A real-world Jurassic Park scenario. The puzzle of immigration, and the immigration of puzzles. The Mapplethorpe x Doolittle collaboration you never imagined. Finding solace in poetry. The inner lives of farm animals. All that—and more—in this week’s edition.

1. What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception. —CLR

2. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Natan Last | The New Yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

So here’s something about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve done them since I was old enough to hold a pen. I’ve written about them. (More than once!) I don’t say this to establish any nerd bona fides, but to make clear that I know from good crossword stories. And in a week when multiple national magazines ran longform pieces about puzzles, Natan Last’s New Yorker feature—which ran in print under the far better headline “Rearrangements”—became one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. A longtime crossword constructor and writer, Last is currently working on a book about you-know-what. Still, this piece contains multitudes in the best way possible. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Ghogre, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords increased his English fluency and ultimately earned him a so-called Einstein visa to the U.S. On another, it uses Ghogre’s story to interrogate the cultural history and linguistic conventions of American-style crosswords—and on a third, it contends with the current movement trying to push those crosswords out of their Western rut and to be more expansive in both their clues and their fill. This conversation has been going on for years among constructors and editors, and the resulting sea change is evident everywhere from the iconic New York Times puzzle to outlets like The New Yorker and USA Today. Yet, Last wraps a human-interest story and a thorny bit of discourse into a bundle that’s accessible to non-solvers while also being sharp and nuanced enough to satisfy obsessives like me. If you didn’t have a clue, now you do. —PR

3. A Work of Love

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This utterly winning Q&A is about “the Noah’s ark you never heard about,” as Radiolab host Lulu Miller puts it in her introduction. Miller talks to John Megahan, an illustrator who spent years secretly drawing detailed pictures of animals engaging in queer behavior: “male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.” The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.” —SD

4. How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Cep profiles poet Christian Wiman who, nearly 20 years ago at age 39—newly married, his life before him—was diagnosed with a “rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” He imagined he had five years to live. As a child, his family’s anger and depression boiled over into violence in fits they referred to as “the sulls.” Wiman, so afflicted, used exercise to quell his feelings until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He made poetry his obsession, “swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes” and later John Milton, thinking that to write great poems, you first must consume them. Cep is nearly invisible in this piece; it’s so carefully researched and written, you feel as though you’re face to face with Wiman as he shares stories and what poetry has meant to him at various stages in his life. Poetry, he has written, is a salve “for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.” Despite that, as Cep notes, when Wiman was in “the cancer chair” undergoing treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to verse. “In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own,” she writes. Cep’s nuanced profile is a testament to dogged determination, coming to grips with faith—both in God and the power of poetry—and the feat of sheer will against despair. —KS

5. What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A couple of years ago, my downstairs neighbors kept chickens. (Finger, Tender, and Nugget. I take no responsibility for the names.) These sassy ladies realized that I was a soft touch, and every day merrily hopped up the stairs to my deck to peer in through the patio door, awaiting kitchen scraps. I soon noticed that when I got up and opened my bedroom curtains, the chickens peered up from the yard. Curtains open, they would race up the stairs: the café was in business. These girls were so on the ball that I have not eaten a chicken since we became acquainted. It’s little wonder, then, that I pounced on this investigation into research on the complexity of thinking in farm animals, an area I have mused on since the food-savvy chickens but that is often ignored by scientists. David Grimm bravely faces the “cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails” and “sour miasma of pig excrement” to enter the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) and learn about the questions being asked there, such as do cows have friends? (Considering that scientists have potty-trained cows here, I think they probably do.) Grimm keeps the tone light—sliding in a few quips between the science—but still provides a comprehensive overview of the work. With a staggering 78 billion farm animals on Earth, it is time we gave them more thought. —CW

Audience Award

What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?

