99% Invisible - 146- Mooallempalooza

Episode Date: December 31, 2014

As you probably know, 99% Invisible is a show about the built world, about things manufactured by humans. We don’t tend to do stories about animals or nature. But our friend Jon Mooallem writes brilliant stories about the weird interactions between animals and humans, interactions that … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. During this holiday season, we have a special episode with two stories from one of my favorite writers, John Mualm. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine and also a writer at large for pop-up magazine, and we're lucky to have had him on the show a few times. The first story is about the origin of the teddy bear, and it would be successor. And we also have this encore presentation of Wild One's Live, The Song, and Story Extravaganza that's probably my favorite thing that we broadcast,

and it deserves to be listened to numerous times. Here we go. It's totally unfair. Hydrox Cookies came out in 1908. Hydrox cookies came out in 1908. Oreos didn't show up until 4 years later, but it didn't matter. Hydrox could never shake the image of being a knockoff, and also ran. Hydrox lovers would champion its 10 year cream filling, vegetarians would praise them for being cruelty free while America's favorite cookie the Oreo contained animal art until the mid 90s. As a consumer product, it's just not up to you.

Sometimes you're deemed the mighty transformer. And sometimes you're the loathsome go bot. One shall stand and one shall fall. It's capricious who wins. Swiss cake roll versus ho ho. swizzler versus red wine. Maybe yours was the first family on the block with the technologically superior beta max player, only to be overwhelmed by the mediocre VHS tape. Sometimes it doesn't make any sense at all.

But sometimes it does. I'm John Moalum. John is a writer for the New York Times magazine and a writer for Pop-Up Magazine, the live magazine in San Francisco where this story first appeared. Right, so it's 1902 and theodore Roosevelt is president and he decides to vacation in a town called Smeads in the Mississippi Woods where he can hunt black bear. He's a big outdoorsman, big hunter and this hunting trip became kind of a famous story. Basically, he had spent a few days hunting

and I don't think they even saw a single bear. They definitely didn't get to shoot it any. And then one morning, the dogs get the scent of a bear and they follow it down into this really witty place where the president's guide says, you know what, don't even bother going in there and troubling yourself. I'll go in and I'll flush the bear out.

You just stay here and I'll flush it right to you. So, Roosevelt waits and waits, but then he gets bored and decides to go off and eat lunch. Eventually, the dogs do corner the bear and the guy not really knowing what to do, leaps off his horse, cracks the bear over the head with the butt of his rifle, knocks it unconscious or send me unconscious and ties it to a tree, and then starts blowing away on his bugle, trying to call Roosevelt back so that the president can be the one by the honor of shooting it. Roosevelt hears the vehicle and makes his way back to the hunting party. And what he finds is this bearer, it's a female bearer, it weighs about 235 pounds and it's tied to a tree. It's still semi-conscious, it's

injured, it looks a little mangy, it's actually probably about half as heavy and big as it should be, but there's been a real drought going on in the area. The bear looks pathetic, and Roosevelt takes pity on it. He decides that it's unsportsman-like to shoot this thing. He's not going to do it, and he doesn't want anyone else to do it either. So he lowers his gun, and in this sort of merciful moment is, you know, word of this spreads and a political cartoonist draws a cartoon of the moment of him, you know, showing the bear this mercy. And the way the cartoonist draws the bear is almost like a little Labrador puppy or a golden retriever puppy. It's sort of on its butt and its hind legs.

And it's got these big round perked up ears, almost like Mickey Mouse and these wide eyes, and it's staring at the president waiting to see what its fate will be. The cartoon was called Drawing the Line in Mississippi, and from that basically spawned the teddy bear. This adorable little bear in the cartoon was turned into a three-dimensional plush toy. The very first teddy bear was either made by a German company called Steve, or a Brooklyn toy store owner, depending on who you ask. And they name it after Theodore Roosevelt. They call it Teddy's Bear. It's a huge sensation.

