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, ...

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 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 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 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. Are we too late? 7

TOM As conservation education shifted to the broader world of schools, television, and film over the last fifty years, the dioramas they replaced have become old fashioned, if not down-right barbaric. In 1999 Field Museum director Willard Boyd wrote that the dioramas “are often viewed by today’s visitors as a dead zoo located in a dark tunnel.”8 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the museum’s last taxidermist, Paul Rhymer, retired in 2016.9 Since the 1990s, several directors of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History have locked horns with curators and the public over plans to “update,” the old-fashioned dioramas--a euphemism for mothballing a greater and greater number of on-display specimens.

Now directors talk about using “Augmented Reality” and “3-D” immersive technology to instruct the next generation on the importance of conservation.

Both Taxidermy and Taxidermists, it seems, have joined the ranks of endangered species.

TRANSITION MUSIC TOM But has the next generation of conservationists succeeded where the resurrectionists failed?

7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfLrqlpkh2A ​ 8www.newsweek.com/2015/08/14/museum-dioramas-endangered-american-museums-358943. html 9 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125914878 ​ If we focus on the charismatic fauna, like the Bald Eagle, then yes. But unfortunately, doing so, we miss the forest for the trees. Because despite our best efforts, extinction has only accelerated since the 1970s and the rise of modern environmentalism.

NEW CLIP: “WHILE THE GLOBAL POPULATION IS SET TO TOP NINE BILLION BY MID-CENTURY, NON-HUMAN LIFE IS DYING AT RATES NOT SEEN IN SIXTEEN MILLION YEARS. SCIENTISTS ARE CALLING IT THE SIXTH GREAT EXTINCTION, A CATASTROPHIC DROP IN THE NUMBER OF THE WORLD’S PLANT AND ANIMALS SPECIES.”10

TOM Where the Cold War generation of conservationists failed, others believe another method can succeed. Rather than kill and preserve endangered animals, however, this new tactic would make science fiction real [JURASSIC PARK SOUND], and re-animate the extinct, through DNA harvesting and editing--a technique they call “de-extinction.”

AUDIO CLIP: “WHAT IF EXTINCTION DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THING? WHAT IF WE COULD BRING SPECIES BACK AT WILL? TO DO THAT WE’D NEED DNA, AN EGG CELL, AND A BIRTHING MOM.”11 (1:58

Boosters of “De-extinction,” however, seem completely unaware that their work is not so new. They are merely continuing the tradition of the “resurrections” who came before them.

After all, the first animal under consideration for “de-extinction” is the

10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK-4ubvbrLQ ​ 11 ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA1_mdiDgyk Wooly Mammoth--the pachyderm that inspired Georges Cuvier and his theory.

TRANSITION MUSIC TO CONCLUSION

TOM Back in Wyoming County, New York, in the museum that holds the last of Ward’s Collection, there is an especially beautiful cabinet case, filled with dozens of bird eggs, some as large as a grapefruit, others as small as a cherry tomato.

BILL NEAL The case that those eggs are have large glass areas on top with drawers underneath.

TOM There are white eggs, and blue-speckled eggs; yellow eggs, and purple eggs. Some have black and gray spots that give the shells the appearance of Italian marble. Others have loopy, splashes of black lines, like someone broke the tip of a fountain pen and spilled the contents on a blank piece of paper.

These eggs are rare not just for their beauty, but because they pre-date the chemical revolution that poisoned and killed millions of birds in the 1950s and ‘60s, including the American Bald Eagle.

BILL NEAL All of those eggs would have been pre-ddt. Their shells are a little thicker, there’s probably the fact that there’s DNA there that could be studied.

TOM In other words, their genetic code might contain the key to rebuilding the natural world we have lost.

As we continue to grapple with the meaning of our accelerating climate catastrophe, and the profound loss that animal extinction continues to create, we would do well to consider our long, and largely failed, history of conservation.

Some day, maybe in 50 years, maybe in 100, a geneticist pursuing de-extinction, may come to Wyoming in search of the rarest of avian DNA. He/she/they may find this little dusty room, the last of Ward’s museum, his life’s work, and the bird eggs. Before blindy harvesting what genetic material remains, the geneticist may pause. With the bust of Cuvier looking on they may consider again the world and anxieties that made Ward and his museum; the ways in which ideas of race, gender, and empire shaped Ward and his successor’s views of nature; and then how the geneticist’s own-views, and interventions in nature, are also just as subjective, partial, and potentially folly.

And yet, Ward’s bird eggs and Akeley’s dioramas, may remain the last traces of the natural world before global warming drowned the coasts, acidified the oceans, and destroyed most of the planet and its creatures. With no wild animals left to film, or watch at the zoo, humans may again return to the collections of the resurrectionists; to catch an imperfect glimpse of the natural world that once was; to feel, however briefly, a transcendent connection to the once living Animal Kingdom; or to revive and reanimate dormant DNA, to begin rewilding the planet anew.

CREDITS

This episode concludes the second season of Hear UR, a podcast show made by students at the University of Rochester. I’m Tom Fleischman, and together with my colleague Steve Roessner, who engineered this episode, we created this podcast series in 2018 to engage the public on topics of historical and environmental significance, while also teaching students about the medium of podcasting.

Over the past year, we’ve had tremendous support from many people.

First, thank you to our professional guests who skyped into our class, or came to Rochester to share their expertise in podcasting and radio production: Lillian Cunningham, Max Linsky, Jim Briggs, Rob Byers, and Peter Iglinsky.

Thank you to Bill Neal and Doug Norton for giving us a memorable tour of Wyoming, NY’s Village Hall, the building that Lydia Avery made, and the fantastic Ward’s collection.

The Hear UR team would like to thank Melissa Mead and the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Jennelle Hart created our logo for this season. Thank you for shaping the “public face” of our show.

A huge thank you to Jacqui Rizzo, Kristi Pakusch and Sarah Murphy in the history department for their help keeping us on budget and in order.

Hear UR is made possible by a Teaching Innovation Grant from the University of Rochester’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Thank you to Stuart Jordan for your guidance and support.

And finally, this should would not have been possible without all the hard work of the students who made it. Thank you for your patience as we ironed out the wrinkles in the course, and for taking this assignment seriously and making it your own.

So thank you to, Alexis, Brenn, Celia, Chloe, Dasha, David, Elizabeth, Ewan, Harrison, James, Jessica, Joshua, Liam, Louis, Max, Maya, Rick, Rose, Sam, and Zoe.

This has been Hear UR, Season Two: Nature Reconstructed.

Thank you for listening.