Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (5 page)

But the argument in Churchill wasn’t really scientific anyway. It was, I realized, a more philosophical fight about what the animal is capable of, the character of the beast. People in Churchill live in the bear’s world and see polar bears do clever and creative things. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize the animals, to see them as having a humanlike capacity for problem solving that makes them, like us, nearly invincible, and to assume they’ll adapt, even if we never thought to expect such ingenuity from a less impressive critter like the copper-striped blue-tailed skink, a lizard in Hawaii, when the ecology it was a part of changed. (The skink was last seen on Kauai in the 1960s; in 2012, the government officially declared it extinct.) In other words, biologists recognize the polar bear as just one cog in a Darwinian machine—one that will drop out when the structure holding it up deteriorates. But people in town see it as a menacing and capable agent of its own fate. It was obvious that they expected the same resourcefulness and perseverance out of their polar bears that they themselves showed after the military left.

On top of that, so many people in Churchill that I met were also not inclined to believe the climate change story because they resented the messenger. They saw Polar Bears International as carpetbaggers from down south, an elite NGO that set up shop every fall and flew in a pageant of scientists and overachieving American high-schoolers, and capitalized on Churchill’s polar bears without much meaningful interaction with Churchill itself. At the Legion Hall that night, everyone was quick to point out the obvious synergy between PBI and the tour company Frontiers North: the more PBI muscled the media into talking about climate change, the faster tourists would pay Frontiers North for the chance to see the animals before they disappeared. Money was presumed to be changing hands somehow, and virtually everyone at the table was convinced that Robert Buchanan is secretly a part owner of Frontiers North—that he had engineered the whole masterful scheme.

The real victim was the bear, they told me. “All I know is that I’m tired of people feeling guilty about coming up to see polar bears. It’s absolutely unfair to the bears,” said Kelsey Eliasson, a contemplative younger guy with gnarled facial hair. He’d come to Churchill in 1999 as an idealistic environmentalist—he owned a composting toilet and a van that ran on vegetable oil. “I believed,” he told me. “I was a believer. I was an annoying eco-freako.” But he was turned off by the way he saw activists like Polar Bears International “Disney-fying” the bear. They played up its vulnerability, twisting it into a cuddly sob story, and it made Kelsey wonder if climate scientists spun the truth in similar ways. “Now I don’t even know whether to believe in climate change anymore,” he said.

A guy a few seats down, who’d been silent, reached around to pat Kelsey on the back. “We always believed somewhere down the road that you’d come around,” he said. His name was Dennis Compayre. People called him Dennis the Bear Man. He had longish, sandy hair, and resembled a thick-set Dennis Hopper. He was imposing, but enunciated all of his words perfectly with the breathy, faintly patrician voice of a Haverford comp-lit professor.

Dennis had driven Tundra Buggies from the very beginning, in 1982, until his friend Len Smith sold the business to Frontiers North. He loved polar bears and, after parting ways with the new ownership, still wanted to be able to spend bear season on the tundra with them. So, in 2000, he dug his old rig, Buggy One, out of a boneyard, rebuilt the machine, and soon talked Frontiers North into going into business with him. He installed a webcam on Buggy One’s roof, drove it into the viewing area, and camped in it all fall, beaming grainy footage of bears and keeping an online diary for a few hundred paid subscribers.

Early one morning during Dennis’s second autumn, Dancer came knocking—thundering on the hull of Buggy One like a friendly drunk who’d lost his keys. Dancer was a huge male polar bear who’d hung around the early photography tours in the eighties. That was the lard-tossing era, before feeding bears was illegal, and by feeding Dancer, Dennis had taught the bear to walk backward on his hind legs—to dance. “It’s a terrible thing, I know,” he told me. “Like a circus act.” Twenty years later, Dancer seemed to remember Dennis and Buggy One. He immediately started doing the dance. And from then on, and every bear season for the next several years while Dennis ran his “bear cam,” Dancer would trail right behind Buggy One like a loyal hound. The media loved it, and the man and bear gained an international following. Then, after the 2005 season, Frontiers North leased Buggy One to Polar Bears International. Dennis was out. Only so many vehicles are allowed on the tundra, and, given the urgency of the climate crisis, Dennis—this feral Lebowski of a man, throwing the occasional sausage to the dancing polar bear behind him—did not seem to be leveraging that access in a productive or meaningful way. His audience was small. He was off-message. As Robert Buchanan put it to me, “His webcam didn’t have much of a consumer franchise.”

