Ben Goldfarb
Goodreads Author
Member Since
February 2018
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Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
7 editions
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published
2018
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Ben Goldfarb
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Ben Goldfarb
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Ben Goldfarb
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Ben Goldfarb
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Ben Goldfarb
rated a book really liked it
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Ben Goldfarb
rated a book really liked it
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Ben Goldfarb
rated a book it was amazing
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Don't never weaken. ...more | |
Ben Goldfarb
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Utterly fascinating, exhaustively reported, engagingly written, excessively footnoted. | |
Ben Goldfarb
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Had the chance to read/blurb an early copy of Amy's book; here's what I wrote: Whether you eat it, skate on it, or plop it in your cocktail, ice is part of your life. In prose as crystalline as a frozen pond, Amy Brady’s Ice details the history of thi ...more |
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Ben Goldfarb
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Honored to blurb this book! Here's what I wrote: "For as long as humans have walked the earth, we’ve traveled alongside bears. But as Eight Bears reveals, this ancient relationship has never been more tenuous. Gloria Dickie travels from the brutal bil ...more |
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“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.”
― Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
― 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.”
― Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
― 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.”
― Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
― Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
Topics Mentioning This Author
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The Seasonal Read...:
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4153 | 356 | Nov 30, 2018 09:27PM | |
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Science and Inquiry:
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