Ben Goldfarb

Add it up, and it’s hard not to conclude that, as Karen Pinchin puts it in her riveting debut book, “Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas,” fisheries science is “an impossible, thankless job with no easy answers.”

One of the finest books I’ve read recently was ‘Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter’ by Ben Goldfarb. Ben is an American environmental journalist who has taken great interest in this remarkable creature and its ability to, as he put it when we spoke, “help tackle many of our ecological problems if we just get out of the way and let the rodent do the work”. 

I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.

…we send fully a third of American-caught fish abroad, even as we import 91 percent of the seafood we eat.

Let me get this straight: you want to flood a pristine valley in Canada to generate power so you can ship natural gas overseas to keep Asia’s lights on?