As the asterisk implies, the dodo* wouldn’t be a real dodo, in the strictest sense. It would be a genetic hybrid, a calculated reinterpretation of a dodo—ideally bearing some traits of its namesake but perhaps also those of the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, whose cells will be manipulated to express the physical traits of the extinct species. A Nicobar pigeon in all its gothic iridescence is certainly beautiful, but it is not a dodo. And with no real dodos around to teach this new bird how to be a dodo, it may behave like a different bird. Is this dodo* worth it?

If we reach a point where native ecosystems have been restored, conservation is abundantly and globally funded, governments have taken meaningful and equitable action against climate change, no species are endangered by our presence on the planet, and people no longer live in poverty that makes poaching a rhino horn or mammoth tusk a necessary trade-off for survival, then sure: Let the dodos* and mammoths* frolic. But in the world we live in, spending lots of money to inflict unknown degrees of suffering on living and dying animals in pursuit of creating hybrids that will require immense and expensive assistance to survive on their own amid vanishing wilds does not just seem misguided. It seems funereal.

Species go extinct all the time—most slip in silence out of this world, where they once forged a careful place for themselves, without ceremony or eulogy or mourning. But the ivorybill will not go quietly. Like any we love, it will go with weeping and gnashing of teeth and a litany of mea culpas, because after all, the Lord God Bird has become, through its beauty and its resurrections and its champions, more than a bird—it is a story; a tragedy, a cautionary tale, of how we let a symbol of the South’s wildest, most mysterious heart slip away. And like the ancient mariner who shot the albatross, we are compelled to tell the tale. It haunts us.

What will you do, I ask Harrison, if they declare the ivorybill extinct? At his age, the bulky batteries that power the trolling motor feel heavier. Stepping in and out of the canoe demands more balance. Loading up the van for the five-hour drive to Arkansas takes longer than it once did. “The ivorybill itself isn’t likely to notice that the government declared it extinct,” he answers. “As long as I’m able, I’ll be out here searching.”

Sam Keck Scott| Longreads | March 2022 | 15 minutes (4,070 words)

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

The big yellow machine casts up a brown blizzard of dust, adding to the trouble of seeing any small bodies attempting to run or slither for their lives. I chase the fleeing field mice and pocket gophers, pinching them at the backs of their necks, and stuff them into the pocket of my orange safety vest, already bulging with the wriggling bodies of alligator lizards and western skinks. 

Better that pocket than the other, where a two-foot gopher snake is coiled up, its head poking out from this alien world of fluorescent orange, where it slowly unspools its slender body, the color of wet hay, up my torso. Again and again, I coax it back in using the heel of my palm, waiting for the mayhem to cease long enough to walk across the busy road to the edge of a dry creek bed, where I unceremoniously dump them all in a squirming pile below a blackberry thicket. Homeless, but alive. 

To the rest of the construction crew, I must look ridiculous — stooped over, racing this way and that through a cloud of dust, filling my pockets with small creatures as the rotary mixer nips at my heels. But I’ve learned not to care. No matter how I appear, the biologist will always be the outcast on these projects. 

When I walk away from the machine, I can’t tell where the dust ends and the smoke begins. Once again, the air in California is lethal to breathe, bruised gray and purple, burning my eyes and throat as I stand in it day after day. But this year is different — this year I need two separate masks to juggle two separate calamities. When alone, the N95 with a one-way valve is superior for filtering smoke, but when close to others I quickly switch to my cloth mask for the virus, knowing the valve won’t protect them from my potentially deadly exhalations. It’s late summer, 2020, and we’re all still beginners at learning to live with an invisible killer.

Some animals don’t flee when the mixer comes. They hold their ground. Wait for the trouble to pass. But nothing in their evolution has prepared them for an eight-foot-wide drum covered in corkscrewing blades coming straight towards their soft bodies where they hunker in their meadow homes. The rotary mixer penetrates the ground 20 inches deep, turning the hard-packed earth into fluffy, aerated, hydrated soil in tidy rows. It’s a dream machine if you need to turn a lumpy field into the future site of a housing development, but it’s a science-fiction nightmare if you’re a vole or a praying mantis or a king snake; a slender salamander, an earthworm, a deer mouse, or a Jerusalem cricket. The ones who don’t flee will be ground into sausage and mixed evenly into the soil, and sometimes are so pulverized they become more mist than matter. Within an hour of the first pass of the mixer, crows appear by the dozens to peck at the peppered bits of the animals I failed to save. 

