Beavers: Beacons of Hope

These humble rodents engineer and maintain massive wetland complexes that create diverse wildlife habitat, protect water quality, lessen the impacts of floods, and offer peaceful spaces for reflection. Leila Philip’s critically acclaimed 2022 book, Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, now a New York Times bestseller, explores these curious creatures and the humans who are learning from them. 

Beavers might just be one of the most inspiring conservation comeback stories of the 20 th century for while they played an outsized role in shaping American history, they now have an important new role to play in our environmental future.

Join Denison, the Licking Land Trust and our local public libraries in welcoming Leila Philip to campus for a conversation about how we can learn from beavers to restore the land we care about. 

The talk will end at 8 pm, followed by book signing.

Leila Philip is an award-winning author Author whose most recent book, Beaverland, is a Times Editor’s Choice, New York Times Best Seller and NPR Science Friday Book Club selection which The Wall Street Journal called “as full of charm and wonder as its beguiling protagonist.”

A Guggenheim Fellow, Philip has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  She was a popular contributing columnist at the Boston Globe and teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at the College of the Holy Cross where she holds the Brooks distinguished Chair in the Humanities.