ROMAN MARS: Our story begins one day in November of 1902. Just a few months prior, President Theodore Roosevelt had become the first president to make a public appearance in a car. And now, he was off on a new adventure, this one taking him to a small town in Mississippi called Smeads.
JON MOOALLEM: And he’s gone down to Smeads to do a hunt, a bear hunt.
ROMAN MARS: That’s journalist Jon Mooallem.
JON MOOALLEM: And he’s there for a few days without seeing a single bear. And then his hunting party happens to spot one. And it runs into a kind of a weedy thicket.
ROMAN MARS: It’s a good move. The hunters can’t really get to the bear. But Roosevelt’s guide says, “Hang on. You just stay right here. And I’ll flush it out and you can kill it.”
JON MOOALLEM: Roosevelt gets a little bored though, and he goes back to have lunch.
ROMAN MARS: So when the hunting guide finally flushes the bear out, Roosevelt is nowhere to be seen.
JON MOOALLEM: So his guide jumps off his horse, whacks the bear on the top of the head with the end of his rifle, and then ties it to a tree and then starts calling the President back over so that he can do the honors.
ROMAN MARS: When the President arrives and sees the bear, let’s just say he was far from impressed.
JON MOOALLEM: He takes a look at this thing. And it just looks pitiable, dazed, kind of semi-conscious. It looks pretty mangy, malnourished, and about half of its normal weight. And so he takes pity on it, and he says, “It’s against my code as a sportsman to shoot this pathetic thing.” And he refuses. This moment in which he refuses to shoot the bear, it’s memorialized a few days later in a cartoon in a newspaper in Washington, D.C.
ROMAN MARS: The cartoon is captioned, “Drawing the Line in Mississippi.”
JON MOOALLEM: And when you look at this cartoon, you see the President there with his arm out, kind of sparing the bear’s life, and he’s holding his rifle. And the bear is there just watching Roosevelt, wondering what’s going to happen to it. He’s got its fate in his hands. This bear looks really vulnerable and cute. Its eyes are huge. It’s got a big, round head. And it wouldn’t necessarily be familiar to you at the time, in 1902, but now we understand what this thing is right away. It’s a teddy bear.
After this cartoon runs, a toy manufacturer turns the bear from that cartoon into a stuffed animal and starts selling Teddy’s bear all over the United States. And it becomes a huge hit.
ROMAN MARS: Teddy’s bear for Theodore Roosevelt–an object that would become so ubiquitous it would take on a life of its own outside of its namesake President. In fact, I bet you or your kid have one somewhere in your house right now. But before we get ahead of ourselves, the teddy bear is not our object for this episode. No, our object comes out of what happens next because what is funny about this story is that the lesson that the toy manufacturers take from this is that maybe this model can be repeated. Maybe every president from here on out will have a viral stuffed animal named after them.
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah. So they’re thinking, “Well, Roosevelt’s going to leave office in 1909. We need the next president’s version of the teddy bear.” Now, the next president was William Howard Taft, not nearly as charismatic of a fellow as Teddy Roosevelt. But you know, the profit motive is strong. We’ve got to find something to be a mascot for his presidency. And they land on something a little suspect in retrospect. It’s not a bear. It’s a possum. And they market it as the Billy Possum. There’s a reason why you have not heard of the Billy Possum, and there’s a reason why there’s no Billy Possum next to your sleeping child in the other room.
ROMAN MARS: From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I’m Roman Mars.
We in America, land of the bald eagle, have always turned animals into symbols. They represent what we’re afraid of, what we love, and what we think deserves to survive. Those stories are some of the most powerful tools we have for protecting the natural world. Today, the story of the Billy Possum and how our fickle feelings about animals have shaped the history and perhaps the future of our relationship with the natural world…
Before we meet the Billy Possum in full, let’s go back to the moment his infinitely more successful cousin, the teddy bear, was first introduced. When that cartoon showing Roosevelt refusing to shoot the cute little bear was published, it was not how people were used to seeing bears or how most people thought about them because, back in the early 1900s, we did not see bears as cute.
JON MOOALLEM: You know, bears were monsters. Bears were a shorthand for everything that was dangerous and unruly about nature–about the Western frontier. This was part of an outlook in the United States that anything big and wild was basically a threat to us and a threat to our ability to take over the landscape.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah. And we didn’t just treat it as a threat, this was an active response to the federal government that we were going to eradicate bears so that people could live in the West.