My job is not to save any of these animals. But since I’m here, I try. The only reason the development company was forced to hire a biologist, as they are on every housing development being built on the Santa Rosa Plain, is for a small population of a single species of salamander — the federally endangered Sonoma County population of the California tiger salamander — an animal once prolific in this part of Northern California, now almost entirely wiped out. 

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

Before European settlers colonized this area, one could scarcely come up with a place more perfectly suited to the unique needs of tiger salamanders than the Santa Rosa Plain — a lush mosaic of lakes, creeks, wetlands, vernal pools, riparian forests, grasslands, and oak savannah. A hummocky world of wet depressions and dry rises — as if the land itself was as amphibious as the salamanders who thrived there. 

Tiger salamanders live a double life — they need both wet and dry places in close proximity. For most of the year, they stay underground in the burrows of other animals, or in large cracks in the adobe soil. But when the rains come, they emerge from their subterranean lairs to migrate in their slow, salamandery way: padding out across the land to a nearby breeding pond, which must be ephemeral to ensure no predatory fish can take up residence in them. After breeding, the adults move upland again, leaving their eggs to hatch into larvae, who metamorphose either quickly or slowly depending on the speed at which their pool is drying up. Once the larvae grow legs, maturing into juveniles who breathe air through lungs instead of gills, they too migrate upland to find an underground home, where they remain for the two to five years it will take them to reach breeding age.

I thought a lot about tiger salamanders during the early weeks of the pandemic, drawing inspiration from these masters of sheltering-in-place. I live in a trailer, which normally suits me just fine — I find small spaces comforting, and too many possessions stressful, so the trailer offers the perfect constraint. But when shelter-in-place began in March, my trailer quickly shrank around me. I morphed into a subterranean animal living in a narrow, aluminum burrow, aestivating during the dry months, waiting for rain. Waiting for a vaccine. Waiting for anyone to tell me anything that felt true or useful. 

Time thickened, then congealed. I hunched over, shuffling around in my sweatpants. One step to the fridge, two to the bathroom, one to the bed, three to the door. This trailer was only meant to be a home base for my life on the move as a field biologist. A way to hack the Bay Area’s obscene rental market — one of the highest in the nation. Not a place to weather a global pandemic. Alone. 

After months of being stuck inside, treating my groceries like hazardous waste until I’d washed them with soap, and growing tired of my own cooking, it was tiger salamanders who finally coaxed me out of my burrow — or at least the possibility of them. A few months into the pandemic, developers had found their way onto the essential worker’s list, and I got the call about 42 new townhouses being built in a vacant lot in Santa Rosa. 

“Vacant” being a relative term. Without needing to see it, I knew the site would be home to many living things. And it was. The first day on the job, I saw fence and alligator lizards, a garter snake, western skink, piles of fox shit, many birds. I also found the recent remains of a human encampment, as I always do at the beginning of these projects. Vacant, according to the company preparing to develop the land, meant the lot was empty of any living thing willing to pay money to be there.

What I didn’t find in that lot were any tiger salamanders. And I knew I wouldn’t. They’re endangered for a reason. The needs of tiger salamanders are far too specific for them to be living in a bone-dry, weedy lot like this, penned in by urban sprawl, and nowhere near a breeding pool — long ago amputated from the last life-supporting places of tiger salamanders in Sonoma County. But as the yellow machines stripped the land bare like a swarm of gargantuan locusts, I spent day after day looking for them anyway, filling the pockets of my safety vest with the struggling bodies of all those we aren’t mandated to care about. 