And it's actually more popular than Baby Dolls, which freaks everyone out a little bit. You know why should their children be playing with bears and not dolls? It's a little savage. And within a few years, I think Steve is producing close to a million teddy bears a year and shipping them to the US. But it was considered so bizarre that kids would play with a stuff bear that people just assumed it was a novelty and as soon as Roosevelt left office no one would want them anymore. At this time the whole idea of mass produced toys was also really new so the toy industry wanted to kind of capitalize on its rally and keep it going.

So it was really looking for whatever was going to be the next cuddly play thing that American kids were going to want. Although it had no idea what that might be. So fast forward in 1909 and Roosevelt's term is about up and the president elect is Roosevelt's handpicked successor William Howard Taft. In that January 1909 Taft is in Atlanta. He's trying to woo the South, try to convince him that his administration is gonna take them seriously as a constituency. And he's the guest of honor at this banquet. In the team of commerce in Atlanta decides

it's going to serve him the truest, most unpretentious southern dish around. It's something that a writer of the time, I found this little book about southern food from the time, calls it the Christmas goose of the Epicurian Negro. The meal was possum and taters. And what it was was an opossum would be roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes and then presented whole

on a platter with its head on, its tail on, and often you'd get a smaller little sweet potato cram between the animal's teeth, 50 teeth. By the way, 50 teeth is apparently the most teeth of any North American mammal, which is fascinating. In the end, the one that they brought to Taff's table weighed 18 pounds. All of a sudden, the orchestra strikes up and the guests burst into song. Suddenly, Taff is presented with a surprise gift, and it's a small, stuffed,

apostantoid. And this is a brand new invention that some local tap supporters are trying to position as William Tap's presidency's answer to the teddy bear. They're calling it the Billy Possum. Already there was a company set up called the Georgia Billy Possum Company. According to one account, within 24 hours of that banquet, there are already deals being brokered for Billy Possums with distributors across the country. In covering the banquet, the LA Times announced that the Teddy Bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with Billy Possum's. So, from then on, a bit of Possum Mania started.

There were Billy Possum postcards, Billy Possum pins, Billy Possum pictures for your cream when you had coffee. There was a ragtime tune called Possum the latest craze and as Taft traveled around the south some people actually started giving him live oppossums and cages when he would make public appearances sort of handing them over like they were floral with kids. Soon Billy Possums were in toy stores from New York to San Francisco. Because real apostles weren't actually that common in cities then and no one really knew what they were. A toy store in Brooklyn ran an in-store promotion with a live captive of Possum that they could show off to kids so the kids could familiarize

themselves with what this new animal they were going to be best friends with was. I found an advertisement for the store that read, do not let it be said that any man, woman, or child, and Brooklyn has not seen the cute little animal, whose name is mentioned more in all parts of the world today than any other. Previously, there had been poems and newspapers sort of mourning the passing of the dolls and how sad it was

that these teddy bears were coming into nurseries and fanquishing them. And now there are poems in newspapers about Billy Possum's displacing teddy bears. But since you probably never heard of a Billy Possum, you can guess what comes next. It was a total flop, and the Billy Possum was forgotten and almost entirely out of stores within a couple of months. So in other words, the Billy Possum never even made almost entirely out of stores within a couple of months. So in other words, the Billy Possum never even made it to see Christmas time, which is a special kind of tragedy for Toy.

