for what el could look l rest t. well, before gleaves closes the dies and gentlemen, garrett graff garrett graff. ■ñt#w@!hello, new york. hello, upper west side.

hello our bookish frnd for comi, lila. so nice to meet you. tions on your book. thank you so much. really great to be here. ate you all coming out. and you down. oh, my pleasure. well, a new author, so i'm trying to get as much love and possible. i'm already getting it from you before i cou even give you gift you gave me yours, which is a number of beavermy little boy. i had brought this for you because this has been sitting i haven't worn it in forever. and i want you to have. 1957 portland beavers, jersey. oh, no way. yes, right. olympian johnny. avers back in the day. it's great. now i have to go to readings wearinthyeah that's why i gave o you. and you have to go to the office and play that. and blair, this over the the beaver and beaver and the honeybee. it sounds great. all right.

let's talk about our favorite little aquatic rodenthow you fah beavers and why and what was the genesis origin story of beaver land? well, the origin story was really serendipity or accident, because i was the woods one day and i heard this crack a gun had gone off my froze. id out to where my dog looking and i saw dry swamp had become this i thought, what has happened this beavers swimming back andthen they slaml again. it was just incredible, you know, i think we think of moments of all as being moment f awe. and i thought, i have to rs are one of nature's engineers at, about they made aa

well. how the indigenous folks thought of them and reacted to them. ye.■ origin story on this continent. well let me just back up to how they made erbeavers really did a it's not an overstatement so first of all transatlantic trade jump by 19th century you got just roaring into fast pace with the fur trade. so our first economies are based oneavers. but it isn't just that the river systems of north america were shaped by beavers. and this is huge and this is why they'relaying incredible role now in our environmentalem backo help ustegrity of our river sys. so it's really exciting, new role they have to play. so we almost wiped them out through the fur trade.

how to extinction do they think we well, no one's exactly sure. but the estimate is that something like 400 million beavers were water sheds of norh america. so imagine that creek, that river that you used to seeing as maybe a thinof water was actually once a river scape. it was just a messy multiple f[ the land with because beavers me original rivers river keepers and now there's probably 10 to 15 million beaver but efforts were made big the 1900s to brin. and we really have to, you know. and remr ot of mistakes. and beavers are one of them.

they're one of the greatest conservathe comeback. exactly. i'm actually working on a whales and one of the other huge comeback driven all right to the brink, but they are the oceans, farmers and engineers. they are the biggest fertilizer pumps. so they go down deep and bring up all this nutrients and fertilize the the top of the sea. wherever there's more whales. saw this with wolves in that you take a key species out of a landscapeor pt ignorance. but what was it that brought back the do they understand this role? i think itbeaver there have beee throughout history who have unders t beavers and their message has been out and it's been rgotn. there's been a kind ecological amnesia, but i should say who the is because the indigenous peoples who have always■y lived

have had long standing indigenous,l knowledge bases and understanding of the value of beavers. so here in the east, up and down the atlantic seaboard, they peoples hunted beavers, but very d stories like the great beaver really teach us again and again their role in river system. can you share that aof that sto? oh, that's a great story. so about beavers in the with that because book starts in connecticut. it's live and i live in■j northeastern in connecticut right now. the valley and there's no wxcept of a creek. and he dams it up and heticut rt becomes so big it starts floodinghumans are hysterical. and obamacare, upon to disciplie

beaver because the are going to perish. so finally tries to discipline the beaver the■6 reason and obae has thim atlantic seaboard into the great beaver a of geography, follows'y about geographylace, bu'also thn stories, the dangers of hoarng resources is. so it's a kind of environmental parable and love it because it's so subversive course. it's huma t need learn not to be greedy not the beaver it's so here's a story you like and this is going to feel like industry gossip. bu because i think it's probably still online, but years ago i used to have this little lake house in jersey, sussex, way up right near where the appalachian trail goes through new jersey.ul, natt the top of a watershed with wetlands on either side and

