Learn more now on The Discovery of Extinction, a Wide Open extra.
Nick Mott: Back in the 1700s, a French thinker with a super long name really peeved off Thomas Jefferson. I’m pretty sure I’m butchering this so, French-speakers bear with me - but the guy’s name was George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. I’ll just call him Buffon. He was ...
Mark Barrow: This towering figure in 18th century natural history.
Nick Mott: That’s Mark Barrow. He’s a professor in the department of history at Virginia Tech, and he’ll be guiding us through this saga of Jefferson’s brush with extinction. Because Buffon had published this really influential idea. The notion was ...
Mark Barrow: … that the environment shapes the organisms that live there in some very profound ways. This theory of degeneracy, that there were a certain number of species that existed and that as a result of the particular environments that they found themselves in, they would change form over time.
Nick Mott: According to this idea, species adapt to their environments. This is something we’ve shown to be the case today. But back then, Buffon took that idea in a very different direction than we’re used to. Nasty environments, he thought, would sort of produce nasty creatures. There was kind of a moral element to it.
Mark Barrow: And in particular, he thought that the environment of North America, because it was colder, presumably colder and damper, that the species that were existing there would become smaller, more feeble, less fertile over time.
Nick Mott: So this theory of degeneracy, as it was known, was kind of menacing if you lived in the newly formed United States. Especially because other theorists applied the idea to people. There was some really terrible racism bound up with it, but the notion was: America’s damp climate would make all of its people small and weak just like our birds and our deer. So, as a country fighting for its freedom from a colonial power, this really didn’t bode well for us if true.
Thomas Jefferson really respected Buffon. But he hears this idea and he’s like — oh hell no! He must’ve thought, this Buffon’s a buffoon! He knew America held these magnificent species: deer, elk, moose, bison—all of them enormous. If we were to succeed in the international order, Jefferson thought, we’d need everybody else not to think we were a bunch of puny, fragile weaklings.
Mark Barrow: So he did everything possible to try to refute it.
Nick Mott: From Montana Public Radio and the Montana Media Lab, this is The Wide Open. I’m Nick Mott. On today’s extra: How Thomas Jefferson’s quest to prove America’s wildlife was bigger and badder and better than anywhere else led him to face off with the idea of species going extinct.
Jefferson’s journey to disprove Buffon’s idea was kind of like the Forrest Gump of the Revolutionary War. It would turn up at all these wild historic times.
At the same time that Thomas Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence, he was taking notes on the animals of North America. While he was deep in correspondence about urgent matters affecting our fledgling democracy, he was frantically writing hunters and explorers, even other founding fathers, begging them to find an animal that could save the country. Specifically, he wanted to find a moose: the bigger, the better.
In 1784 he wrote a letter to fellow founding father and declaration-signer William Whipple. Here's part of that letter read by reporter — and voice actor John Hooks.
[Thomas Jefferson letter]: A complete skeleton of one is what I would wish to procure: or if this cannot be got, then the horns, hoof, and such bones as would enable me to decide on it’s size.… I am with very great esteem dear. Sir Your most obedient humble servant
Nick Mott: You’d think, back then, it wouldn’t be that hard to track down a moose, shoot it, and ship it abroad. But the affair proved surprisingly difficult for Jefferson. He bugged Whipple again a couple years later.
[Thomas Jefferson letter]: I am emboldened to renew my application to you on the subject of the Moose, the Caribou and… the elk… The skin, the skeleton and the horns of each, would be an acquisition here more precious than you could conceive… I am with very great esteem Dear Sir your most obedient humble servant,
Nick Mott: Jefferson — in addition to ending all these letters with my new favorite email sign-off — "your most obedient humble servant,"
Nick Mott: — is hellbent on disproving the theory of degeneracy. He devotes part of the only book he ever wrote to refuting Buffon head-on. In the book, Notes on the State of Virginia, he documents the size of America’s wildlife, and compares it to the size of European animals. America has bison, beavers, elk, and bears way bigger than anything comparable in Europe, he argues. And at the top of his list of enormous American fauna is … the mammoth.
That’s because for years, people have been digging up these curious, giant fossils. Here’s Mark Barrow again.
Mark Barrow: primarily things like the teeth, the molars, and large bones, the thigh bone and other bones. What the heck are these things? They were finding them and they, among the theories were early theories were that they might belong to a group of giants, human giants that had been talked about in the Bible before the great flood.