“You’ve been out here every day for two weeks and still haven’t found one of them salamanders?” the foreman said to me one morning, appearing beside me and slapping me on the back while I watched an excavator dig up a waterline.

“Not yet,” I replied, stepping away, his handprint glowing on my shoulder blade like a coronavirus starburst. 

“Then what’s the point of having you out here if there aren’t any?” he asked me, maskless.

“Well, there’s always a chance there are,” I told him, despite knowing there almost certainly wasn’t. “They used to be all over before we dried up the Laguna,” I added.

He looked around at this dusty, flat, unremarkable place, surrounded by houses, a nearby high school, storefronts with blinking neon signs, busy roads. I’m guessing that’s all he saw. I’m guessing he wasn’t imagining what this place used to look like, only a few generations ago, like I was. 

He stepped forward, peering into the eight-foot trench. 

“There’s too much fucking clay in this soil!” he barked, saying it to no one in particular, before walking away.

I wanted to yell at him that there’s too much fucking clay in this soil because it used to be a wetland. There’s too much fucking clay in this soil because this place once teemed with profusions of wet, aquatic life. But I kept quiet, staying in my narrow lane — only here for the nonexistent salamanders. 

Before Europeans settled the Santa Rosa Plain and turned it into cow pasture and high-intensity agricultural land — smearing it with chemicals and shopping centers; bifurcating it with roadways and irrigation canals; before they dried it up, domesticated it, and sucked the green lush life from its spongy soil, turning the land and its grasses the dead-gray of roadside cardboard — the Santa Rosa Plain was dripping and oozing with life, sprinting, squirming, squiggling, crawling, flapping, splashing and growling across its skies and lands and waters.

Grizzly bears were here, wading up to their haunches in cool, clear water never touched by agrochemicals, hormones, antibiotics, or gasoline. Salmon pushed up rushing creeks and rivers, skipping over each other’s backs, beating past the swiping claws of the bears, big as catcher’s mitts. Waterfowl blackened the sky like living, billowing curtains, honking and calling, shitting an even coat of nutrient-rich fertilizer across every inch of the land, sending a chaos of plant life bursting skywards. Pronghorn grazed at the wetland’s edges, stalked by cougar slinking down through the purple manzanita of the foothills, while condors with nine-foot wingspans cast sharp, slicing shadows over the land, searching for bloat, for stink, for blood — of which there was plenty. At night, bats swooped and hunted through a thick, sonic stew of frog chorus, and coyotes curdled the air with their manic songs whenever the silver moon rose in the east. And of course, there were people here then too. The Southern Pomo built tule balsa rafts and lived in tule huts all over the Santa Rosa Plain, fishing for salmon with hooks chipped from chert. Hunting black-tailed deer and pronghorn. Gathering fat acorns in baskets woven from willow branches. Coexisting with all this life.

And amidst the flurry, the tiger salamanders — their dark, stalky bodies splotched in archipelagos of sunlit buttercup as they ambushed spiders in the darkness of gopher burrows. Tiger salamanders, their yellow lips giving them the appearance of a dopey grin, twisting their wet, rubbery bodies around each other in breeding ponds. Tiger salamander larvae boiling in every vernal pool dotting the plain, the external lungs behind their heads swaying like aquatic lion’s manes. Tiger salamanders dragging their heavy tails as they migrate by the thousands on the first big rain of the year: a clumsy procession of yellow speckles moving in slow motion over hills; through tall, swaying grasses; past the brown, humped mountains of sleeping grizzlies. A few getting speared and eaten by herons and egrets along the way, or batted in the air by bobcats, ground up by rapacious badgers, or swallowed whole by snakes. But they kept going, determined to get to their breeding ponds at any cost — determined to make more tiger salamanders. The only ones in the world who can. 

This was not so long ago. This wasn’t the Pleistocene or some other far-flung time in the past. This was less than 200 years ago. Individual koi fish have been known to live longer than that. Only 100 years ago the Santa Rosa Plain was closer to that throng of life than to what it is today — traffic, bad air, car dealerships glinting in the sunlight. Townhouses crammed between townhouses crammed between townhouses. 