beaver dams and. i love them. and they'd swim and i'd paddle board them and watch them all the time. but then they camfor like one of my prized trees. right. which they will do, but really, it was their tree if you think about it properly. and i posother chicken wire. what do i do a, cuomo was a cot the time, replied baseball bat in a tarp, w. yeah so a lot their attitude towards beavers but is that still prevalent are they seen as as pests that are just need be . yeah in our landscapg.well mea't question and it varies region to gieavers definitely need a rebrand. were considered pests and now they're water superheroes. so i mean, beavers can help us with every environmental problem. we have to do with accelerated

climate change. we have drought. we have much water and then too little water. we're in this climate7- whiplas. so thinking about things in the east, when haveea creating, wet, when we have an isn't going to go into the river system and ju held the wetlands which aresponges under the ground are going to hold it. they're going to going to cleanse it. so you have groundwater rharge and that water is cleansed and, you know, a wet sponge, a reall. so th' discovered about ten years ago. the light bulb went on in californr how could actually be harnessed help th wildfire mitigation. and in the book, i have a picture of and thwildfire in 20k and they're these picture of

charred mountains. and in the middle of that is where the beavers were. and it's a green refugia. eavers are. there's wildfires closed down and there's a resurgent. it's after a wildfire. so they're incredibly valuable in the watershed. oregon, washington, calif to utah have been harnessing the wo o beavers for the last ten years. so the light bulb is turned on in many places where climate change has had extreme outcomes. here in the east, it's mixed and i think there's still a lot of that what they do is more valuable than the inconvenience, right? they are going to flood we're living in lowland places where river used to be. 're not going to move infrastructure. we're not going to move manhattan. we're not going to move but there are a lot of places where we can tolerate coexistence benefits from what y

they dbuitrequire lot more educ. yeah. so i have a first book coming out in april were kind enough to take a look at it and tu i devote a few pages to beavers, not the whole thing. but my book is called life as we know it can be and it it's sort of addressed as letter to my kids, but it's framed around a reexamination of maslow's ■>hierarchy of needs in the agef climate change. so i my way up through the ■0. needs a chapter on air, water, temperature. and then we go to shelter and came across so many inspiring stories of people a.takeaway ise comm, these changes the most, the ones that have the most trust, the most connection th a. people who are using these beaver dam analogs out west that try to bring back wetlands beav,

let's see how long it lasts and how much more of the wetlands recovered. and it's led to these dams even in the arid west. if you arrange rocks in a certain way that just slows down the watee beavers, even if they don't live there, it's a way forward in a healthier way. you in this? yeah. yeah think know here in new york there are other examples of you know we mighcall tha restord using the power of nature to restore a degraded you know with beavers it's really inter!e■pesr

beavers do it for free, you know. so i think the lightul is on also that that communities, individuals and muci save lot o. and out west you know ranchers wh historically were at war with beavers are now calling up beaverlaces. the utah relocation center and beavers?can you get me som my cattle need grass in my stream system's going dry. and you know, when i have beavers, it's wet for an extra month. so as people realize how valuable loop back arid plains pe like the blackfeet had strict against hunting beavers at a because they knew how valuable they were to the so they were dependent on the bison, which are dependent on thehe beavers were just■q managed in e

water that would lead to the grass. it would it to all these europeans arrive and wantto pelt if it means you're not going to have a bison. you know, that just didn't add up. but took the europeans a while to figure it out ait does. is there a beaver trap trade today? i know. i think you spoke to some in the bo a is what's the industry like and what's their attitude about this new■> well, i think it's changing. i mean, i everything now in an ■u is but i talk about met in the book he was a fur who really was my first mentor about, beavers. and this was so surprising to me. i'm an lover. i'm an environmentalist and here i am out tromping through the swamps with a fur trapper. was like, what am i doing here?