Nick Mott: A group of slaves, when they unearth fossils in South Carolina, realize they resembled the teeth of elephants in their home country. So the theory became: These things are mammoths. Today, we know it actually turned out to be a mastodon, not a mammoth, which is a little different. But the fossils seize Jefferson’s imagination.
Mark Barrow: Jefferson started collecting them and was very interested in the possibility that they belonged to one of these creatures that was really large and would help to refute Buffon's theory of degeneracy.
Nick Mott: Now there’s a big leap here. Because these bones, if you found ‘em in your backyard, you might think they’re from something that’s extinct. But Jefferson gets a hole of these bones, and it occurs to him that these things might still be plodding around the country, somewhere remote and unexplored.
Mark Barrow: Jefferson, like most westerners at the time, firmly believed that extinction could not take place; that extinction violated basic notions about the balance of nature and violated notions about the great chain of being.
Nick Mott: I’m gonna get back to Jefferson and his search for the mammoth, and of course that moose to send over to Buffon. But I need to make a little tangent here on this idea: The Great Chain of Being. It was this idea that had shaped Western culture for thousands of years.
Mark Barrow: You could take every organism from the lowest organism to the most complex, and usually humans were at the top of this chain. And you could line them up and there was this continuous series from the most simple to the most complex // the belief is that God is responsible for the order. God has created the earth, God has created everything on the earth, and that God has imparted on that creation an order that pervades that creation.
God, in this very Christian worldview, was perfect. So the Great Chain of Being didn’t leave room for any of God’s creatures to stop existing. He created the world as it should be, and as it always would be. Humans were right at they top of the hierarchy in this order; closer to perfection than any of the plants and animals around us. But we still didn’t have the power to change the world in such a fundamental way as making a species go extinct.
Thomas Jefferson, like many thinkers of his day, buys into it this system of thinking.
Mark Barrow: He basically was trapped by his mental conceptions of the world, like we all are.
We have ideas, some of which are unexamined assumptions about how the world operates, and he's trapped within those, and he's finding these fossils, and he becomes later recognized as the founder of paleontology in North America. But he doesn't believe extinction can exist. And he thinks in fact that the remains that they're finding are the fossilized remains of creatures that still exist somewhere out in the West of the United States.
Nick Mott: Jefferson still thinks he can prove Buffon wrong. These mammoth fossils keep getting found - that thing could be out there. And he’s still got hunters looking for a huge moose.
In 1778, good news comes. Jefferson gets word that a friend of his, after a treacherous winter in Vermont, finally had an opportunity to take a moose. Killing and transporting the thing was a weeks-long project involving a team of 20 men and miles of plowing. Eventually, a bulky box arrives on Buffon’s doorstep in Paris. Attached is a letter.
[Thomas Jefferson letter]: I am happy to be able to present to you at this moment the bones and skin of a Moose, the horns of [another] individual of the same species…
Nick Mott: Travel and processing has been rough on the animal’s remains. Its fur is falling off in clumps on the scraggly bits of pelt that haven’t decomposed. Somehow, its original antlers had been lost, so another set, from another moose entirely, has been thrown in the box with the animal’s bones. Jefferson isn’t happy with those replacement parts.
[Thomas Jefferson letter]: The horns of the elk are remarkably small. I have certainly seen of them which would have weighed five or six times as much ...
Nick Mott: It’s funny to me to hear a founding father this way, insecure and posturing—it’s way bigger normally, I swear!
[Thomas Jefferson letter]: I wish these spoils, Sir, may have the merit of adding any thing new to the treasures of nature which [have] so fortunately come under your observation… Sir, your most obedient, humble servant
Nick Mott: Even though the whole affair has sitcom levels of mishaps, Jefferson still hopes this shipment will be the nail in the coffin of Buffon’s theory of degeneracy in America. But Buffon dies shortly after he receives the moose and the otherbones. He never has a chance to publish if the scraggly, pieced-together ungulate changes his mind.
Instead, in the decades that follow the theory of degeneracy dies a quiet death as ideas around the natural world undergo drastic change.
Another scientist looks at those very same mastodon bones Jefferson is so curious about, And this scientist gets another idea about the animal’s fate. It’s an idea that shakes up our collective understanding of our planet.
