Margo Taft Stever on “For I Will Consider the North American Beaver”

When I was preparing to teach a challenging eight hour a day, five days a week Zoom course on Poetry and Bioethics for the Bioethics Department in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in January, 2021, I studied “Jubilate Agno,” by Christopher Smart, written between 1759 and 1763, but not published until 1939. Smart’s poem is now considered one of the first and most engaging ecopoems ever written. Because Smart provided so many close observations about his now famous cat, Jeoffry, I decided to use “Jubilate Agno” as the model form in my writing of “For I Will Consider the North American Beaver.”

My motivation for writing a poem about beavers developed after my spouse served on the board of an environmental organization that provided stewardship for thousands of acres of undeveloped land in New York. After a beaver family disrupted the tranquility of a man-made wildflower island that they had created on a man-made lake for the enjoyment of their members, several of them decided that they wanted to trap and kill a beaver family. During my spouse’s tenure on the board, he was able to fight for the beavers’ survival, but soon after his term was up, the beaver-killers united to influence the board to vote to eliminate them. Instead of live-trapping and moving them to a safe location, the board and staff decided to kill-trap them by drowning. Several of the staff stated that their Ph.D. degrees provided adequate justification for their unconscionable deeds.

Because I was horrified by the family’s forced drowning, I searched for books about the beaver to better understand my loss. I was delighted to find Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). To write my poem, I took notes and divided them into two parts, one on what is outstanding about the beaver and the other on atrocities that humans have inflicted on them. In the 1800s, those engaged in the beaver trade almost entirely wiped out the species.

For this poem, I concentrated on how the beaver has accomplished much more environmental good than most other creatures, especially more than humans, when one computes the destruction that we have wrought. Goldfarb’s book includes information on how to live-trap and relocate the beaver, and I was fascinated to discover after reading “The True Story Behind Idaho’s Parachuting Beavers,” Julia Zorthian, (Time Magazine, October 23, 2015) that in 1948, seventy-six of them were parachuted to establish flourishing new beaver communities in Idaho. Needless to say, beavers could even more easily relocate without the parachute.