and i learned so from her. he was an extra ornery conservationist. he knew the beavers better than anybody. and i didn't come from a family that of hunters. conservationists like, st me frd well, we've farm the hudson valley. so i guess i always was interested in the interface humans and the natural world. but in kind of way it was really, it was actually from herb that i got the title of the book because one day he was out in the swamp and he looked around him and he just loved the wetlands and he loved the beavers and he said this beaver land with so much in his voice, i thought, wow, i have to write that down. i have no idea what he's talking about. and after several of research i would understand so was an example of how you knowledge comes to us in different ways climate change problems, ways

we need to be open to solutions that come from every and listen to all different kinds of people. and that's, you know,lutely. that's the trust building exercise. it takes some bravery sometimes to think may not agree with you on these sorts offer to the greate. and if treated with resct ally . yeah. andbeaver now. i write about it in the afterword and when i was out there withscientists measuring r and we were trying to figure out we basically were i watched two very young beavers flee a drastisi down into the river system and a a dam er dry area and within something like three months in over 5 million gallons of water. it was incredible the speed at this. but nobody had any idea about

thanimals themself. and i realized, okay, i'll do at herb taught me. i built a bait pile and i brouth i exactly how to do it because i watched him. so i wasn't bring them into a trap. i was bringing them into wildlife, but i had the beavers ■9on within 24 hours and they we like, how'd do that? and i was li, well, maybe there something to learn from fur trappers. knew exactly. you know, i was just thinking what would perv do? d so so anyway i think there's there's some value in that. g in my home state of wisconsin when it comes well you know wiscoin has is really the light bulb is coming on a slow way because there's been this myth about beavers that because they slow down the water, they warm it too much for trout and therefore trout lobby has been taking out beaver dams

in the midwest. trout unlimited. well, actually, unlimited are now very much working. because and i read about this in the=l chesapeake some of the farmers down there are realizing maybe these beavers are flooding a half acre of corn, but that can sell a duck hunting lease there for a lot more than i could evers sl co, i think, you, farmers tend to be practical pele pay bills and there's like, okay, now we'd rather have someeaver ponds than than corn right there, which is probably what shoul have always happened, because they in low lying areas. but in wisconsin, i beaver, bear dams were being removed because they thought that they were bad for trout. now, out in theorthwest they're actually and many of the indigenous triba councils working theo tribes council up ,

th recover salmon by bringing beaver back because now we understand what oples understood, which is that beavers taught salmono jump and. necessary for theevolved ecosystem. i mean, if you think about it why we was taught that salmon to jump. yeah that's actually an expression out in the northwest and trout are also a cold fish so i think that's changing and there's actually a lawsuit happening right now on behalf of the watershed, which is really interesting. and the watershed is the suing wisconsin department ofe fish and wildlife. i believe that's the organization and saying look, 7,000 beavers that you didn't need to and you damage the watershed and you are suos protecting the watershed. and you know what they've they were like, well, wwer for that.

so i think they're actually making well, they put an actual dollar beaver colony or that sort of thing. ah i about some of that in the book, i mean extraordinary nowllar figure is being put so out in milwaukee. there was a study in 2020 and upper watershed of the milwaukee within 25 years would generate 1.7 trillion gallons of water storage water hold on it is valt $3.3 billion a year. and that's just it's not that many beavers either. it's like 4000 beavers. yeah. and so and this this is 900 square miles of land that's open. 'it's as if you have to move someone's soccer or worry about infrastructure. we have a lot of open land that is beaver ready that people just

haven't thought about. so iu know, the coexistence strategies that you putting in pond level areas to control when they flood. level f flooding culvert to otect culverts. but i think it also we need to change our thinking in some places maybe we put the soccer field in in the wrong and we else. tly. it takes some humility and some you have to do that. but what are you i want to read your reference to the 2023 supreme court decision to really roll back protections the waters of the u.s. you callt nothing of delusional. what do you mean by that? well, the sackett decision from last may narrowed the protection, the river system to

st visible and continuous water. so what now understand about the river system? and again, t we i have say sort of contemporary science because the indigenous peoples who have always lived here didn't think about beavers out and manipulating the river and in fact out in california you if i may, in on the klamath river, the europe tribe has actually given the river. and so it's it's interesting. but so if you as a circulatory m rather than just a water, that's like a conveyance like the hudson river out there, would look at it. and we see this long body water that's it's almost like a big ditch of water. i know that seems disrespectful, we've done to that river. we've ditched it because. we wanted it for is like a circulatory system. decision

