According to author and environmental studies professor Leila Philip, who spoke at Sunday’s Monadnock Summer Lyceum at Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church, beavers could hold a key to environmental resilience in the face of climate change. 

Growing up on a farm in upstate New York, Philip was fascinated by “the intersection between the human and the natural world.” She was particularly drawn to the wetlands and ponds on the edges of her family’s Hudson Valley farm, where she “spent hours chasing frogs.” Years later, Philip said, she realized the landscape everyone at the time referred to as “swamps” were an essential piece of the natural habitat, and that the role of beavers in the preservation of wetlands was an environmental linchpin.

Philip’s book, “Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America,” traces the history of beavers and their impact on North America, from the Indigenous stories of the northern woodlands through the current environmental research. According to Philip, the U.S. government now recognizes the positive economic significance of beavers, placing the value of their impact on the land at $179,000 per square mile per year.

“When I got to the point in my research where I realized beavers had been hunted nearly extinction in North America by 1800, I had to just take a pause. I wasn’t sure how to effectively communicate our long dark, history of the overextraction of resources,” Philip said. “That is what creates empire.”

The beaver played a primary role in the development of the United States and Canada, with hunters and trappers arriving as early as the 1500s. 

John Jacob Astor, the first American millionaire, made his fortune on beaver pelts. As beavers disappeared from North American landscapes, waterways were becoming industrialized, with natural wetlands, the “swamps” of Philip’s youth, drained and replaced with canals, dammed rivers and controlled reservoirs.

“Degraded, single-channel waterways are not in their natural state. They have lost their ability to support the natural ecosystem and the surrounding environment,” Philip said. “Beavers restore wetlands by damming streams and creating networks of ponds, which increase biodiversity, including microbial life.”

Philip noted that the beaver’s most-crucial contributions are unseen. 

“The most-important part of a beaver pond is under the ground. The ground under a beaver pond holds three times as much water as what is in the actual pond, enabling the habitat to withstand drought,” Philip explained. 

Philip noted that some of the oldest known Indigenous “teaching stories” of people such as the Algonquian center on beavers, their impact on the land and their vital role in retaining water in the environment.

“Every single environmental crisis that is affecting humans involves water, whether it is drought, flooding, rising sea levels. Beavers are agents of ecological change,” Philip said.

Philip said that new research with drones and AI has shed fascinating light onto the complexity of beavers’ work.

“From the ground, it just looks like a pond, but from overhead, images reveal a network of dendritic patterns, almost likes roots of a tree radiating out. Those are the beavers’ channels acting as irrigation channels, bringing water to the surrounding area,” Philip said. “They are like millions of highly trained furry engineers.” 

“Beaverland” is available at leilaphilip.com.

After taking  a week off for MacDowell Medal Day on July 21, the series resumes with Michael Kimmel presenting “Angry White Men: Masculinity on the Extreme Right” on Sunday, July 28, at 11 a.m.