The reason tiger salamanders are no longer proliferating as they once did is not for lack of effort. Nowadays, on the first big rain of the year, they are run over by the dozens as they slowly cross busy roads separating their underground homes from breeding ponds, drawn by the strength of a giant magnet born of tens of thousands of years of instinct. Local biologists have learned where some of the busier crossings tend to be and will spend all night standing in the rain escorting salamanders safely from one side to the other, headlights whipping past them at 70 miles per hour. But these efforts are not enough to counteract what we’ve done to the land in Sonoma County. 

In less than a geologic blink of an eye, 95% of the breeding habitat of the Sonoma County population of the California tiger salamander is now gone or under direct threat from development. And it isn’t just the salamanders who are suffering. Some of the largest grizzly bears in the world used to live where I live — the last one shot by white settlers in California in 1922. Gray wolves were also trapped and shot into local extinction in California, though after 90 years of absence, a small pack has recently reentered the Golden State, mounting a quiet comeback — godspeed. Pronghorn, a short-necked relative of the giraffe, left the Santa Rosa Plain long ago, as did the California condor, after nearly going extinct due to lead poisoning from the bullets filling the bodies of the countless animals left to rot across the landscape. 

According to the historical records of the Laguna Foundation in Santa Rosa, an individual hunter killed 6,200 ducks by himself in 1892 to supply markets in San Francisco. One morning I noticed seven Canada geese standing in the center of our project site. When the construction crew arrived, firing up the yellow machines, this anemic flock flew off to look for some other marginal place to scrape out an existence. As I watched them fly away, I didn’t see seven geese in the sky above me — I saw the ghosts of the thousands of birds that were no longer there, replaced instead by a sky toxic with smoke. 

None of this is normal, yet we treat it as if it is. And it isn’t just Northern California that’s changed — the entire planet has. All the way down to the fish in the sea.

As a species, we suffer from a sort of collective amnesia brought on by a phenomenon called “shifting baseline syndrome.” Shifting baselines are what allow each new generation of people to be born into a world that appears “normal” to them, even as their grandparents loudly lament “the way things used to be.” Those lamentations die with the older generation, and the new generation begins the process over, now bemoaning the changes they’ve witnessed in their short lifetimes, while their children and grandchildren are born into worlds that appear perfectly normal to them. And so on. 

A classic example of shifting baseline syndrome was discovered by marine biologist Loren McClenachan when she found a series of historic photographs all taken in the same place on a wharf in Key West, Florida. The photos show people displaying their day’s fishing catch in front of a hanging board throughout the decades, beginning in 1956 up until 2007. As the years slip past, the fish on display get smaller and smaller and smaller. At first, in the 1950s, they are mighty behemoths hanging from hooks, taller than the people who caught them, averaging 43.8 pounds. But by 2007, the average weight of the fish is only five pounds, held proudly in the hands of the anglers with no exertion whatsoever. Yet, what is most striking about these photographs isn’t the shrinking fish, but rather the smiles on the faces of these pleased fisherpeople, which lose none of their brightness throughout the decades, even as their catches become preposterously diminished. This is shifting baseline syndrome. We keep smiling, ignorant to the fact that the natural world, which we rely on for survival, is disappearing beneath our feet, and in our very hands. 

Recently, we’ve reached a point where the ecological changes are happening too fast and are too destructive for us to continue in this ignorance. Shifting baseline syndrome may have helped to bring the Big Bad Wolf to our door, but climate change, habitat loss, and pollution have blown the house down. Or in the case of my home state of California: burned the house down.

Growing up in Northern California, I never remember the sky filling with smoke. Not once. Wildfires, if I heard about them at all, were burning “over there” somewhere, out of sight, and nothing for me to fear. Not anymore. 2020 marked the fourth straight year Sonoma County was either on fire itself or smothered by the toxic smoke of other fires — or both — as it became the largest, most destructive fire season in California’s history. 