removed protection■0 on 70% of e river system because the tributaries, all the perennial streams, all the intermittent streams, all wetlands, they're not protected anymo they're like literally connected to the big river, which is usually not the case so disconnected wetlands. what we call disconnected actually of the vast circulatory system of the rive scape, are no longer protected and. it' mean, we've got the inflatin reductioact, wchthis really amb, imprsive piece of legislation that now people use to do watershedestoration. and and that's happening. and in some actually like out in washington there they're harnessing beavers as part of that. and then we have this decision which seems to like roll it, roll it all b put streams at risk. so what learned researching this

book is that a river, a creek stream. that's just the water you what? th■e water you can't see is an incredibly valuable part of the rir syst.and if we take protecty from t delusional. right? right. is therecongress now that coulde any of thisbeavers best tell ou? i think the beavers best hope is actually individual states and individual finding out about their watershed getting involved in protecting theiran, californy leapt ahead in the last year as a leading state in the west because they an official beaver group the governor just hired five bver real policy ofe state to harness beavers for pr. they know they have to get about dwindling groundwater and

wildfire mitigation and. right.■k and so what's interesting is the firsav relocation 75 years is happening out and it's actually happening on historic mida traditional lands of the middle mountain people and that's because they managed buy that land back. it's complicated when a major power company went bankrupt, they managed to get thr oric traditional lands back. so i thinkal organizations land restoring probably where a great deal of hopes activity ig there and other stes might follow that lead if they see the fruits of that labor. yeah. yeah, i mean people are working incredibly hard been so heartened as the books come out to have met many incredible people i met and i met so incredible people researching book past and present and had fun writing about their

stories, but also the books come out meeting, working on r restoration here up and down the hudsonyork area, you know, worko hard river. that's a billion oyster project, ■ right here in the in the harb. got a lot of things goingthat'st i'm lucky enough to live rbrooke bridge and walk aroundhe time. and that is an ecological comeck that's up there with the beaver and the humpback was an open sewer when i was a child and there was a humpback whale a mile times square following menhaden upstrm, oysters and all of that. it's how nature can heal itself give tright. well, and i think amazing what people can do on a grassroots level. i mean, i think the thing is

i you know, i fell in love with beavers, but i beavers in north america because it such a story of hope and for our time. but i think we need more than hope. we need hope that leads to action. and i see a of action happening by individuals and it builds and i think also once you take an action however small you feel so paralyzed by change because you realizethings we can do and you'll allies you that anxiety into action. right this isstions? sure. from these folks? yeah, sure. anybody got ti and we'll pass ty ground if anybody's one. i've got one there, sir. are there m states? yeah, well there's a eurasian

to caster candidates is the north beaver, but it has some differences. so are there's a big hnik, scot, ireland germany, throughout europe actually too they call it rewildg. they're because river restoration was, a big push in deer in the eu and also in great britain. returning beavers last summer seen in an area of west london and the mayor of london was down there on on you know bbc news talking how exciting it was and of talking about how much restoration be happening. so, you know, they just as concerned about flooding and dealing with that as we are urban flooding is a there's mucn you so weird and quirky and extraordinary i mean they they seem be remarkably adaptive

moving into places where you wouldn't think they could be and then they're they are, you know, their beaver thing. sof fun about beavers. in fact, there were beavers in the i think a couple of years ago, subways maybe was not so fun but walked into a toronto subway stop and everybody had to rat, they got y beaver. well, we should be so lucky that we so lucky, right. ■'canada, a lot more beavers thn and there's a project to bring rbeavs and actually a russia had had been quite a leader in beaver research and it's really interesting i have some pictures of early beaver es from from russia in the book so it's really interesting story tha' fascinating. yeah, there was a piece i don't

know if anybody else has a but there was a piece in the times few months ago about a study, canadian beavers and how they changed this the species of the trees right around here they're then they wander out to get more trees but the wolves were basically containing how far ld roam fast. yeah like you said they taught the salmon how to how to jump but everything i each other out. yeah it's sort of like the i think they use like regulators, the wolves regulators on just how much rearranging beavers can do. yeah, i it's really interesting. actually was at the kerry institute of ecosystem studies and i■w was to have a conversatn with clive jones, who actually coined the term engineer. and itting to talk to him. how did he come up? i said, how did you come up with