JON MOOALLEM: Yes, we were absolutely at war with bears. There was a department of the federal government called the Bureau for Biological Survey. One of its primary jobs was just shooting and trapping and killing animals. We had sorted nature into sort of the desirable and undesirable ones, and we were letting all the undesirable ones really have it: coyotes, wolves, mountain lions… It’s also a cultural outlook. You see this reflected in a lot of fiction of the time, especially fiction for kids. Ladies Home Journal Magazine published a story in 1900 about a boy named Balser who was described as “the happiest boy in Indiana because he owned a rifle and enough ammunition to kill every creature within five miles.” And in this story, Balser kills a bear. But he gets bitten by the bear in the process. And so it all culminates in this kind of feel good ending when Balser and his dad track down the bear’s mate and then shoot her in revenge.
ROMAN MARS: And how successful were we at this time period of taking out the bears?
JON MOOALLEM: Very successful, if you wanna call that success. Yeah, this is an era in which a lot of what we call “mega fauna” of the United States is being driven either out of its territory or just extinct. The grizzly bear was a huge target of these efforts. And it was about to be extirpated from 95% of its original range in the continental U.S.
ROMAN MARS: The eradication of the grizzly bear coincided with a big shift in America. For the first time in our history, a majority of Americans were living in cities, far from nature and far away from the threat of bears. And so, as more and more bears disappeared from the landscape, they started showing up differently in our imaginations and in the pages of children’s books.
JON MOOALLEM: There was an extremely famous writer at the time named Ernest Thompson Seton who was leading a movement in fiction, especially stories that were read by a lot of American children, where he was writing stories with protagonists who were bears and other animals–exactly the same kind of species that the government was busy exterminating. One of his most famous books was called The Biography of a Grizzly. And it centers on a cub, named Wahb, who at the beginning of the book has to watch his mother and his siblings be shot dead by a rancher. The rest of the book is just this poor cub wandering through a wilderness, where every threat to him is not a wild threat but a man-made threat. He’s dodging traps and other people with guns. Even the scent of man is said to be unsettling to him. Now these grizzlies that were once seen as ferocious competitors on the landscape–things to fear–they’re now fearing us.
What Seton’s getting at is something that you see across the culture. People are really starting to feel conflicted about all the killing going on. We hated the bear and we feared the bear, but we also suddenly sort of wanted to give the bear a hug.
ROMAN MARS: So this is the ideological war that is going on as the teddy bear arrives at our shores. What happens after that political cartoon and the teddy bear takes off the way it does? What happens when the teddy bear hits the market?
JON MOOALLEM: It kickstarts this whole craze of teddy bears where, within a few years, this German company, Steiff, is said to be exporting a million bears a year. Suddenly, it’s to the extent that there are newspaper editorials worrying about children playing with bears instead of dolls. They’re displacing human dolls, and what could this mean? You can buy clothing for your bear. You can buy winter coats for your bear, which is astonishing because I sort of think of this as the moment that the evolutionary trajectory of teddy bears and regular bears splits–that your teddy bear now won’t be warm unless it has a winter coat.
ROMAN MARS: This is the point in our story where people know that Theodore Roosevelt is not gonna be president that much longer, and they need to figure out what to do next. Taft gets elected. He’s sort of Teddy Roosevelt’s handpicked successor. And they want a new cuddly plaything to sort of mark his presidency. So, let’s talk about the Billy Possum story. How did they come to decide on a possum as the thing that would represent William Howard Taft?
JON MOOALLEM: Right, so once again, we’re in the South. We’re in Atlanta. So Taft is gonna be inaugurated. He’s doing a tour of the South. And he’s the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta for the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. And they’re pulling out all the stops. And they serve him this very particular Southern delicacy, really seen as an authentic piece of the South, and it’s called “possum and taters.” What we have is an opossum roasted whole, head on, tail still hanging off it like a meaty noodle. And it’s on a platter surrounded by sweet potatoes. And in many cases, it would be served with a small sweet potato crammed into the opossum’s mouth. And how many teeth does an opossum have, Roman? Do you remember? 50 teeth. So, jammed in its 50 teeth, which is just a phenomenally disgusting number of teeth, is a small sweet potato. This thing is rolled out at the middle of the banquet. The one they put on Taff’s table weighs 18 pounds. He eats it. After he’s done, the band starts playing. And a group of Taft supporters makes a big ceremony of giving him a surprise gift. And it’s a small stuffed opossum toy, very realistic with those kind of creepy beady eyes, the naked ears, and the tail. They hand this thing over with great pomp. This is the icon of his presidency. This is it. This is the Billy Possum.