There are several possible explanations as to why the Billy Possum never took off. The first, and probably what you're thinking right now, is this, O Possums are ugly and nobody likes them. But it was also the dawn of the mechanical toy, and even some teddy bears that evolved into wind up animatrons. There was a French-made teddy bear that, quote, winds up and is calculated to indulge in

a number of ludicrous summer salts. How could a limp stuffed Billy Possum compete with that? But John Moilum argues that at its heart, the acceptance of Teddy Bear and the rejection of the Lee Possum comes down to their origin stories. In the story that was told about Roosevelt and this bear, it was a very kind of tender moment where Roosevelt was showing the bear mercy and when you looked at that cartoon the way the bear was drawn, it looked like something that you would want to just sweep up into your arms and take care of and that was vulnerable and that needed your help. It looked like a teddy bear as we know it, although no one knew it at the time. The story with Taft, it didn't give it anything

else. Taft ate his apostle for supper and he ate a lot of it and he ate so much that after his first several helping, a doctor seated nearby apparently passed him a note suggesting that it might be a good idea if he slowed down a little. Taft even bragged to reporters the next day about how much possum he consumed. Well, I like a possum, and I ate very heartily of it last night, and it did not disturb in the slightest my digestion or my sleep. The possum was vulnerable, I guess, to split out on a bed of taters, but you're not exactly rooting for it.

I started feeling really bad for Taft, who, you know, the more I read a little bit about him, he was this totally colorless politician, and he didn't actually even want to be president by some accounts. He was sort of strong armed into it by Roosevelt, and he never really measured up to Roosevelt's charisma and charm. I mean, Roosevelt was the kind of guy who,

you know, no matter what he did, history seemed eager to glorify him for it. Case in point, the messed up thing about the famous story of Teddy's bear on that hunting trip in Mississippi isn't even the whole truth. You have to remember that Roosevelt was a hunter. He was there to hunt bears. He wasn't a PETA activist or something like this. While he did show the bear mercy, it was a very particular kind of mercy. After

he refused to shoot it, he said, put it out of its misery. And then one of his hunting buddies came in and slipped the bear's neck open with a knife. They carried the bear's body back to camp over the back of a horse, and they basically ate off it for the next several days. And on the last night of their trip, they finished it off, they roasted its paws, and I could you not bathe the paws with a side of possumentators. So that's why you will never cuddle up with a billy possum. Just like you will never watch a beta max tape, or travel to gobitron with leader one, and you will never again dunk a Hydrox

cookie. Manimus Hydrox Cookies. They were really tasty. We have one cardinal rule on 99% invisible. No cardinals, meaning we don't deal with the natural world, only the built world. So when I read John Mwellen's brilliant book called Wild Ones, a sometimes dismaying,

weirdly reassuring story about looking at people, looking at animals in America, I didn't think I'd ever do an episode of 99% of visible about it. I just read it for fun. But then I saw John perform stories from the book Live with musical accompaniment, and I thought, I need to put this on the radio. I still call this radio. Anyway, what you need to know about Wild Ones is that it isn't a book about nature.

It's a book about how we fit nature into our modern lives. Wild Ones is about the cutesy stuffed animals, the eco tours, and the Byzantine methods of conservation that evolve when our experience with wildlife goes from something natural to something designed. Human animal interaction has become a designed experience, and the story of that transition, as the title of the book suggests, is sometimes dismayed, and also weirdly reassuring. John Mwellem is friends with the band Black Prairie, and as he was writing the book, they can cock to this idea of the band creating a soundtrack to the book, and the result was an extended EP called Wild Wands. A musical score for the things you might see in your head when you reflect on certain characters and incidents that you read in the book. The writer and the band then went on a short

tour with the song and story extravaganza that I'm going to play for you today. When I saw them perform this live in San Francisco, I freaked out it was so good and I costed them in the dressing room and said, you have to let me share this with my audience. So here it is. And here we go. 2 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1 %, 1, 2%, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful.

I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you.

I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. I'm so glad I was able to see you. It It happens every summer. Small turtles called Diamondback Terrapins skitter out of the water around JFK airport

in New York. They start moving west. They're heading for a patch of sand where they like to lay their eggs, and they have to cross over one of the airports runways to get there. Runway 4L. Sometimes, there's so many turtles on the move it wants that the control tower has to delay flights. Now the press loves doing stories about how funny this is, how a fleet of giant airplanes can be held up by just a few tiny turtles. But hold that picture in your mind and think about the Caribbean Sea in 1492. There were almost a billion sea turtles living in it back then.

