Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (6 page)

After he arrived in Paris, it took Jefferson nearly a year to get a face-to-face meeting with his adversary. When Jefferson finally had an opportunity to confront Buffon, at a dinner the count hosted, he was cut off; Buffon handed him a new manuscript, saying, “When Mr. Jefferson shall have read this, he will be perfectly satisfied that I am right.” Later, over dinner, Buffon said something flippant about American deer, rousing Jefferson to insist that American deer are awesome and have horns that are two feet long. Buffon also let slip that he didn’t believe in moose. He presumed this allegedly new American species to be merely a form of reindeer that some degenerate American naturalist had incorrectly given a new name. Jefferson spoke up, telling Buffon, as he later recounted it, “The rein deer could walk under the belly of our moose.” Buffon laughed this off. So Thomas Jefferson started issuing a flurry of letters home, pleading for someone in America, anyone, to kill and stuff the largest moose he could find and ship it to him in France.

The moose became a fixation. Dugatkin writes that for the better part of a year, “in the midst of correspondences with James Monroe, George Washington, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin over urgent matters of state, Jefferson found the time to repeatedly write his colleagues—particularly those who liked to hunt—all but begging them to send him a moose.” But the moose that finally arrived in France a year later seems to have been more than a little pathetic. A military captain in Vermont, subcontracted by a former governor of New Hampshire, had finally succeeding in killing a seven-foot-tall moose for Jefferson. But the moose fell deep in the wilderness, twenty miles from the nearest road. A team of men had to clear a path through heavy snow and haul the animal out. The carcass decayed, the skin wasted, and the meat putrefied during the fourteen-day-long trek. It was, the governor wrote to Jefferson, a “very troublesome affair” and he was “much mortified” by the expense. (He included receipts so Jefferson could reimburse him.) The moose’s antlers had to be tossed, so the governor sent along sets of deer, elk, and caribou antlers instead, for Jefferson to affix to the head or mix and match as he saw fit.

Jefferson sent the moose to Buffon. He did his best to talk it up. He swore to the count that, although this moose had gone mostly bald in transit and its remaining fur was now shedding, it definitely had a full and glorious coat when killed. He also apologized for the elk horns, which were on the small side. “I have certainly seen of them which would have weighed five or six times as much,” he insisted.

Ultimately, it’s easy to imagine Thomas Jefferson as an early American George Costanza, a seething nebbish quick to take umbrage but never quite able to respond convincingly. The theory of degeneracy would go away only gradually as, in response, Americans turned that chauvinism on its head and told a more compelling story about themselves. They’d begin celebrating the raw wildness of their country: America as a land full of big and beautiful things, and Americans as a people tied to nature’s rhythms—farming and hunting rather than sitting in European parlors. “Nature,” one writer claimed, “was establishing a system of freedom in America” that Old Europe “could neither comprehend or discern.”

It is impossible to know what impact Jefferson’s moose had on Buffon’s thinking. Not long after receiving it, the Count died.

—

I
N
N
OTES ON THE
S
TATE OF
V
IRGINIA
,
Jefferson compiled the data he’d gathered—measurements and weights of animals in Europe and America—and presented a table of side-by-side comparisons: our 410-pound bear versus their 153.7-pound bear; our 12-pound otter versus their 8.9-pound otter. Having argued, at length, that the American Incognitum shouldn’t be presumed extinct, he put it all by itself, at the top, to give the table a little wow factor.

Notes on the State of Virginia
helped elevate the mammoth into an icon of patriotic pride. The historian Paul Semonin calls the animal “a symbol of overwhelming power in a psychologically insecure society.” Its story hinted at the wonders the new continent might contain. The mammoth was gossiped about at the Continental Congress, and several of the Founding Fathers collected its fossilized teeth. As president, Jefferson made his own paleontological study of the beast, laying out a set of bones on the floor of a room in the White House like a child’s electric train set.

In 1802, during Jefferson’s first term, the first complete mammoth skeleton was mounted in a blockbuster exhibit by the Philadelphia museum owner Charles Willson Peale. “A kind of mammoth fever swept the nation,” as Semonin puts it. A Philadelphia baker made a “Mammoth Bread.” Two butchers sent Jefferson a “Mammoth Veal,” the hindquarter of an especially elephantine, 436-pound calf. (Jefferson declined to eat the veal, which had been shipped long-distance, but praised it as an example of “enlarging the animal volume.”) In Washington, a “Mammoth Eater” shoveled forty-two eggs down his throat in ten minutes. When Peale’s son took the mammoth skeleton on a tour of Europe, the museum hosted a “Mammoth Feast” to send him off. A dozen guests ate at a banquet table under the Incognitum’s rib cage while a pianist played “Yankee Doodle.”