ROMAN MARS: Billy Possum, as in William Howard Taft’s Possum.
ROMAN MARS: I mean, they had this whole manufacturing apparatus and marketing machine ready for this moment to make this work.
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, this is the launch. This is the Billy Possum activation. But all the groundwork has been laid. I read news reports about how, within 24 hours, this company called the Georgia Billy Possum Company, which was already set up and ready to go, within 24-hours of the banquet, they’re already brokering deals to distribute the toys all over the country. The LA Times covering this wrote, “The teddy bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear. And for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with Billy Possums.” So I actually found an advertisement for a toy store in Brooklyn that had a promotion where kids could come in and see an actual opossum in a cage so that they would just get more familiar with this thing that was going to be their cuddly pal for the next four years, possibly eight. And the ad read, “Do not let it be said that any man, woman, or child in Brooklyn has not seen the cute little animal whose name is mentioned more in all parts of the world today than any other.” So, yeah, very bullish on Billy Possums.
ROMAN MARS: And not just the toys themselves, but there’s all kinds of other merchandise associated, right?
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, there’s, like, attendant Billy Possum merchandise to help make the craze go even wider. There was postcards. There was pitchers for cream for coffee time. Taft supporters wore Billy Possum pins at his inauguration. Then as Taft is touring around the country, people are actually meeting him at railroad stations and appearances and handing over actual possums like bouquets of flowers. There’s a brief moment when it’s sort of an icon of the man.
ROMAN MARS: And as you mentioned, this moment is brief. What happens to the Billy Possum?
JON MOOALLEM: Almost nothing happens with the Billy Possum, to answer your question. You know, from what I could tell, it’s really just only a matter of months before there’s no mention of it anywhere. Everyone stops caring about it. Sales tank. And remember that this all started in January of 1909, so that means the Billy Possum didn’t even make it to Christmas. It didn’t even get to see a Christmas season, which is sort of a special tragedy for a toy.
ROMAN MARS: So, I mean, there might be some obvious answers to this, but I think there might be some non-obvious answers as to why the teddy bears took off and the Billy Possums didn’t. What are your thoughts on that?
JON MOOALLEM: Well, the obvious answer is that opossums are really ugly. It’s a really long stretch, I think, to make one seem snuggly and adorable or, like, something you want to take care of. I just don’t think there’s any getting around that fact. More interestingly though, I also think that the possum lacked a story that had any resonance with Americans, even just subconsciously. I mean, when you think about it, for all of human’s evolutionary history, the bear was this icon. It was fearsome. It was independent from us, and that’s what made it so impressive. It was living a parallel life as a menace to us, as a competitor to us, in some ways, our superior, more powerful than us… And now, at the time of the teddy bear, we’ve beaten that creature back to such a degree that it is at our mercy–that its survival is gonna be dependent on us. And I think that stirs up some really complicated emotions–both worries about the future of nature, but also worries about our place in it, this new place where we really have a kind of brutal dominion over everything. I think that’s really unsettling for a lot of people. There’s this oscillation that happens between demonizing an animal and then eradicating it, and then suddenly empathizing with that animal as a kind helpless underdog and rewriting its reputation in our minds as something innocent and sweet that needs our help.
ROMAN MARS: This, you could say, is John’s teddy bear vs. Billy Possum theory. The reason we love the bear is because of this compelling, complex relationship we have with it. We feared the bear, we vilified the bear, we killed the bear, and then we felt so bad about killing the bear that now we wanted to save it. Whereas the possum really had none of that resonance.
JON MOOALLEM: It was hard to feel anything for the opossum, good or bad. It was lacking of any kind of emotional import. The story with Taft was someone served him a dead opossum and he ate it. And he really loved it too. You know, he had a few helpings and then he just kept going, and a doctor at his table actually passed him a note saying, “Maybe you should slow down.” And the next day, Taft was bragging to reporters about it. He said, “Well, I like opossum. I ate very heartily of it last night, and it did not disturb in the slightest my digestion or my sleep.” Yeah, he just obliterated it.
ROMAN MARS: So we laid out this pattern of oscillation between exterminating animals and then empathizing with them. That pattern repeats throughout the 20th century. And during that time, animals start to become useful symbols for fights about the environment. Take the bald eagle. It was nearly wiped out from overhunting and the use of the pesticide DDT. And then people clocked that it was going extinct and turned it into the face of a big campaign against DDT–a big, successful campaign. The same thing happened with the spotted owl and the logging industry. But all those environmental fights were nothing compared to the existential threat that the planet was facing in the early 2000s.