In 1796, this young scientist — a Frenchman named Georges Cuvier — gives a public lecture in Paris. Those bones, he claims, are from a species that no longer exists. That mammoth, he proclaims, is an extinct species.
The idea spreads across the world. But Jefferson still isn’t convinced that extinction could happen. Even with Buffon dead and this new idea taking hold, he’s convinced that the mammoth could still exist. And he wants to find it.
Mark Barrow: As part of his instructions to explorers out in the west, including Lewis and Clark, he orders them basically to keep an eye out for large, elephant-like creatures. He doesn't use those words exactly in the Lewis and Clark expedition orders, but basically keep an eye out for species that are presumed to be extinct and bring back remains of them if you can
Nick Mott: Those explorers found herds of bison and elk; grizzly bears and wolves; a landscape teeming with bounty that seemed limitless at the time. But, much to Jefferson’s chagrin, they didn’t find any mammoths.
Today, the possibility of extinction seems so … obvious. But back in Jefferson’s day, Passenger pigeons darkened skies. Brilliant flashes of green and orange could signal Carolina parakeets in the South. Caribou roamed in the northern states. America seemed so large and full of infinite bounty, I sort of get how Jefferson could so obstinately deny extinction: America was enormous and mysterious. The West in particular was laden with desert canyons and mountain ranges. It was labyrinth that seemed endless
But Jefferson also lived as the industrial revolution began, as we began using more resources more rapidly, as the world shrunk as that technology gained steam, and as the mystery of the vast expanse in the West diminished as the landscape was explored and mapped.
Mark Barrow: There's not like a moment that he says, the scales have fallen from my eyes and I repudiate everything I've ever written. But toward the end of his life, he does quietly accept the notion that extinction, it may have taken place. He does in the face of increasing evidence gradually come to the realization that extinction probably has taken place.
Nick Mott: So Jefferson dies, and over time so does this idea that extinction couldn’t happen. Scientists speculate that extinctions came from large-scale, natural phenomena. A giant volcanic eruption—that kind of thing. By and large, even as we collectively reckoned with the idea that species like the mammoth went extinct, we still couldn’t accept that we, as humans, had the power to manipulate the natural world in such fundamental ways.
About three decades after Jefferson’s death, one scientific expedition near Iceland changes that forever. In the late 1850s, these two British ornithologists set out looking for great auks, these large flightless birds with big black beaks. These scientists try everything looking for auks. But they can’t find any, and nobody they interview seems to know of any living birds either.
The species, it turns out, is extinct. It had been hunted for its feathers and tasty meat. Rich European collectors wanted auk carcasses and eggs for their collections. Back in 1844, it turned out, fishermen had encountered the last known pair of the birds. They wrung their necks and stomped on their egg.
This tragedy leads to a new hypothesis that fundamentally alters that old theory of extinction. Humans can cause extinction, these scientists argue. For the great auk, and for other critters too, we were the catastrophe. Extinction was happening in real time, and people were causing it.
Jefferson wrote this in a memoir back in his day.
[Thomas Jefferson memoir]: If one link in nature’s chain might be lost, then another and another might be.
Nick Mott: Looking back on Jefferson’s tangle with extinction, what’s most striking to me is just how recently we came to grapple with this problem that seems so entrenched our reality. Extinction is a fact Jefferson lived with only briefly, but it's a part of all of our lives now.
Today, nobody really knows how exactly many species we’ve lost to human-caused extinction. At least hundreds, maybe thousands. A 2019 UN report estimated that about a million species of plants and animals face the threat of extinction across the globe.
It doesn’t take a dug-up molar or a box of skeletons on our doorstep to wake us up to the reality that extinction is occurring at unprecedented rates, thanks to us. The question, now, is how do we agree on what to save, and how to save it?
Credits
Thanks so much to Corin Cates-Carney for the stellar edits, Mary Auld for the production support, and John Hooks for the unrivalled Thomas Jefferson voice acting. Jessy Stevenson created art for the season. Our theme music is by Izaak Opatz, arranged and produced by Dylan Rodrigue, featuring Jordan Bush on Pedal Steel. Other original music is by Dylan Rodrigue. Special thanks to Mark Barrow, - author of “Nature’s ghosts: from the age of jefferson to the age of extinction”. And also to Lee Alan Dugatkin, who wrote a fascinating book called “Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose.” And also of course, to the Montana Media Lab and Montana Public Radio for making this show possible.