this? whyhe said, we looked at snails beavers andesting. so apparently rock eating beaved elephants. elephants, we can kind think thh beavers are so brilliant at constructing, it's also we don't fully understand yet how they do starting to crack the code of beaver intelligence. yes. and i write about this researcher, i■■■ think is really doing interesting work. she's out montana now on the blackfeet. she grew up on the blackfeet reservation. but when ier she was at harvard and. she thinks that beavers are abls and theirthem have lasted 200 yd successive generations of beavers are working on that that we need to think about them

closer to ants and terteworking. so wtend to think about intelligence in a human way as an indivl.think what beavers doe ch i think is pretty fascinating amazing. and you think i scientist who's using artificial intelligence ice to do census of ■i in antarctica and figure that out and could use a.i. to understand it with somef are a.i. now. they're trying to beaver cally useful if google earth could locate all beaver dams in north america. that would be super useful for beaver research would also be really useful for flood research because see how many beaver dams after a flood. ■bso biomimicry engineers are

because. beavers never one big dam. they build at least three and it's in anqb engineer sense a really smart way to capture the sheer force because. if the top dam a little bit impinged, the second dam catches it in the third and the lor dam, all that water that's collected below presses against the top dam and helps support it. so there are a lot engineering things going on that are actually quite sophisticated. i sometimes look at the beavers, i' watching, i think, god, you're 36 inches tall. you really like a funny looking little creature. how do you do this? hink that's the question humans have asked for centuries. ose are those little guys. yeah. yeah. th a of new yorkers would be interested to know why is the

beavers a major design element in the astor place subway station? oh, great. yes, that beautiful tile. ou seen it, you have to go see it. so john jacob astor,■ multimillionaire, made his fortune selling beavere wharfs . so that's why that is there for john jacob astor. so and he would go and it's a story i have a lot of fun writing about because he would actually, you know, almost dupe jefferson and build what would global trade empire but he w itg lewis and clark's expedition across and send a boat vo and found the first tradingn the west coast in oregon, which he would of course name ter

and. so then fur it would go to c by of london, pick up trade goods to new york and go round and round was quite brilliant. the only thing that was not brillianabout his scheme was that like everyone else in his time considered beaver1w in exhaustible resource and within years they were trapped out. so he had more beaver pelts, but so he into real estate by then so curious i left one sec so we can get the lamike c-span folk want to hear you. hi. i'm curious if they have a preference for specific species of trees. oh, trees. yeah, they do have favorites and so trees, like here in the east willow and poplar have a big scent and are quite sweet, and

they really like those a lot. the' eat, you know, they basically survive on trees when they don't have a quarter quarter plants. and they also use trees to make building material. so they don't actually feed on trees because don't get that much nutrition from underlying layer of bark that can become they'll eat, they do not like pine. it's too sticky, but they they like trees that that are sweet. and thema place for water plants to grow. yeah their fmerso they need water they are incredibly awkwardwaddle around and anybodd eat them very easily. so they knowt. really interestig because when i' these two beavers with their ponds. they went to a perfect pinch

spot in a valley and i was thinking, how did they know it't have seen lay of the land so it's really a■l kind a mystery. you know there's, they're small and they havvery poor eyesight. so they're just going what they can see in a very small around them or by smell, b west they rs like trees have more sugar in them have orl birch in your yard, paint it■9 sand. the paint, they don't like that or protect them. chicken wire is another good way so they will go after those trees. good tooh. in this discussion, talked a lot about so many to ecosystem, how they cane ■so financially helpful to society.