Polar Bears International overhauled Buggy One again, rebuilding its interior so that, in a matter of minutes, it can be transformed into a mobile television studio. Now during bear season PBI and its partners fly in a different panel of polar bear and climate specialists every week and broadcast live chats from the tundra to schoolkids and college classrooms, or to jam-packed special events at zoos. PBI has branded these brief talk-show-style programs Tundra Connections.

I felt bad for Dennis. I’d heard he could be a disagreeable man, but, still, he’d lost his pet project. And he felt something else was being lost, too. “People come up here now with a lump in their throat because they think this bear is doomed,” he told me. “Not for the joy of being with a bear, and seeing a bear in the wild. That’s secondary now.” The animal was being diminished, disparaged. He couldn’t conceive of the need to grease a wild animal into a sympathetic environmental “franchise,” just as, thirty years earlier, people in Churchill couldn’t understand why National Geographic felt obligated to frame the bear as a cage-rattling monster. It was as though, the closer you were to the actual bears, the harder they were to square with any one story—even, in the case of climate change, with the truth.

—

E
XTINCTION IS NOT AN EASY IDEA
to get your head around. Centuries ago, as the first colonists hacked away at the wilderness of the eastern seaboard, they sometimes noticed that the deer or wolves they were encroaching on and killing disappeared rapidly from the immediate area. But the possibility that a species could be annihilated totally, everywhere, was literally inconceivable: it occurred to almost no one.

Partly, this had to do with the way people imagined America. In such an infinite-seeming space, brimming with wild things, surely there’d always be somewhere else for these displaced animals to go. But it also had to do with how people imagined nature. All species were believed to be part of a “Great Chain of Being”—a sturdy hierarchy into which God had ordered and fixed all living things, from bugs and slugs all the way up to angels. The idea that any part of God’s perfect chain could be destroyed was both illogical and sacrilegious. “Such is the economy of nature,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.” I was finding a vestige of this idea around Churchill—the attitude that, as long as the change in the climate was natural, it couldn’t threaten the bears. Nature, Jefferson argued, is not in the business of driving its own animals extinct.

Jefferson was writing in the early 1780s,
in a book called
Notes on the State of Virginia
. He was defending his decision to include the mammoth in a preceding list of contemporary American animals, even though no one had encountered a mammoth alive. Mammoth fossils—one-pound teeth and femurs larger than my daughter—had started to be unearthed nearly a hundred years earlier, first in upstate New York and later from an area in Kentucky dubbed Big Bone Lick. Confronted with mammoth fossils, Jefferson, like others, saw no reason to believe that herds of these giant animals weren’t still grazing across the “unexplored and undisturbed” interior of the continent. “Our entire ignorance of the immense country to the West and North-West, and of its contents, does not authorise us to say what it does not contain,” he argued. Years later, he’d advise Lewis and Clark to keep their eyes peeled for these monsters. Americans had begun calling the mammoth the American Incognitum, Latin for “unknown.”

Jefferson makes a big deal of the Incognitum in
Notes on the State of Virginia
. He spends several pages waxing about the animal’s hugeness and fussily discrediting claims that the bones being dug up are actually from less impressive, more common animals. He sounds defensive—petty, even. And I came to understand it’s because the argument Jefferson was trying to settle wasn’t just about Incognitums. He was marshaling the mammoth forward as a symbol, a stirring icon that—not unlike the polar bear today—might have the power to change public opinion about a critical issue of his time.

Jefferson was trying to debunk the Theory of American Degeneracy, which had been worked up several years earlier by the revered Enlightenment writer and natural historian, Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon. Count Buffon argued that the animal life of the New World was smaller, weaker, and less spectacular than that of the Old World. Not only were there fewer species in America—less of a diversity of life—but individual animals there were smaller than their counterparts in Europe: they were “degenerate” versions. Buffon himself had never been to America, it turns out, so he plucked measurements to support his claims from the accounts of travelers, who weren’t always reliable. (At one point in his book
Natural History,
Buffon repeats a claim that the region around Hudson Bay was populated by pygmies, winged serpents, and savages with backward-bending knees.)

