I’m a fan of NYRA, Catty Corner, Eric Schwartau—and beavers (see “The Beautiful and the Damned,” #42). Obviously, you must cover North America’s largest rodent in depth and often. (They are way better than rats IMHO. I could go on about the financial impact they had in building New York City and Albany, which began as a beaver trading post.) Beavers, though, aren’t just architects but landscape architects with nearly as big an impact on our continent as humankind. While they may be monogamous, I too am skeptical of the het-norming prejudices of animal behaviorists. The bias I do bring: socialist. Castor canadensis are the rodent socialists of the animal realm. They are collective, cooperative, and to my mind, utopian. They allow mice and muskrats and frogs to share their home, even the food.
Near my house upstate is a defunct beaver lodge, and for years the animals created a terraced series of dams to cache food and extend their terrain. In our moment of climate collapse, beavers, with their systems of dams, help control flooding and bring water to parched regions. …