In Beaver World

Enos A. Mills spent 38 years watching beavers in Longs Peak Valley, from his arrival in 1884 until his death in 1922. This book is the accumulated wisdom of that obsessive, luminous attention. Mills reveals beavers as perhaps the most remarkable engineers in the animal kingdom, creatures who build dams that reshape landscapes, construct lodges with underwater entrances, and fell trees with mathematical precision. But this is more than a natural history. Mills argues that no animal contributed more to civilization or lived more harmoniously within it. He documents their vegetarianism, their peaceful social organization, their almost superhuman conservation of natural resources. He estimates 100 million beavers once thrived in North America before the fur trade's devastation. The book pulses with a quiet radical idea: we have much to learn from creatures who work less than we do yet build more. A century old yet startlingly fresh, In Beaver World is for anyone who has ever stopped to watch water pool behind a dam and wondered at the intelligence behind it.