Columbus's men anchored in the Caribbean, wrote about being kept to wake at night by the thwacking of so many turtle shells against the sides of their ship. Notice how that scene is the exact opposite of the scene at JFK. It's not a fleet of giant airplanes being held up by a few tiny turtles. It's a giant fleet of turtles bombarding just a few relatively tiny ships. So I wrote this book about people and wild animals in America and it only really started because I wanted to show my daughter in danger species in the wild before they disappeared. Like a lot of people I think, I felt this pain. I knew that all around us, beautiful parts of the world are expiring.

And I also knew that people in the future, they might not even notice. For them, a world without whales or wilderness, might feel normal. I wanted to counteract that forgetting that's bound to take hold over time. This forgetting has a name. Scientists call it shifting baselines syndrome. It means that all of us accept the version of the world we inherit as normal. Over the years we watch forests get locked or animals disappear, but when the next generation comes along, they accept

that depleted version of nature is their normal. It's hard to zoom out, really feel the changes that are stacking up across the generations. I can't even imagine what an ocean filled with a billion sea turtles unless feel like. Last winter, I was in Hawaii, and I saw three seaterals, and I flipped the f*** out. I felt like I was in Eden. It wasn't so long ago though that America was a kind of eat when people could be dwarfed and engulfed by wild animals in a way that feels almost impossible now. In the late 1800s, trains with sometimes had to stop for four or five hours as streams of buffalo moved across the tracks.

Occasionally, a stampede would batter into the side of a train derailing it. A witness described one of these scenes, 1871 in Kansas. Each individual of Buffalo went at it with a desperation and despair of punching against between local boat cars, just as blind madness chants directed after having dreams thrown off the track twice a one-week conductors learned to have a very decided respect for the inuosyncrasies of the Buffalo. This man's name was William Temple Horneday. He was a fantastic midwesterner with an elaborate mustache. Horn today was head

taxi-dermist at the Smithsonian and he traveled the globe, hunting exotic animals and stuffing them for the museum. In India, after he took down an elephant, climbed to top the carcass and popped open a bass ale. Once he trapped in a rangatang, named it Little Man, gave it to Andrew Carnegie as a pet. It sounds weird, but for Hornetay, killing these animals was a kind of conservation. He believed by stuffing them, he was preserving endangered species and for the future generations that might not know them after they were gone. Through taxidermy, he could make them immortal. In 1886, Horneday looked west and saw that Americans were killing so many buffaloes,

so rapidly that the prairie was almost empty. He figured there were maybe less than 300 buffalo left in the wild. And so he did what he thought was the most helpful and logical thing. He lit out from Montana to kill several dozen of them. ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la born. But from there, his thinking evolved. He realized he was basically just a funeral director, embalming the species that America was exterminating. It occurred to him. What have we actually tried to keep these animals alive? And so he became one of America's first real wildlife conservationists, an activist, a lobbyist, a celebrity. America was killing every conceivable kind of animal in their way, and Hornetay stood

up for all of them, and mycons like the grizzly, to lollier, less majestic things, like the squirrel. A life squirrel to tree is poetry and motion. We asked every American to let the hand to say the silver tail. There was really only one animal on the continent that Hornetay wasn't worried about. It was seemed too mighty to be brought down by men with guns, and it lived in a cold and brutal wilderness that men couldn't possibly take over.

Polar Bear was the king of the frozen Earth. It's not very probable that the polar bear will ever be exterminated by man. That's Hornetay, writing in 1914. Back then, no one could have imagined the problem as abstract as climate change. But think about how quickly climate change has changed the polar bear's reputation in our minds. It's gone from bloodthirsty man killer to delicate drowning victim. 200 years ago, Arctic explorers wrote about polar bears leaping into their boats and trying to eat them, even if they lit the bear on fire.