Meanwhile, scientific evidence that the Incognitum was extinct mounted. And in the end, there was no getting around the logical assumption that, if these fossilized animals did still roam the earth, humankind would have stumbled into them by now. It was through the example of the mammoth that the concept of extinction gained credibility, undoing people’s belief in the Great Chain of Being.

Americans, though, were slow to accept that fact—until it, too, was given a more palatable spin. Writers framed the disappearance of the mammoth as a divine blessing on America. Clearly, Americans couldn’t claim dominion over the continent if it were teeming with angry mammoths. And so God had wiped out “this terrible disturber.” The idea of extinction had undermined religious belief in the Great Chain of Being. But now it was reinterpreted to confirm the central myth of a new religion: Americanism. God had purged the mammoth so that the young nation could spread out and absorb the empty continent ahead of it.

This was an extinction America could get behind—evidence of our singular and overpowering status in the world. The likelihood of the polar bear’s extinction tells the same story. But we don’t feel good about it this time.

BILLY POSSUMS

I
n 2007, a fourth-grader at Sobrante Park Elementary in Oakland, California, wrote a letter to the head of the United States Department of the Interior. “My name is Juan Piedra,” he began. “Every morning when I wake up I tell myself how much danger the polar bears are in right now, and how sad I am right now. Imagine if everything was upside down. Please help the polar bears. I am really heart broken. They are feeling badly.”

I found Juan’s letter in an archive of public comments submitted to the government after it announced that it was considering putting the polar bear on the endangered species list. Normally, these decision-making processes are quiet, complicated ordeals, hashed out by bureaucrats and lawyers; calling for comments from the public is a pro forma part of the procedure. But with the polar bear, half a million supportive letters, postcards, and petitions from Americans poured into the Department of the Interior—then the most ever in the Endangered Species Act’s history. Many were handwritten pleas from children to “save the polar bear,” and some offered solutions to climate change, like using ethanol instead of fossil fuels. (A kid named Fritz wrote: “I feel bad about the polar bears. I like polar bears. Everyone can use corn juice for cars. From, Fritz.”) Lots of kids just drew pictures: polar bears wearing life preservers, or stuck on little ice islands, or—in one case—a polar bear drowning and being eaten simultaneously by a shark and a lobster.

The polar bear was, by this time, a pop culture preoccupation—“a shining white symbol of the green movement,” as one television news reporter put it. The mania was sparked in early 2005, when environmental groups, led by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, had first petitioned the Department of the Interior to consider endangered status for the bear, setting the legal procedure in motion. Petitions to list species as endangered are filed all the time. In fact, the Center for Biological Diversity and another group, WildEarth Guardians, would soon be filing them at a combined rate of about three hundred per year—pressuring the federal government to protect all manner of imperiled sturgeon and bats that most environmental groups don’t bother to lobby for. But the Center for Biological Diversity hoped the polar bear might stir up special interest. It could be a landmark case: the first species protected explicitly because of the threat of climate change.

The morning after the center filed its petition, MSNBC splashed a picture of a polar bear across its home page. Then CNN did. A long polar bear blitz began. Over the next several years, public attention to climate change intensified, spurred on by events that often had nothing to do directly with polar bears. The summer of 2005 saw less ice cover in the Arctic than any other summer since satellite monitoring began three decades earlier. In 2006, Al Gore released
An Inconvenient Truth.
Then, in 2007, a high-profile panel of scientists convened by the United Nations released its final, sobering report about the “unequivocal” certainty of climate change and its projected effects. (“This is real, this is real, this is real,” one of the lead authors said, explaining the findings to the press.) But because the problem of climate change was invisible, the media found that polar bears were an easy, adorable means to illustrate these stories—more eye-catching than a smokestack spewing carbon or a glacier crumbling.
Time
magazine ran a photo of a bear on its cover with the headline “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.” Annie Leibovitz photographed Knut, a celebrity polar bear cub at the Berlin Zoo, with Leonardo DiCaprio for the cover of
Vanity Fair
.

