“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. […]  If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind.”
-Ben Goldfarb, The Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter

                My friend Ben Goldfarb’s new book (Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet) comes out in September. I can’t wait to read it, and still, I also can’t read it yet, so instead I’ve been thinking about two things. First, the undergrad afternoons Ben and I spent playing pool and chatting, the balls scattering across the table as our ideas bounced off each other in easy chatter. Second, Ben’s first book, Eager. And that means beavers. At its heart, for me, Eager is about repositioning the way some US conversations think about humans and other-then-humans. About how we could imagine ourselves as part of an ecosystem, instead of ‘masters’ over it. To get there, Eager’s about how so many of the things we struggle with (too much water in floods, not enough water in summer as plants wither; that’s just the start) can be helped be a good beaver. Or a bad beaver. Like a punk greaser beaver with slicked back hair and a switchblade— that one would help, too. 
                I’m not going to try and explain how it is that beavers do things that our clever engineering struggles with. Ben’s done that already. But sitting here, now, I’m struck by how the memory of playing pool blurs into the promise of the book. Before I’d read Eager as suggesting a kind of partnership—human families and beaver families could all gain from working together. And I think that’s true, but now, next to the emphasis on work, I’m thinking about something that’s more like friendship. Like games on long afternoons. A playful relationship of curiosity, bouncing off each other in easy chatter and as our lives cross and interweave in the paths we walk and the water we share.