by Jon Mooallem
Jefferson makes a big deal of the Incognitum in Notes on the State of Virginia. He spends several pages waxing about the animal’s hugeness and fussily discrediting claims that the bones being dug up are actually from less impressive, more common animals. He sounds defensive—petty, even. And I came to understand it’s because the argument Jefferson was trying to settle wasn’t just about Incognitums. He was marshaling the mammoth forward as a symbol, a stirring icon that—not unlike the polar bear today—might have the power to change public opinion about a critical issue of his time.
Jefferson was trying to debunk the Theory of American Degeneracy, which had been worked up several years earlier by the revered Enlightenment writer and natural historian, Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon. Count Buffon argued that the animal life of the New World was smaller, weaker, and less spectacular than that of the Old World. Not only were there fewer species in America—less of a diversity of life—but individual animals there were smaller than their counterparts in Europe: they were “degenerate” versions. Buffon himself had never been to America, it turns out, so he plucked measurements to support his claims from the accounts of travelers, who weren’t always reliable. (At one point in his book Natural History, Buffon repeats a claim that the region around Hudson Bay was populated by pygmies, winged serpents, and savages with backward-bending knees.)
The degeneracy theory turned on a question of climate. Buffon believed that species could attain their ideal forms only in a warm climate. He imagined America as a humid stew of swamps and uncultivated wildness; he believed its landmass had only recently emerged from under the sea and was still drying out. The continent, he wrote, is “crisscrossed by old trees laden with parasitic plants, lichens, [and] fungi, the impure fruits of corruption.” Eventually, Buffon concluded that even lines of domesticated animals brought to America from Europe gradually shrank and degenerated. The dogs in America were “absolutely dumb.” The sheep didn’t taste as delicious.
Others picked up on Buffon’s theory. Soon the fact that America’s birds or squirrels were smaller than Europe’s became a stand-in for the irredeemable smallness of everything else in America. The critiques became snider and snobbier, and strayed further from Buffon’s original quantitative claims. (“A stupid imbecility is the fundamental disposition of all Americans,” one writer noted of the Indians.) Soon champions of degeneracy were claiming that there was something so vexingly degenerate about America that Europeans who immigrated there would have inferior kids—that their bloodlines would degenerate just like the livestock’s. They noted America’s conspicuous lack of great men. Europe had produced Socrates, Copernicus, and so on. But, as one writer pointed out, “Through the whole extent of America there had never appeared a philosopher, an artist, a man of learning whose name had found a place in the history of science or whose talents have been of any use to others.”
As ridiculous as it might sound, the degeneracy idea gained enough traction that it threatened to undercut America’s standing in the world. Confidence in the new American nation was already shaky. Europeans doubted whether the crowd of rowdy idealists we now call the Founding Fathers could hold the whole project together. Buffon’s degeneracy theory now gave an empirical basis for those doubts. It made America look like an inherently bad bet, and might dissuade already skeptical nations from loaning the United States money. In short, this wasn’t just a fight about their foxes being bigger than our foxes. Something had to be done. Thomas Jefferson stepped up.
It’s easy to see why the degeneracy myth rankled a man like Jefferson. Jefferson was almost unbearably left-brained, a stickler for precise and provable facts. He recorded the daily weather for forty-four years and measured his own walking speed (four miles and 264 yards per hour). He also appears to have been thin-skinned and a little vindictive. At the Continental Congress, as delegates slashed sections from his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he sulked in his chair, looking wounded; Benjamin Franklin tried to loosen up his friend by muttering little jokes under his breath. (Jefferson felt so hurt by how the congress had “mangled” his writing that he later issued a kind of director’s cut of the Declaration to his friends, with all his original text restored.) That Buffon and his followers were passing off their bunkum as science would have infuriated him as an empiricist as well as a patriot.
In an excellent book about the episode, biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin explains that disproving Buffon became “one of Jefferson’s great obsessions”—and one that would escalate, to the point of absurdity, through some of the most otherwise productive years of his life. Jefferson started sensibly enough, by attacking the credibility of Buffon’s data and gathering data of his own. (It became a national project. Ben Franklin helped out, as did James Madison, who sent a letter to Jefferson reporting the dimensions of a particular weasel. Madison’s letter was detailed, down to the “distance between the anus and the vulva.”) But before long, Jefferson’s counteroffensive became less straitlaced. Buffon had written that America had no panthers, only smaller and less impressive cougars. Jefferson wanted to show the count that America did have panthers, and that American panthers were very formidable. So, en route to France, where he was going to serve as ambassador, Jefferson impulsively bought a panther skin and took it with him, to deliver to Buffon and prove his point. The Frenchman wrote Jefferson to thank him for the gift. But he referred to it as a “cougar” skin, not a “panther” skin. Buffon did promise to correct the mistake in a future edition of his book—not the theory of degeneracy as a whole, just the panther bit. Nevertheless, Jefferson could be found bragging triumphantly about this nitpicky panther comeuppance in a letter to a friend forty years later.
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.
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IN NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, 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.
3.
BILLY POSSUMS
In 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 anoth
er 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.
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IN 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.