99% Invisible - 91- Wild Ones Live

Episode Date: October 15, 2013

We have one cardinal rule on 99% Invisible: No cardinals. Meaning, we deal with the built world, not the natural world. So, when I read Jon Mooallem’s brilliant book, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. 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 Isabel 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 talk to this idea of the band creating a soundtrack writing the book, they concocted this idea of the band creating a soundtrack to the book, and the result was an extended EP called Wild Ones. 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 2 %, 1 nd 2 nd 2 nd 2 nd 2 nd 2 nd

2 nd 2 nd 2 nd 2 nd 2 nd 2 nd 2 nd 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. The It happens every summer. Small turtles called Diamondback Tarotans 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 airport's runways to get their runway for L. Sometimes there's so many turtles on the move at 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 man anchored in the Caribbean wrote about being kept awake 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 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 endangered 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 in Rome.

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 as they're 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 I. Last winter, I was in Hawaii, and I saw three sea turtles,

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 a buffalo went at it, with the desperation and despair of punching against the green locomotive cars, just as blind madness changed directed after having

trains thrown off the track twice a week, conductors learned to have a very decided respect for the idiosyncrasies of the buffalo. This man's name was William Temple Horneday. He was a bombastic midwesterner with an elaborate mustache. Horneday was head-taxidermist 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, we climbed to top the carcass and popped open a bass ale.

Once he trapped in a rangatang, named it Little Man, and 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 for 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 I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy

I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la One day, he shot 25 buffalo in Montana and he built the best looking ones into an exhibit at the museum. He gathered them around a thick, watering hole, looking for lorne. 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 if 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 Hornet Day stood up for all of them, and micons like the Grizzly, to lowlier, less majestic things, like the squirrel. A live squirrel in a tree is poetry in motion.

We ask every American to let the hand to stay the silver tail. There was really only one animal on the continent that Hornetay wasn't worried about. It would seem 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 North! It's not very probable that the Polar Bear will ever be exterminated by man. That's Hornet A writing in 1914. Back then, no one could have imagined a 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 and 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 Bearer, and a squad of bear patrol officers will come chase the animals back onto the tundra and their trucks. Bearers 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. Crowds of tourists come out to watch these bear lifts and I went to one myself. There was something just a little ceremonial about the bear lift I went to. How the uniformed wildlife officers 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 fly away. All of a sudden the helicopters 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, air lifting 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 parygrine falcons were especially made receptacle they called the Cocholation House, coaxed the bird named Beercan, 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 we're 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. Non-agodes, humanity, strapping on the proverbberal population now, again and again and again. Consider the story of George and Tex. The late 1970s, there were 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 zookeeper's living room, and having never seen another 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 Tex 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 pen, and moved in as Texas companion. They'd forge together, build a nest, and they'd dance. George, during deep knee bends and springing up with thorns out like wings, He'd wook, then holler, come on, text, come on, come on,

Come on, text, and soon, they'd be dancing together just like wild cranes do during courtship. This would get Tex aroused, and it just the right moment to assistance would rush out from a hiding place an artificially inseminator with cranes even. George did all this for three years, living with texts for months at a time because the eggs she kept laying were infertile. 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 dance, they dance, and they dance, and they 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, crangy, proud parents of Chick. George named the Chick-ih-Wiz. By now, G-Wiz has 44 grandchildren and great grandchildren. Today, there are more woping grains in the wild than there have been in almost a hundred years. William Temple Horned Day, 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 Horneday'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 Horniday, 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 butchers of the Great West have stopped killing the buffalo. All the buffalo are dead. Hello, my name is William Temple, please know I tried, I tried dear sir I write this letter to you, relevant Give the devil his doom. Dear, sir, I am happy not to be alive To see what you have to say dear sir, I have protected them now to thee. Highest degree, dear Son, I have now stopped the killing, they're all gone We're here for you to see I'm giving them a home. Please keep them from home.

I am dust and bone. You can move faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than faster than can move faster than faster than the wild ones can I'll give now I am the stand-up, you can do faster than of Of course Hornet Ed written that pessimistic letter in 1887 when he was still just a young taxidermist. 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'd turn bitter to solution. I tried to inject 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 in the other direction. In the direction of more being, not less. But that happens in Cremenoi 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. The 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, talking the eggs of the next generation into the sand. And we're like the airplanes soon, because we have chains. We've changed into something that Hornetay 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 are then partying like a shiny metallic scene. So this tiny tribe of turtles in Pasquim. I get it. It looks funny in the present, but squint into the hazy panorama of history and 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 I'm gonna love you, I'm gonna love you I'm gonna love you, I'm gonna love you

Thank you guys for my great love I'm gonna love you, I'm gonna love you Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, text written by John Moelleum, music by Black Prairie. Black Prairie is Jenny Conley Driesos on accordion invocals. Chris Funk on Banjo Dobro on a harp and vocals. John Moin on drums and vocals. John Newfeld on drums and vocals, John Newfeld on guitar and vocals, Nate Query on bass, and Anelisa Tornfeld on Fiddling Vocals. Their recording engineer is Rich Hip.

That's 99% Invisible for this week, the show is Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. We are a project of KLW-991.7 local public radio in in San Francisco in the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars. Sam Greensman tweets at Sam listens. We have links to all things Wild Ones at our website, it'sepia.org Radio Tepia from PRX