But recently, when I went to the tiny northern town that calls itself the polar bear a capital of the world, Martha Stewart had just arrived to film the animals for her daytime show on the Hallmark channel. The town is called Churchill Manitoba. It's on the edge of Hudson Bay. In every fall, right before the bay freezes over, Churchill gets overrun with about 900 polar bears and 10,000 polar bear tourists. Bears routinely wander into town, they like hanging out at the elementary school, especially. Folks can call 675 Bear and a squad of bear patrol officers will come chase the animals back onto the tundra and their trups. Bears that won't budge are tranquilized and shipped out to a quonset hunt near the airport.

Once this so-called polar bear jail fills up, each animal is drugged again and airlifted one at a time to an area north of town. and I went to one myself. There was something just a little ceremonial about the bear lift I went to. How the uniformed wildlife officer has arranged the sleeping bear on a net at the center of the crowd. How they tucked its paws carefully across its chest like some drunken uncle after Thanksgiving dinner. It was so careful, beautiful,

and confusing. A couple of people cried. It was like the opposite of an animal sacrifice, a ritual to save the bearer, to show how far out of our way we'd go not to kill it. I stood there and watched, and as I did, Martha Stewart stood next to me. Her crew was there filming everything. Honestly, it's a breathtaking thing to watch, a polar bear flying away. All of a sudden the helicopter started to churn. The edges of the net lifted. The furry shape inside contracted to you

and then the entire package was off the ground. The helicopter climbed toward a cloud bank. The bear twirling slightly underneath it like a teethe bag. And then finally the polar bear was gone. Yeah, I know, airlifting polar bears. Strange, no one could have imagined it would come to this. But the way we help animals now has evolved into a surreal kind of performance art. We carry migrating salmanners across busy highways. We monitor pygmy rabbits with drones. At Cornell, scientists breeding endangered peregrine falcons

were especially made receptacle. They called the Coculation Hats, coaxed a bird named Burecane, to ejaculate on their heads several times a day every day for much of the 1970s. See, this is another baseline that shifts over time. The lengths were willing to go. Each generation does what would have looked like fighting for a preposterous lost cause to the one before.

And then each generation comes along anew and does a little bit more than that. And on it goes, humanity is strapping on the proverbial population now. Again, and again, and again. Consider the story of George and Tex. In the late 1970s there only a handful of looping cranes left in the wild, and also a small number at a government lab in Maryland. Scientists there were doing their best to ring as many new offspring as they could from those captive birds.

But the lab had one problem child, a female crane named Tex. As a newborn Tex had been raised in a cardboard box in the zookeepers living room and having never seen another crane crane she imprinted on the one animal she did see the zookeeper. Basically she wound up sexually attracted to people and not other cranes. The scientists kept trying to pair a text off but text wasn't interested. She wanted a man and specifically a man who looked like her old zookeeper, a dark-haired white man, a medium-build. Now, there was a young crane conservationist named George Archibald, and George happened

to be a dark-haired white man, a medium-build. He took text to rural Wisconsin, put a mattress in her tent, and moved in as Texas companion. They'd forge together, build a S, and they'd dance. George doing deep knee bends and springing up with thorns out like wing. He'd wook, Benholler, come on text, come on, come on text, and soon they'd be dancing together just like wild cranes do during courtship. This would get texts aroused and it just the right moment to assistance would rush out from a hiding place and artificially inseminator with cranes even. Living with text for months at a time because the eggs she kept laying were in fertile. The man in crane would start out after dawn, they'd go for a walk, and they'd dance.

