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Hear UR Season Two Episode 207 De-Extinction by Tom Fleischman

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Hear UR Season Two Episode 207 De-Extinction by Tom Fleischman Hear UR Season Two Episode 207 De-Extinction By Tom Fleischman and Steve Roessner TOM Hear you are... MOTOR OF A BUS, ACCELERATING. VIBRATIONS SHAKING SEATS. SQUEAKS. TIRES AND WATER.MOTOR OF A BUS, ACCELERATING. VIBRATIONS SHAKING SEATS. SQUEAKS. TIRES AND WATER. TOM ...on a bus, heading south-east out of Rochester, New York. It’s a rainy Sunday morning in February, and there’s a major winter storm rolling in. BUS AUDIO OUT WEATHER FORECAST AUDIO IN/OUT BUS AUDIO RESUMES But you, and your fellow travelers--the production team for this season of Hear UR--are determined to complete the trip before the weather turns severe. Your destination, a small village in Wyoming County, where the 19th-century United States still resides. EXTERIOR SOUNDS OF THE TOWN. BIRDS. RUNNING WATER. AND THE SOUND OF FEET SHUFFLING INTO THE GREAT ROOM. TOM When you arrive, you step off the bus into another world. For one thing, it’s sunny and warm here, no hint of a blizzard at all. But then, you see the magnificent red brick building, that looks like a cross between a church, an armory, and a regal estate. Out front, a sign reads “Village Hall.” You step inside, into another time, and there in front of you, waiting, is Bill Neal. BACKGROUND AUDIO: BILL NEAL GIVING A TOUR ALMOST INAUDIBLY BILL NEAL So this is Lydia Avery Coonley Ward. And thanks to Lydia, we have the building, museum... TOM In the magnificent hall, you hear Bill talk about the creation of the building. How it was the gift of Lydia Avery Coonley Ward, who once summered in the town, and wanted to leave its residents with a gift. BILL NEAL She was originally from New York state. They were wealthy farmers, and they had a place down on the Finger Lakes. But her first husband was from Chicago and he developed the conveyor belt that went around corners, so there was a lot of money involved. I guess she had foresight and realized that people in the community couldn’t do what she could do, so she built that building to bring people like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Teddy Roosevelt came as President. TOM The building itself is a product of the 1893 World’s Fair, the fabled Columbian Exposition, and on its executive board sat Lydia Avery to serve her adopted second city. It was the same World’s Fair where Frederick Jackson Turner publicized his “Frontier Thesis;” where white visitors peered into “live displays” of Native Americans, like the Penobscot Indians, and indigenous people from all over the world; where naturalists displayed mythical creatures like a giant octopus and wooly mammoth1; where Carl and Delia Akeley showcased their best, to-date, specimens; and where the Field Museum would receive its initial charter, and then purchase the first animals for its collection, including works by the Akeley’s.2 For contemporaries, the Columbian Exposition introduced a new, matured, and powerful United States to the world; a transformation that also seemed to codify a belief amongst many powerful whites that the United States was losing its “wildness,” or its natural heritage, which included buffalo, deer, and bears, as well as the Sioux, Apache, and Cheyenne; all were in danger of going extinct, yet not at the hands of people, they believed, but from the inchoate forces of “Modernity.” MUSIC CUE IN TOM Lydia Avery Ward also brought the Columbian Exposition to her summer home town, using Chicago’s capital, artifacts, and architects to create the Town Hall. The Chicago Firm, Pons and Pons designed the building. BILL NEAL Pons and Pons was one of the premier architectural firms in Chicago. The columns on the stage were gifts from the King of Siam, when she was on the 1893 World’s Fair board in Chicago. TOM 1https://hyperallergic.com/91279/cursed-meteorite-giant-octopus-models-and-other -worlds-fair-wonders/ 2 https://www.fieldmuseum.org/about/history ​ And a series of watercolors, depicting the Chicago Fair Grounds of so-called “White City,” welcome visitors just past the entrance doors. The spirit of the World’s Fair, also lies upstairs. Following our hosts, we make our way up to the second floor, past floral-patterned wallpaper and wooden cabinets filled with Native American artifacts, and then enter the attraction we’ve come to see: the natural history museum. 