JON MOOALLEM: It’s interesting. In 2005, I remember being in graduate school at Berkeley and watching with a class the aftermath of Katrina–Hurricane Katrina–and seeing New Orleans flooded and realizing, for the first time, that there was a sort of general understanding that like, “Oh, this has to do with climate change.”
ROMAN MARS: As the evidence for climate change started to stack up, climate activists and attorneys were trying to get the government to do something about it.
JON MOOALLEM: What happens in the early 2000s is you have a group of environmental attorneys who have been struggling for years to try to get the George W. Bush administration to act on climate change or even just to acknowledge the science around greenhouse gasses.
ROMAN MARS: But so far, all of their attempts had largely failed. What could they do to make the issue urgent enough to get the public outraged and the government to act?
JON MOOALLEM: They needed some kind of emotional trigger–something that was going to not just make climate change feel real and urgent in an intellectual way, but that would cut through the kind of busyness of people’s lives and make them care.
ROMAN MARS: An emotional trigger, something people could care about, something like an animal…
JON MOOALLEM: You had environmental attorneys who were just in the trenches suing the administration. One of these groups, the Center for Biological Diversity, hit upon this pretty ingenious idea. And that was to get a species listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, specifically because of the threat of climate change to its survival.
ROMAN MARS: Here’s why the plan is ingenious. By law, if a species is listed as endangered, then the government is legally bound to look at what is threatening its survival.
JON MOOALLEM: They could put that science in front of the administration. They would essentially force its hand to do what it had not wanted to do in other contexts, which was to affirm the validity of climate change.
ROMAN MARS: No more dodging or dismissing. But to make this work, the activists feel like they have to really find the perfect animal. So basically, they start a casting process.
JON MOOALLEM: And a good candidate on that front is going to be two things. It’s going to have a lot of solid science backing it up to say that, yes, this thing will go extinct because of climate change. And it’s going to be something that ordinary people care about because, if there isn’t the public interest, no matter how good the science is, the administration did have ways of kind of shunting that animal off into a kind of bureaucratic abyss and not having to deal with it.
ROMAN MARS: In fact, hundreds and hundreds of species were sitting in a backlog, waiting to be looked at by the government–species that the public had never even heard of.
JON MOOALLEM: The Neosho mucket mussel and the slabside pearlymussel, the band-rumped storm petrel, the spotless crake, the relict leopard frog… We’ve got a whole list of cave beetles, the Icebox Cave beetle, the fowler’s cave beetle, the fire cave beetle, the Tatum Cave beetle… And at the time, in 2013, when I was looking into this, at least 24 different species had actually gone extinct while they were waiting around on the candidate list. And essentially no one cared about them. These things could just sort of pass into oblivion unnoticed, even though they had been deemed worthy of protection. And that’s what the Center for Biological Diversity was trying to avoid. That’s why they needed the public behind them so that whatever they petitioned the government for wouldn’t just slip away silently.
ROMAN MARS: So they needed a good candidate, but they also needed one whose survival was really linked to climate change. And this was harder than you might think because, remember, this is the early 2000s. And we’re just starting to get a grasp on climate change. And there are very few actual studies that have been done about its impact on specific species.
JON MOOALLEM: So they went looking for species. And a lot of the candidates they came up with were way more Billy Possum than teddy bear. The first animal that the Center for Biological Diversity looked at was called the Glacier Bay wolf spider. Okay, so it’s a spider. It’s disgusting. Second of all, it turns out there was some uncertainty about whether it was even its own species. So that one gets tossed out. Next, they have this kind of small speckled seabird in Alaska called the Kittlitz’s murrelet. You know, I guess it could be sold as cute, but you were working an uphill battle there. You had to first introduce people to it. It’s hard to say. There was exactly one expert in the bird, as far as I could tell. So these two species–even if you could make a strong scientific case–they’re missing that wow factor. It wasn’t going to inspire the public interest and the public concern that was going to make this petition go forward.
ROMAN MARS: So a spider wasn’t going to do. A murrelet wasn’t going to do. No cave beetle is going to get the public upset. Where did they end up landing as their sort of animal that was going to help combat climate change?
JON MOOALLEM: The polar bear.
ROMAN MARS: It’s right there in front of you the whole time!
