Ben Goldfarb > Quotes

“Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year. If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“That story, of course, isn’t unique to California, or to beavers. Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. You’re probably familiar with most of the colonists’ original environmental sins: They wielded an ax against every tree, lowered a net to catch every fish, turned livestock onto every pasture, churned the prairie to dust. In California’s Sierra Nevada, nineteenth-century gold miners displaced so much sediment that the sludge could have filled the Panama Canal eight times.14 We are not accustomed to discussing the fur trade in the same breath as those earth-changing industries, but perhaps we should. The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of countless streams, and imperiled water-loving fish, fowl, and amphibians—an aquatic Dust Bowl. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and the Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. “[Beavers’] systematic and widespread removal,” wrote Sharon Brown and Suzanne Fouty in 2011, “represents the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Beaver Pledge: One river, underground, irreplaceable, with habitat and wetlands for all.”
― Ben Goldfarb

“In the mid-1990s the Florida panther, a cougar subspecies that roams the Southeast’s cypress swamps, had suffered its own brush with extinction. After decades of development and roadkill cut the panther’s population to around thirty animals, the survivors had no choice but to breed with their relatives, and genetic anomalies cropped up. Some mutations, like kinked tails and cowlicked fur, were benign. Others were life-threatening. More than 60 percent of males developed undescended testicles, and 20 percent of all panthers suffered atrial septal defects—holes in the walls of their heart. After biologists introduced eight female lions from Texas, the defects abated, and the panther’s numbers ticked upward.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“beaver the size of a small black bear that roamed from Florida to Alaska and disappeared just ten thousand years ago.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Like many Americans, he judged the automobile a disruptive and fearsome technology. By the 1920s cars had claimed tens of thousands of human lives, frayed social contracts, and demoted pedestrians to second-class citizens.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity;”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“hippo-like Castoroides, a beaver the size of a small black bear that roamed from Florida to Alaska and disappeared just ten thousand years ago.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“In Nevada, and throughout the West, most ranchers graze their livestock on federal land, paying the government rent for the privilege.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Luckily we don’t have to worry about hybrids: The two species have different numbers of chromosomes, and all interbreeding attempts have failed.12”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Since it’s unlikely that a behavior as bizarre as tree harvesting evolved more than once,”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“The demand for Castor fiber was spurred, in part, by the Catholic Church, which classified beavers, whales, otters, and other water-dwelling mammals as fish—making the rodents one of the few forms of red meat that parishioners could guiltlessly consume during Lent.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report released by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year.4 Although you can argue with the wisdom of slapping a dollar value on nature, there’s no denying that these are some seriously important critters.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“observed two-year-olds remaining at home to groom, feed, and guard their kid brothers and sisters.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Yet beavers are as balletic in water as they are clumsy out of it. They can hold their breath for up to fifteen minutes, and their underwater gymnastics are powered by webbed hind feet. Transparent eyelids allow them to see below the surface, while a second set of fur-lined lips close behind their teeth, permitting them to chew and drag wood without drowning. Building dams expands the extent of beavers’ watery domains, submerges lodge entrances to repel predators, and gives them a place to stash their food caches. Ponds also serve to irrigate water-loving trees like willow, allowing beavers to operate as rotational farmers: They’ll chew down vegetation in one corner of their compound while cultivating their next crop in another.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“from logging companies to transportation departments, are prohibited from destroying stream and wetland habitat. But there’s a loophole: If your construction project promises to cause “unavoidable” damage, you can pay to restore streams elsewhere, like a sixteenth-century Christian buying indulgences to offset sin. The system allows restoration firms to function like house flippers, fixing up degraded streams and selling them off at profit to indulgence-seekers.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“crepuscule.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Twenty million years ago Nebraska resembled nothing so much as the Serengeti, a river-webbed grassland upon which foraged a spectacular mammalian bestiary: tiny camels and giant wolverines, two-horned rhinos and pig-like oreodonts, muscular beardogs and lithe horses.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“The arrival of Europeans warped indigenous peoples’ relationship with beaver from subsistence and kinship to extraction,”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Journalists bemoaned the proliferation of “road hogs,” “speed maniacs,” “Sunday drivers,” “juggernauts,” and the dreaded “flivverboob,” the epithet for an inconsiderate motorist. The automobile struck critics as not only dangerous but depraved. The moment that “the foot touches the accelerator and the hand grasps the wheel,” chided one reporter, law-abiding citizens “become afflicted with the gas rabies.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“Add up all those dependents, and you begin to comprehend why scientists consider beavers the ultimate keystone species. To architects, a keystone is the wedge-shaped block that forms the apex of a stone arch, the brick that holds the span in place. To ecologists, a keystone species is that rare organism that likewise supports an entire biological community. Salmon, whose decomposing carcasses sustain grizzly bears, eagles, and even trees, are one keystone species; elephants, who clear the savanna for grasses by uprooting trees and shrubs, are another. Pull the keystone out, and the arch—or the ecosystem—collapses.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“Although Americans don’t pay similar heed to our beaver heritage,”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“The landscapes where beavers can do the most good aren’t always ready for them. Environmental need and political opportunity don’t necessarily overlap, especially in the American West - witness the wolf, at once ecological hero and agricultural villain.”
― Ben Goldfarb

“Cars turned streets into war zones.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“Traffic’s moving fence deterred animals from crossing between populations, and cars crushed would-be lovers who dared the trip. By stymieing life’s most fundamental act, highways scrawled their signature into its molecular code. In Switzerland roads distorted the genes of species from roe deer to bank voles; in the Mojave Desert they pared the genetic diversity of bighorn sheep. In the Northern Rockies grizzly populations are so disunited by highways that researchers can tell, from the merest snippet of DNA, on which side of which road any bear was born. Abax parallelepipedus, a flightless European beetle, disperses so feebly that biologists once found a genetically distinct population encircled by a highway exit loop.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“Many animals are cute; very few are ecosystem engineers. Even acknowledging that beavers store water and sustain other creatures is insufficient. Because the truth is that beavers are nothing less than continent-scale forces of nature, in large part responsible for sculpting the land upon which we Americans built our towns and raised our food. Beavers shaped North America’s ecosystems, its human history, its geology. They whittled our world, and they could again—if, that is, we learn to treat them as allies instead of adversaries. Our future must be as entwined with beavers as our past has been, and yet we must completely reverse the nature of our relationship. They will build it, if we let them come.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“For centuries urban streets had been nodes of activity and commerce, as much bazaars as conduits. Yes, they were the province of carriages and electric streetcars. But they were also where kids played ball and shined shoes, where vendors flogged vegetables, where pedestrians loitered and gossiped.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

“Pandemonium isn’t convenient, but often it’s more natural than stability.”
― Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter