note, speaking of science, we've all been taught, I was certainly taught Darwin, survival of the fittest, that that's how evolution was forwarded. But there's also another story that isn't told widely enough, which is that microbiologist lynn Margulis in 1967 discovered that actually evolution was forwarded by two bacteria collaborating. And they collaborated and they created a mitochondria which led to multicellular life. That was the beginning of the complexity of life on Earth big time. And it happened not through two bacteria fighting, but collaborating. We need to pay attention to the stories we give power to. When I read that, I was like, how come I didn't read that when I was in sixth grade learning about Darwin?
- [51:52]
A
People have been asking me all about free brewery at Minneapolis St. Paul, plumbing, heating and air. I've been getting phone calls about free brewery. Some folks been lining up in front of my house, right in front of my front door with signs asking all about free brewery at Minneapolis St. Paul Plumbing, Heating and air. Here's the deal. You get yourself a $49 furnace tune up, which you need anyway and you should have gotten long ago. And it doesn't cost much at all. And you enter to win a free furnace, which happens to cost a hell of a lot of money is a really big deal. A big thing that's heavy and hard to lift. Boy, wouldn't it be great to win a free furnace. And you can just by getting yourself a little furnace tune up for 49 bucks in the month of February. Gotta be February. And then you automatically enter to possibly win a free furnace they're calling it. And I love this. I can't believe they came up with this. Free Brewery, Minneapolis St. Paul Plumbing, Heating and air. They've only been around since World War I. There are three things I Want to make sure I pass along to you and get your reaction to number one? I think the image that had the greatest effect on me relating to what beavers can do is I thought of them as coming to a place where there was already a stream, already a creek, already something. And then they build their dam and a pond forms and they build their canals and the water shoots out and all of a sudden there's wildlife and lush land and greenery and mammals coming in, birds flying around, and there's this whole city that they created. I had that image. And then I come upon an image where there is no stream that I can see, there is no river, there is no creek, and these beavers come along and I look away for whatever period of time and I look back and again there is this lush world and there is water, and there is waterfowl and there are mammals. And I say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. But there was nothing there. That is when the real magic of these things appeared to me. And tell me what was going on there when that happens.
- [54:28]
B
I walked by this dried out part of the woods that was actually, frankly, a little bit depressing. I always thought of it as the epitome of the degraded landscape around here. And that was where beavers moved in. And I saw them rebuild this world and rebuild it so quickly. And all the wildlife come in. What I actually have learned is that there's the river. We see the stream that had disappeared in that spot. But often when streams disappear, they've just gone underground and they're still running through the ground. There's a kind of massive under river to the river system. So all the waters we never see in the river system, they're still there. And the beavers are like water dowsers in some instances, they know it's there, they dig down and they enable subsurface water to start coming back up. I write about another site right near here. I saw beavers do this and a completely dry area that I had walked by in November and my sneakers weren't even wet. They brought something like 2 million gallons of water to that area by the following spring just by digging down and making like a little 3 inch dam, then a 4 inch dam, then it got up to 5ft. It has to do with actually the way rivers work. There's something like 100 times as much water in the ground as we can see on the surface. And it's also why when we have beavers in the landscape helping bring that water up and remoisten the land above, we're actually helping cool the Earth because when we rehydrate degraded lands and make them moist again, the water cycle then actually cools the earth. And that's going to be one of our big challenges, is turning planetary heat from boil down to simmer so we have enough time to sort ourselves out. And working with the water cycle can do that.
- [56:31]
A
There's a second miracle that if I didn't have a scientist telling me this is real, I wouldn't believe it. A forest fire goes through. And after the forest fire goes through, there remains this huge tract of land that looks like Shangri La, that looks like the Garden of Eden, that looks beautiful and lush. And there are creatures there, and there's life there and plants there. And it's this refuge that somehow miraculously survives. And the beavers get credit for that too. What's going on there?
- [57:07]
B
So by creating their wetlands, remember those were those big underground sponges of water. The whole area is damper and moister and it just doesn't burn. There have been examples out west in some of the megafires where these refugia of the beaver wetlands are where they find wildlife has fled. In fact, some people say we should make the new mascot Smokey the Beaver, not Smokey the Bear, because they do so much to prevent wildfires. In California, there's a statewide program of creating wildfire resiliency by bringing beavers back to headwaters of stream systems. So there's a whole statewide program out there to do this. And they also those beaver wetlands. We haven't talked as much about how the wetlands cleanse water. As the water is slowed down and it goes through the wetland, it's as if it's a huge coffee filter under the ground. So imagine it not just as a sponge, but as a big coffee filter water that's full of pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus that come from our over fertilizing lawns. And in agriculture, these are real problems for us in our water. And they get cleansed out in a wetland. So when the water either gets down into the aquifer or goes back into the stream system, it's cleansed. And after a wildfire, it's also cleansed of the ash, which is a real big problem after a wildfire. So as you can see, I'm a little bit of a beaver geek, but I spent years learning the science and it's really fun to share it because there is so much going on. The more you look, the more you see.
- [58:53]
A
You talked about all the animals that Sought refuge there and were able to survive by getting there. I thought of people who could have survived by getting there.
- [59:01]
B
Actually, there have been instances of firefighters taking refuge in fever wetlands.
- [59:07]
A
The other thing I wanted to talk about a friend of mine in Minnesota who loves working with cameras and creating interesting cameras and inventing new cameras. He put a camera in a bear den over a winter, and I believe was the first one to show a birth of a cub in a den.
- [59:29]
B
Wow.
- [59:29]
A
And he put one in a beaver den. Put a camera in a beaver den. And I got to watch over a winter, what was going on. And I was quite shocked to see the beaver sharing their den with muskrats.
- [59:42]
B
Oh, yeah? Yeah. Isn't that fun? And sometimes snakes will come in. And I saw one recording where beavers, like the muskrat moved in. And the beavers clearly didn't like them being there. But instead of being aggressive and chasing them out, they actually built a wall. It was hilarious. So it's like, okay, you can stay, but just stay over there.
- [60:03]
A
Well, I think my buddy was just kind of making this up, but it was something you could watch. He said, I think the arrangement the beaver have with the muskrat is you can stay here if you groom us. Because what the muskrat were doing was looked like they were brushing their hair periodically and picking out little things out of their hair, little bugs and stuff. And it was this really extraordinary kind. And the beavers were quietly allowing their little barber or salon worker to take care of their fur. And this was all on camera. So that was quite extraordinary to me.
- [60:39]
B
I think that's another example where we're so keyed in to think about the natural world as survival of the fittest. But there are just these extraordinary stories of collaboration and cooperation for the same goal, which is survival. I had the fun of watching a beaver dispute this past fall, and it was the funniest thing. Two beavers were swimming toward the culvert, and it was clear that one beaver was agitated. And I don't know this backstory of why one beaver didn't want the other beaver to go toward the culvert, but they got toward the culvert, and they rose up in the water, and they started this kind of like wrestling match, like sumo wrestlers. I push you, I push you. I push you, I push you. And then it just stopped. And one beaver swam away. It was like, that was that. We sorted that out. You know, they don't have an alpha beaver, and their social hierarchy isn't really fully understood. They have a very strong sense of family, but they seem non hierarchical and they don't seem to fight very much. They just seem to sort it out. And anyway, I just share that.
- [61:48]
A
I want to thank you so much for all this time. Leila Philip, author of Beaverland I want to encourage you people to check out this book. You will never look at that creature the same way again. How One Weird Rodent Made America thanks again for all your time.
- [62:06]
B
It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.
- [62:09]
A
Absolutely.