7/6/2023 0 Comments Ben goldfarb eager![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “ systematic and widespread removal,” wrote Sharon Brown and Suzanne Fouty in 2011, “represents the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and the Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. Filled with hard facts and fascinating people (and animals), this is an authoritative, vigorous call for understanding and action. 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. In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions. 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. 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. Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. “That story, of course, isn’t unique to California, or to beavers. ![]()
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