The species had become a spokes-species, and no matter what context polar bears appeared in, they symbolized the same thing. It had gotten to the point that, by the end of 2007, New Line Cinema, the makers of the fantasy film
The Golden Compass,
which featured a computer-generated, armored white bear as one of its characters, worked with the World Wildlife Fund to produce public service announcements about climate change using clips from the film. They also donated several hundred thousand dollars to the conservation group. It was as though New Line were paying a karmic licensing fee for the use of a white bear, even though
The Golden Compass
never actually mentioned polar bears and took place in another universe. “This is a very organic partnership for us,” a New Line marketing executive insisted.

This convulsion of polar-bear love may look like an empty craze. But all that visibility, and all those children’s letters, had real, political consequences. Even though the fervor for polar bears wasn’t engineered by the Center for Biological Diversity, they were counting on it as part of a plan they’d laid out in advance. They were using the bear as a trap in a much bigger and longer-running legalistic war of words.

—

I
N THE EARLY 2000S,
environmental attorneys were struggling to force the Bush administration to regulate greenhouse gases. The Bush administration, meanwhile, kept refusing even to acknowledge definitively that those emissions were causing climate change. In 2003, the legal tack that had seemed the most promising—that carbon should be controlled as another kind of pollution under the Clean Air Act—got stalled in the courts. Looking for new angles of attack, two attorneys at the Center for Biological Diversity, Kassie Siegel and Brendan Cummings, turned to the Endangered Species Act.

The Endangered Species Act lays out a program for the conservation of imperiled plant and animal species. It makes it possible to devote money and government workers to their recovery and to set aside and protect land they live on. It bans killing, harassing, or shipping those species across state lines or overseas, and forces government agencies to make sure that their activities—everything from building a new fence to testing bombs—don’t endanger them further.

The government’s decisions about which animals deserve to be on the endangered species list must be based solely on the “best available science”—whatever studies have been conducted that speak to the severity of the threat of their extinction. It wasn’t clear how far listing the polar bear could go toward actually saving the species; some significant steps could be taken under the Endangered Species Act, but it seemed unlikely that any administration would upend America’s entire carbon-based economy to fulfill its technical obligations to the polar bear under the law. But petitioning the Bush administration to rule on whether the polar bear
qualified
for protection would at least confront the government, and the public, with the climate science it had so far managed to duck—a first step to any eventual progress. It was a way to put the government on the spot; the polar bear and the entire Endangered Species Act were being played like pawns in a higher-stakes chess match. In fact, Siegel and Cummings had come up with the strategy several years earlier and had already auditioned other species for the role of climate change victim.

The science of climate change was well understood at the time, but there still weren’t many published studies showing how specific species would be affected—and, for the environmentalists’ strategy to work, the “best available science” the Bush administration was going to be cornered with needed to be ironclad. Siegel and Cummings were left scraping the bottom of the taxonomic barrel. They considered using the Glacier Bay wolf spider, a spider in Alaska. But there was uncertainty as to whether the wolf spider was a distinct species, and whether it therefore qualified for protection. Also, the Glacier Bay wolf spider sounded icky, a public relations nonstarter, unlikely to focus the American public, and not just the courts, on climate change as the case picked up steam.

In 2001, Siegel and Cummings petitioned the government on behalf of the one truly solid case they could find: the Kittlitz’s murrelet, a little-known speckled Alaskan seabird that frequently nests near shrinking glacial ice sheets, and whose population—estimated in the low tens of thousands of birds—may have declined more than 85 percent since 1991. The outcome of the Kittlitz’s murrelet petition was discouraging. The Bush administration didn’t exactly deny the bird endangered status, but it didn’t protect it, either. The Kittlitz’s was deemed “warranted but precluded.” It was shoved through a curious loophole in the law onto a backlog known as “the candidate list.”

The candidate list has a complicated history. The modern Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, by an overwhelming majority of senators and congressmen. It announced itself as a counterforce to the “consequences of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern.” And, although this may sound radical—the United States government pledging to temper the country’s growth—it was treated as feel-good, softball stuff at the time. A law to save animals was a relief from Watergate and Vietnam. Its passage was hardly noted—the
Washington Post, New York Times,
and
Los Angeles Times
each devoted exactly one sentence to it—and President Nixon signed it into law in the doldrums between Christmas and New Year’s.