They'd dance, and they'd dance, and they'd dance. George didn't enjoy any of this. He was miserable, actually miserable, but in the spring of 1983, text finally laid an egg that hatched, and George was right there when it did. He was invited on the tonight show to celebrate one headline read, man, crane, proud parents of Chick. George named the Chick-G-Wiz. By now, G-Wiz has 44 grandchildren and great grandchildren. Today, there are more whooping grains in the wild than there have been in almost a hundred years. William Temple Ornidae, the taxidermist, died in 1937. At his funeral, buglers from the local Boy Scout troop surrounded the coffin and played

home on the range. Twenty years later, workers at the Smithsonian were dismantling Hornet A's buffalo exhibit, the one he built after the hunt in Montana, the one he thought would last forever. They found a rusty box buried in the fake ground. Inside was a letter. It was from Hornet A, written to his future successor at the museum. Dear sir, what I am Dustin Ashes, I beg you to protect these specimens from the deterioration of destruction.

At last, the game boosters of the Great West have stopped killing the Buffalo. All the Buffalo are dead. I tried, I tried, dear sir I write this letter to you, Reload, give the devil his doom Dear sir, I am happy not to be alive, to see you have to see. Dear sir, I have prepared for the worst, and their beauty, kill by, was true. Dear Son, I have protected them now to thee, high as debris of dear sin, I have now stopped the killing. They're all gone, here for you to soon. ...to the sea. I'll give them a home.

Please keep them a home. I am dust and bone, you can move faster than faster than wild ones can Oh Oh Please keep them from home, home give them a heart. I understand what you can do faster than, As do them while one is here Of course, Hornet had written that pessimistic letter in 1887 when he was still just a young taxi dermist. Turns out he was wrong, the buffalo were not all dead, and in the years to come, he actually played a big role in helping to save them. Lots of other species too. But it was hard for him to focus on those successes. He'd lost so many more battles than he wanted.

By the end of his life, he turned bitter to solution. I tried to eject the courage into the hearts of men, but today, I think that speaking generally, civilized man is an unmitigated ass. Like all of us, his imagination was hopelessly trapped in its own moment, its own lifetime. You can only see the world through the tiny keyhole of the present. So where does that leave us then, in our present? Maybe all any one of us can do is push against the baseline as it shifts. We can be a tiny counterweight. We weigh almost nothing.

The generation after generation that weight adds up. Sometimes in some places the baseline starts to shift from the other direction, in the direction of more being, not less. But that happens in Cremenore 2 and it can be hard to notice. So picture that scene at JFK again, all those turtles. When Hornet it was born, they were close to extinction, being hunted because they tasted so good and soup. We're like those turtles, a race of stubborn little things that barely notices as the wilderness it migrates through, fills up with villages and lights, and swells into an

airport runway. Just keep migrating across it anyway, tucking the eggs of the next generation into the sand. And we're like the airplanes too, because we have chains. We've changed into something that Horniday couldn't ever imagine, species that can at least try to slow down, try to stop. I like to think about those airplanes powering down, the lines of them parting like a shiny metallic sea. So this tiny tribe of turtles can pass through.

I get it, it looks funny in the present, but squint into the hazy panorama of history. Those airplanes idling in place, that little moment of not moving forward, looks unmistakably to me like progress La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la That's John Fowellum, we're up to take a break if you're back, thanks so much. That was Wild One's Life, text written by John Moellum, music by Black Prairie. Black Prairie is Jenny Conley Driesos on accordion and vocals. Chris Funk on Banjo Dobro on a harp and vocals. John Moellon on drums and vocals.

John Newfeld on guitar and vocals. Nate Query on bass. An Analyza Tornfeld on Fiddling vocals. Their recording engineer is Rich Hip. Black Prairie has a new-ish album called Fortune that I know you'll like, and Annalisa from the band has an upcoming solo record called The Number 8 that you can pre-order online, and I'm going to have a link to that on our website 99pi.org. 99% invisible is Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle,

Avery Troubleman, and me Roman Mars. It's been a really spectacular year for us at the show. Thank you so much for your enthusiasm and support. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, K-A-L-W and San Francisco, and produced under the offices of Arksite, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and hang out with other people who like this show on Facebook. All of us at 99pi are on Twitter, please follow us there.

We have a great Tumblr, but you're always welcome at our place at 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.