in your research found are the counterarguments for employing beavers and prett issues we're having like i was really surprised by that fact that you told us that legislation was passed to rlly not protect all of these watershed ads in these rivers how is that how is that argument evenwell, i think the to go bace sackett decision. i think that decision flies in the face of science andongress just because it was a bipartisan decision, vote in the clean water act. ■"so basically a small group of justice overturned that in the may. but i just have been hardwired to thi beavers either as well for, you know, 300 years as a resource. and then they became this pest. we were moving into lowland

areas. the river used to bere would be. and so beavers were in the way of where we wanted to be. our train. a lot of our before there was an understanding of a their value b that they're actually co-existence that can work. people just thought we just have to get rid of them. and also, i to go back to the efforts to return themrts wh century to return them. and because there were so many abandod farms the early 1900s, there's so much woodland out returning. beavers had a lot of area to retu did rebound in the park and then they moved down the fort to beavers, came to connecticut in 1914 and so i just sort of got used to thinking about as so durable and we could just take

as many out as we yeah, rodentsd i've even seen the diagram of sort of rodent kind of reproduction that don't make any sense because beavers only have 2 to 4 kids. they limit their population of food goes, they have fewer kids. so it's not they're not like mice where you're going to have two than four than 16 than a, you know an explosion of beavers is what people like to talk about and that that would be the rationale for taking out 30% of the population every year which was sort of the standard response. but i think what happens is that agencies just sort have policy, they have a culture and that that culture just goes on until shake it up with size its and i think people are shaking it up now but sometimes it has to be shaken up by lauisometimep by grassroots and really

motivator is the dollar sign. so when people rlize they can save money, that that really gets the wheels tng so that's encouraging for beavers. but i think it's cultural, you ow think that's a great question. happen. yes,■t sir. how far do beavers travel? i mean, i, i guess we're moving them, but they move themselves as well. so what'st] the range of, of a beaver family? well, that also is a really good question and i should say what know beavers as i you know i spent six years researching this book. i thought wow. i really know everything about beavers and then one year into this observing i'm calling up beaver and them saying, look, the beavold me they didn't do that. and they're like, well, you know

now know. so there's really an absence of there's been an absence of research about. ore charismatic mammals, wolves andd then the bt have been needed for hunting and wild turkey have been studied because people waedso we needed information abt them. so now that we know beavers, valuable people are like, oh my gosh, we need more information about animal itself and discovering that, hey, we actually don't know, but that very question is being monitored out in voyageurs park where that'f beavers in north america right now. it's anble. that park is relativelfu8$but 's in the reaches of mneboundary ws

rebounding and now they've tagged them so thathey can see how far they go. you know, there's been story ann beavers as the climate isthey've actually been creating problems alaska because they're bringing water which is thaw the permafrost they're not the only animal didn't used to be there that's moving there but they actually have been seen on video camera climbing over a mountain to get to where they are. so nobody's up. beavers climbed mountains re pixar movie. yeah, i think it would be a good one. i want to make a disney film about these two young beavers who just their story is so poignant and incredible. they're le refugees. lost their family. they lost their parents they lost everything. down, you know,

surviving, making it happen. these are the all that. yeah. yeah. and there there are of, sort of sometimes don't know how to do something. sometimes their dams fail and it's like they're teenage, teenage. they didn't they didn't have enough time to how to do it right. vso. one more question. yes. thanks. just wondering iffacing challene from invasive phragmites or nutr beavers just that good at sort of adapting and changing their environment that face challenge. yeah, that's a really good question. and they they actually are so phragmites,is invasive kind of water wetlandst is ctails d cattails eels

are really nutritious food muskt of different species and nobody eats phragmites. but phragmites grows everywhere. it's out the cattails. that's a problem because a major food source is disappearing down region is that it's happening right here here. yeah. in fact, all up and down the hudsonl volunteer are removing phragmites and it's it's really important if you have a pond and you have phragmites, you should get rid of it. but neutral is a problem down south, which is a kind of rodent that is bcausina loof havoc. they're an invasive ie a lot ofe species we think of as being here, we european colonists brought. and it's an interesting the climate is changing to the extent where we're not invasive or try to go

conversation.riginal weyou so much, lila it was really a treat talking to you. kara swisher ighted to be here with you. it's a real honor to talk about fern book, which you we have to i think for the c-span audience, webook in context. can you give us can you give usn actually mean girls is out now, whicisbook you write things you really