One historian writes that most in Congress believed the Endangered Species Act was “a largely symbolic effort” to protect only the kinds of species environmentalists call “charismatic megafauna”—grizzlies, whales, bald eagles, and other large, beautiful species that people tend to feel an easy connection with. But the act had been quietly beefed up by idealistic staffers, and was much further-reaching and more powerful than most congressmen took the time to understand. After its passage, there was instantly a lot of buyer’s remorse. (In a famous example, a small fish called the snail darter quickly complicated a dam-building project in Tennessee.) Meanwhile, protection was being sought for obscure birds and skinny little snakes that none of these legislators had ever heard of. Within two years, some twenty-three thousand species had been proposed for endangered status. The Smithsonian pulled together a list of 3,187 plants it considered worthy of protection. The paperwork alone was staggering. The agencies responsible for ruling on those petitions, primarily the Fish and Wildlife Service, soon found ways of brushing them off their desks.

Congress reformed the law several times to make the listing process more functional and fair. It required the government to rule on petitions according to strict timelines, but also set up the candidate list so that, if a particular species needed protection in a hurry, Fish and Wildlife would have the flexibility to deal with that crisis. Designating a species “warranted but precluded” would put it in a temporary holding pen, pausing the clock on its petition deadline, while the agency made progress on its more pressing work. But the workload involved in staving off extinction and managing all of America’s endangered species only grows, and in our new era of conservation reliance, it appears to be open-ended. Especially since the 1990s, the government has used the warranted but precluded category as an indefinite dumping ground.

In 2005, the Center for Biological Diversity found that many candidate species had been waiting around on the list for an average of seventeen years, some of them holdovers from that original list of imperiled plants drawn up by the Smithsonian. Recently, the center and other groups sued the federal government to spring those species from their bureaucratic purgatory and give them full protection. The government settled and will now be slowly reassessing each one’s case. But the settlement didn’t close the warranted-but-precluded loophole. It’s likely only a matter of time before the candidate list starts filling up again.

Around the time I visited Churchill, there were nearly three hundred species on the candidate list. I found a copy of the list and noticed that virtually all the species on it have one thing in common: I’ve never heard of them. There’s the Neosho mucket mussel and the Slabside pearlymussel, the band-rumped storm petrel, spotless crake, relict leopard frog, smalleye shiner, and least chub. The Roy Prairie pocket gopher is one of nine pocket gophers on the list. There are several bats, five kinds of salamanders, nine snails, and four shrimps. There’s the Sonoyta mud turtle and Miami blue butterfly; the Clifton Cave beetle, the Coleman Cave beetle, the Fowler’s Cave beetle, the Indian Grave Point Cave beetle, the Icebox Cave beetle, the Inquirer Cave beetle, the Louisville Cave beetle, the Nobletts Cave beetle, and the Tatum Cave beetle. Also, Stephan’s Riffle beetle. And there are plants, like Hirst’s panic grass and Short’s bladderpod. A Hawaiian plant called the Alani spent fifteen years on the candidate list before it was finally bumped up to endangered status in 1994. Unfortunately, the plant appeared to have gone extinct two years earlier.

At least twenty-four species seem to have gone extinct while waiting around on the candidate list, and I’ve never heard of them, either. They include a fish called the shortnose cisco and lots and lots of species of mussels, including one called the lined pocketbook. In 1982, something called the Valdina Farms salamander, which lived in a single cave in Texas, was deemed warranted but precluded. Five years later, a water agency diverted a river and flooded the cave, wiping it out.

This was the real value of the polar bear, then: its magnetism. It could inspire enough public gushing to make it politically impossible for the Bush administration to dump it quietly onto the candidate list and bury the issue of climate change yet again. The public-relations strategy was also a legal strategy. As the Center for Biological Diversity’s Brendan Cummings put it at the time, “No politician wants to tell their kids, tell their constituency, ‘Yes, I voted to kill the polar bear.’” The Endangered Species Act may say that we, as a nation, are devoted to preventing the extinction of any more species. But we also know that we can’t realistically save everything. And no one cried for the lined pocketbook.

—

W
HY ARE WE DRAWN
to certain wild animals and not others? Can the cultural carrying capacity of a species—its charisma, essentially—be predicted or deconstructed?

That’s the mystery that the Center for Biological Diversity was trying to game in its listing petitions, and that conservation groups have long puzzled over, working to move the public to a particular ecological cause through the story of just the right, sympathetic victim—the bald eagle, which brought attention to DDT in the 1970s; or the spotted owl, which took on the logging industry in the nineties. Why exactly, according to one survey, are 73 percent of Americans willing to block construction of a power plant and pay more for their electricity in order to save mountain lions, but only 48 percent willing to do so to protect a plant called Furbish’s lousewort—especially since, frankly, few of us are likely ever to see a mountain lion or a Furbish’s lousewort whether the power plant is built or not.
*