JON MOOALLEM: They got the polar bear. I mean, fortunately, in 2004, I believe it was, luckily enough you had a really definitive first paper by a researcher named Andrew Derocher linking climate change to the near future extinction of polar bears. Polar bears survive on sea ice for most of the year. That’s where they live. And they hunt seals out on the sea ice. And as the sea ice broke up earlier and earlier in certain parts of the arctic or subarctic or just disappeared entirely from other places, the entire platform where they walk around making their living was just going to be gone.
ROMAN MARS: I mean, like, if you’re trying to decide if you are a Billy Possum or if you are a teddy bear… Let’s run the polar bear through the teddy bear test. Okay. So, like, what are the things that it checks that make it appropriate to be the type of thing that we would rally around and love and want to make dolls of and hold.
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, I think it’s operating on two levels: a surface level cute, brown face. You can imagine it as a plush toy. It’s no Glacier Bay wolf spider. And then on a deeper level, you have identical forces that were operating with the teddy bear story, where you have a creature that was regarded as this really powerful, independent Lord of the Arctic. And now it’s being shown in a completely new light: as helpless, as dependent on us for help, and as living in this world that is literally trickling out from underneath it because of things that we’ve done.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah. We have killed the polar bear off, and now we need to save the polar bear.
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, I mean, I would read accounts of polar bears from back in history, and you would see, a few hundred years ago, Arctic explorers writing about this thing like it was a demon. I don’t know if this is true, but it says something just that these stories would be recited. You know, a polar bear jumps into a guy’s boat and tries to eat them all, even when he lights the bear on fire. And you’ve gone from that into something on the cover of Time, where it’s this sad, thin polar bear walking on a strip of ice surrounded by water with the headline, “Be Worried, Be Very Worried.”
ROMAN MARS: The polar bear had the science, and it had the potential to capture the public. And if the climate activists won their petition, it would be a landmark case, the first species to be protected explicitly because of climate change. And right away, the public seemed to respond.
JON MOOALLEM: The day after the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups filed this petition to get the polar bear listed as endangered, it was immediately splashed on the MSNBC homepage, on CNN… It really got a kind of coverage that you had not seen endangered species and climate change getting in a while. One TV broadcast called it a “shining white symbol of the green movement.”
ROMAN MARS: And one of my favorites from this time is the Vanity Fair cover.
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, so at this time, there was a famous polar bear cub at a German zoo named Knut. He was an adorable, flashy, charismatic creature. And he was paired with another flashy, charismatic creature, Leonardo DiCaprio, and photographed by Annie Leibowitz for Vanity Fair.
ROMAN MARS: But the public didn’t just care about Leonardo DiCaprio. They cared about the petition that was now on the Bush administration’s desk.
JON MOOALLEM: This set a record at the time for the most public comments ever sent to the government for an endangered species petition. They got a half a million letters and postcards and messages. A lot of them were from kids. You had drawings of a polar bear. I found one of a polar bear that’s drowning and then it’s also being eaten simultaneously by a lobster and a shark. You had a letter saying– This fourth grader in Oakland wrote, “I really think it is not fair to the polar bears. Also, they could drown and die off and what if they were you?” I liked another one from a kid named Fritz, who actually proposes a solution to climate change. He’s all in on an ethanol-based solution. He says, “I feel bad about the polar bears. I like polar bears. Everyone can use corn juice for cars. From Fritz.”
ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] Good point, Fritz.
JON MOOALLEM: Yeah. Fritz is ahead of his time. I grew up in the ’80s. To the extent that I thought about polar bears, I did not think about polar bears the way Fritz does or the way that Juan, who wrote about the polar bears drowning, does. It’s just a completely different creature at that point.
ROMAN MARS: The plan was working. And the hope was that if this many people cared about the polar bear, politicians would have to care, too.
JON MOOALLEM: One of the attorneys for the Center for Biological Diversity was talking about the cultural power of the polar bear and said something like, “No politician wants to tell their constituency, ‘Yes, I voted to kill the polar bear.'”
ROMAN MARS: And how did the politicians respond to all this public pressure?
JON MOOALLEM: They were really actually able to wiggle out of it. So, the Bush administration was able to find another kind of procedural loophole. Basically, they were to list the polar bear as a threatened species, rather than an endangered species, and then they could apply something called a “4(d) exception” to it. And basically that was just a legalistic way of saying that these arms of the federal government that are responsible for endangered species just didn’t have the power or the ability to regulate greenhouse gasses. And so we can’t really welcome the polar bear in the ranks of creatures that we’re going to save right now.
ROMAN MARS: Meaning, sure, the polar bear’s existence might be threatened by climate change, but the Endangered Species Act can’t force the government to do what it would take to save the polar bear, which would be regulating greenhouse gasses.
