PAWcast: Leila Philip ’86 on How Beavers Shaped America

Only one creature, other than humans, substantially engineers the landscape around it: the beaver. Many millions of these furry dam builders once busily trapped water in ponds across North America, keeping the landscape lush and fertile, until colonists in the 1600s discovered the lucrative fur trade. In her new book, titled “Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America,” Leila Philip ’86, an English and environmental studies professor at the College of the Holy Cross, who lives near a beaver pond in Connecticut, traces the Native Americans who viewed beavers as sacred, and the colonial capitalists who nearly drove the beaver to extinction. On the latest PAWcast, Philip spoke with PAW about how reintroduction efforts have brought the beaver back, along with hopes that they can help with ecological restoration and climate change.