The degeneracy theory turned on a question of climate. Buffon believed that species could attain their ideal forms only in a warm climate. He imagined America as a humid stew of swamps and uncultivated wildness; he believed its landmass had only recently emerged from under the sea and was still drying out. The continent, he wrote, is “crisscrossed by old trees laden with parasitic plants, lichens, [and] fungi, the impure fruits of corruption.” Eventually, Buffon concluded that even lines of domesticated animals brought to America from Europe gradually shrank and degenerated. The dogs in America were “absolutely dumb.” The sheep didn’t taste as delicious.

Others picked up on Buffon’s theory. Soon the fact that America’s birds or squirrels were smaller than Europe’s became a stand-in for the irredeemable smallness of everything else in America. The critiques became snider and snobbier, and strayed further from Buffon’s original quantitative claims. (“A stupid imbecility is the fundamental disposition of all Americans,” one writer noted of the Indians.) Soon champions of degeneracy were claiming that there was something so vexingly degenerate about America that Europeans who immigrated there would have inferior kids—that their bloodlines would degenerate just like the livestock’s. They noted America’s conspicuous lack of great men. Europe had produced Socrates, Copernicus, and so on. But, as one writer pointed out, “Through the whole extent of America there had never appeared a philosopher, an artist, a man of learning whose name had found a place in the history of science or whose talents have been of any use to others.”

As ridiculous as it might sound, the degeneracy idea gained enough traction that it threatened to undercut America’s standing in the world. Confidence in the new American nation was already shaky. Europeans doubted whether the crowd of rowdy idealists we now call the Founding Fathers could hold the whole project together. Buffon’s degeneracy theory now gave an empirical basis for those doubts. It made America look like an inherently bad bet, and might dissuade already skeptical nations from loaning the United States money. In short, this wasn’t just a fight about their foxes being bigger than our foxes. Something had to be done. Thomas Jefferson stepped up.

It’s easy to see why the degeneracy myth rankled a man like Jefferson. Jefferson was almost unbearably left-brained, a stickler for precise and provable facts. He recorded the daily weather for forty-four years and measured his own walking speed (four miles and 264 yards per hour). He also appears to have been thin-skinned and a little vindictive. At the Continental Congress, as delegates slashed sections from his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he sulked in his chair, looking wounded; Benjamin Franklin tried to loosen up his friend by muttering little jokes under his breath. (Jefferson felt so hurt by how the congress had “mangled” his writing that he later issued a kind of director’s cut of the Declaration to his friends, with all his original text restored.) That Buffon and his followers were passing off their bunkum as science would have infuriated him as an empiricist as well as a patriot.

In an excellent book about the episode, biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin explains that disproving Buffon became “one of Jefferson’s great obsessions”—and one that would escalate, to the point of absurdity, through some of the most otherwise productive years of his life. Jefferson started sensibly enough, by attacking the credibility of Buffon’s data and gathering data of his own. (It became a national project. Ben Franklin helped out, as did James Madison, who sent a letter to Jefferson reporting the dimensions of a particular weasel. Madison’s letter was detailed, down to the “distance between the anus and the vulva.”) But before long, Jefferson’s counteroffensive became less straitlaced. Buffon had written that America had no panthers, only smaller and less impressive cougars. Jefferson wanted to show the count that America
did
have panthers, and that American panthers were very formidable. So, en route to France, where he was going to serve as ambassador, Jefferson impulsively bought a panther skin and took it with him, to deliver to Buffon and prove his point. The Frenchman wrote Jefferson to thank him for the gift. But he referred to it as a “cougar” skin, not a “panther” skin. Buffon did promise to correct the mistake in a future edition of
his book—not the theory of degeneracy as a whole, just the panther bit. Nevertheless, Jefferson could be found bragging triumphantly about this nitpicky panther comeuppance in a letter to a friend forty years later.