JON MOOALLEM: The Secretary of the Interior at the time, Dirk Kempthorne–that’s who oversees the Endangered Species Program–said in a press conference that he wasn’t going to let a law about animals be quote “abused to make global warming policies.”
So this set off a slew of other lawsuits arguing about even the difference between endangered and threatened and back and forth and back for years between the Center for Biological Diversity and the Bush administration and then the Obama administration, until essentially, despite the public outcry and sympathy for the polar bear, the entire issue just kind of got lost in this rabbit warren of lawsuits and counter lawsuits and semantic rebutting.
ROMAN MARS: It is striking to me that we have this really powerful symbol of climate change–the perfect teddy bear candidate for getting Americans to care about the relationship with nature and about climate change in particular–and it still gets outmaneuvered. It fails. I mean, do you think that the polar bear wasn’t up for the task here, or were we asking the polar bear to do too much?
JON MOOALLEM: I think it’s important to go back to the original intent of that endangered species petition. The original intent wasn’t necessarily to birth a mascot for the climate change movement that would lead the federal government and some of the most entrenched and powerful corporate interests to suddenly change their way of doing business. The intent was simply to find a kind of legal backdoor with that first endangered species petition. It wasn’t part of the plan to have it on the cover of Vanity Fair with Leonardo DiCaprio. But it was like the bear was just so damn charismatic that everyone just lost their minds about it.
ROMAN MARS: Also, the teddy bear phenomenon really didn’t ask people to do too much. Like, the people carried on with their sort of exploitation of the West and hunting. You know, maybe it wasn’t done with quite such complete eradication agenda. But the teddy bear didn’t ask much of us.
JON MOOALLEM: That cartoon of Roosevelt in 1902… It takes 71 years from that moment to get the Endangered Species Act, which actually proposes a way to help that animal. So, I’d like action on climate change to happen a lot faster, but I do think we’re letting a lot of power for people off the hook if we start to wonder what was wrong with the polar bear. I mean, dealing with climate change–we see it much more clearly now than I think we did in the early 2000s, right? There was this feeling back then that if we just got people to accept it and care, we would just solve this thing. And I think that that’s proven to be pretty naive. It’s not just an environmental issue, it’s a housing issue, it’s a migration issue, it’s an economic issue, it’s a social justice issue… It’s hard to just undo that just because enough people want to. So I think it’s naive to think that the polar bear could have solved climate change. And therefore I think it’s naive to say that it was a failure because it didn’t.
ROMAN MARS: One thing you can say for sure is that the polar bear got a lot of people to care about climate change who didn’t before. It successfully became a symbol for an entire movement. But the problem with making any animal a symbol is that you can lose control of it. Climate change deniers started focusing on the polar bear too, using it to debunk the claims that it was in danger.
JON MOOALLEM: Because there was a sense that if you could prove that polar bears were gonna be okay, you were also just proving climate change. I talked to one researcher who was researching snow geese. And he made an argument in a scientific paper that this one population of polar bears–if there was no ice for them to live on for longer and longer periods of time of the year–they could probably subsist by eating snow goose eggs. And this poor guy suddenly was embraced by climate deniers, which he wasn’t. And other polar bear scientists were upset with him, not as far as I could tell because his science was bad, but because he was sort of giving ammunition to the other side. So the symbol, in some sense, became the issue. And we kind of lost sight of what it was all about. It’s very dangerous, I think, when we start to mistake symbols for the whole reality. In a way, they’re like these psychic pack animals. We just heap a lot of our feelings onto their backs. And whatever we say about them, they just always have no comment.
ROMAN MARS: Do you think there’s any hope for the possum to be something that we love the way that they wanted us to love it back in the Billy Possum days?
JON MOOALLEM: It’s not too late, I guess. Maybe as more and more creatures disappear there will be a time in the future when people will think nostalgically about all the opossums that raided their trash cans and think of them as just trying to get by and now we owe it to them.
ROMAN MARS: And that’s our show. Our expert of all things Billy Possum and the polar bear was journalist Jon Mooallem. He’s the author of many books, including Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It’s hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars.
This episode was produced by Brenna Daldorph. Our other producers are Priscilla Alabi and Ellie Lightfoot. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. The series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon-King. Fact-checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real.
From 99% Invisible, our Executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our Executive Producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our Production coordinator is Shan Pill-ay and production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.
99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. BBC studios is headquartered in beautiful… White City… West London.
If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected]
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