5s BREAK TOM Through the doors we enter a small, multi-sided room, lined with glass and wood cabinets, each displaying a Family of the Animal Kingdom. Rare tropical birds, like toucans and finches, blowfish, sharks, turtle shells, fossils, a wild boar, a moose, and myriad geodes and rare rocks. Each of these creatures is long since dead, frozen and fixed by arsenic and molded clay casts, administered a century ago--all erstwhile artifacts of Henry Augustus Ward--the founder of Ward’s Museum of Science in Rochester, NY; the man who was Carl Akeley’s taxidermy teacher and employer; and in his later life, the second husband of Lydia Avery Ward. Most of what remains of his life’s work now sits in this tiny, underappreciated room in rural western New York, a far cry from the monumental, granite steps of the Field Museum or American Museum of Natural History. And yet, The Village Hall Museum shares the same DNA of these wealthy institutions; it is a product of the 1893 World’s Fair, the so-called Closing of the Frontier, and the sudden “rise of conservation,” as explicitly a movement to halt the disappearance of the natural world--to stop extinction. As if to drive home this message, there in the remnants of Ward’s Natural History Museum, perched on a shelf, is a bust of the French naturalist, paleontologist, and teacher, Georges Cuvier--who is also known as the first theorist of “extinction.” It was Cuvier who, in the late 18th-century, studied the skeletons of Wooly Mammoth and Mastodon, and wondered, “What has become of these two enormous animals of which one no longer finds any living traces?”3 In remarks on “the species of elephants, both living and fossil” from 1796, he claimed these fossil skeletons “prove[d] the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.” Cuvier did not know it at the time, but he was describing the last great mass extinction found in the geological record--the so-called die off of the Megafauna, around 12,000-13,000 years ago. The bust of Cuvier, then, provides the final clue for why the collection exists in the first place. Henry Ward, like Carl Akeley, Lydia Avery Ward, Teddy Roosevelt, Osa and Martin Johnson, and the other 3 Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Lost World,” The New Yorker, December 8th, 2013, accessed at ​ ​ https://www-newyorker-com.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/magazine/2013/12/16/the-lost-world-2 characters we met along the way, were all convinced of the fact that a new extinction was already unfolding. In response, they worked to collect and preserve the natural world in the hopes that extinction could be slowed, if not stopped. By the turn of the century, Ward’s students, like Akeley and Hornaday, had elevated this craft into part science, part art. Their dioramas would be so life-like and immersive, they believed, they could rescue the natural world from death. In time the modern taxidermists would acquire a new name: the resurrectionists. TRANSITION MUSIC TOM So what happened to the taxidermists and their artistic science? Why do people so rarely associate “conservation” with this early movement? The answer, as with most things, is complicated. First, our views of animals have changed. As we’ve heard this season, the rise of documentary nature films, like the Johnson’s works, showed that people could experience “natural transcendence on film, without having to kill the animals. Second, modern environmentalism started to promote the “cute” and “cuddly” aspects of charismatic megafauna. Borrowing on new work in conservation biology and ecology, states and governments signed national laws and international agreements that promoted the protection of particular animals. Think of Panda Diplomacy between China and Western countries during the Cold War...4 NEWS CLIP, PAT NIXON SPEECH, 1972: On behalf of the ​ people of the United States, I am pleased to be here and to accept the precious gift of the pandas, and also these other mementos, from the People’s Republic of China.5 TOM ...The passage of the Endangered Species Act and the remarkable recovery of “American” icons, like the Bald Eagle, or the astounding success of the Save the Whales Campaign and the international moratorium on whaling. NEWS CLIP, INTERVIEW ON THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT: The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is the Magna Carta of the Environmental Movement, because at the highest level now of Federal Law, and tested again and again in the courts, is the preservation of wildlife, and by implication, the larger preservation of the environment.6 TOM What better example of the pervasive success of this kind of environmentalism than the 1986 film, Star Trek IV, in which Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise travel back in time to the 20th century to save the “soon-to-be” extinct, humpback whales. AUDIO CLIP, STAR TREK IV SOUND: Beeps of Star Ship Radar, Uhura: Admiral, I have a signal closing in on the ​ whales, bearing 628 degrees Kirk: Let’s see it ​ 4 Elena Songster, Panda Nation: The Construction and Conservation of China’s Modern Icon, (New York: ​ ​ Oxford University Press, 2018). 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQN8FJ4uQwc ​ 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=110&v=qEwjO_skap0 ​ McCoy: What kind of ship is that? Gillian: It’s a whaling ship, doctor.
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