During a day off from looking for salamanders, I found myself stuck in my trailer again. The air quality outside — measured in PM2.5 — was in the 370s. Anything above 300 is considered by the EPA to be hazardous to human health, and anything above 151 is categorized as unhealthy. The air temperature was 95˚F. I had no choice but to keep every window and door sealed shut because of the smoke, but my trailer sits in direct sunlight, and the indoor temperature quickly outpaced the heat outside. Sweat poured down my body as if in a sauna at full furnace. My chest tightened. I felt squeezed by the hands of some invisible giant. I couldn’t tell if it was claustrophobia or if I was actually running out of breathable air. I paced around my narrow home, leaving wet footprints across the wood floors — the air a hot, toxic porridge both inside and out. Panicked, I went to the window, looking out across the farm where my trailer is parked. Normally I see green hills and old red barns out that window, but on this day, I could barely see the outline of my truck, parked only 15’ away — a vague shape in a brown-gray hellscape. 

My chest squeezed tighter. I had to find some good air to breathe. I held the door handle, ready to burst out of this sweltering aluminum pillbox, but there was nowhere to go. I was trapped. If I opened the door, the air inside my trailer would only get worse. This wasn’t simply the smoke of charred forests, but countless human structures as well, filled with paint, asbestos, burned-out cars, garages full of half-empty gas cans, lacquers, engine oil, cleaning supplies. I remembered two years earlier when the smoke from the fire that destroyed the entire town of Paradise settled over Sonoma County, and I’d wondered if I was breathing dead bodies. If the ash on my truck was someone’s uncle, or mother. 

Black bear, or rattlesnake.

I fell face-first onto my small couch, pressing my nose and mouth into a pillow, trying to calm down. I thought of the salamanders — how they breathe air through both their skin and lungs and how easily polluted their small, squishy bodies are. When the smoke rolls into their cramped burrows, what will this rancid air do to them? Will any tiger salamanders crawl out this winter when the rains finally come? If they come? Or will they all die in there? Smoked. Jerkied. Little golden-flecked mummies, hard as old bubblegum. Will anyone notice? Will tiger salamanders make the news if we kill off the last one? Will people finally realize how cute they were, and wonder why no one had told them earlier, before it was too late? 

According to ancient belief, salamanders have nothing to fear from fire. The Talmud describes salamanders as being born of fire, and that anyone who covered themselves in the blood of salamanders would be immune to burning. In Greek, the name salamander means “fire lizard.” Both Pliny the Elder and Aristotle claimed that salamanders could extinguish fires with their wet, icy skin. Leonardo da Vinci said that salamanders have “no digestive organs, and get no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin.” People also long believed that the fire-proof substance, asbestos, was made from the “fur” of salamanders. It’s thought that these archaic misconceptions arose from the fact that salamanders often burrow beneath, and sometimes inside of, rotting wood, and throughout history, as people placed these logs into their fires, salamanders would crawl out of the flames. 

I found myself wishing the mythology of the fire lizards was true. As the August Complex Fire, California’s first-ever “gigafire”— one that is larger than a million acres — burned to the north of me, and the nearby hillsides around Santa Rosa were an inferno to the east, and the Santa Cruz Mountains to my south were engulfed in flames until they ran straight into the sea,  I wished that somehow, in the charred wake of all this destruction, millions of salamanders would materialize. Slow-motion phoenixes rising from the ashes with their long tails, fat legs, yellow spots, and a knowing look in their wet, protruding eyes that says: We come from where you’re headed, and you’re not going to like it there. 

But of course, tiger salamanders, like most other lifeforms, will not emerge from these fires, but will instead be destroyed by them. 

“Why should I care about some salamander anyway?” 

It’s a question I get from the construction crew on nearly every job site, and you can replace salamander with whatever species I might be there to protect: dusky-footed woodrats, Alameda whipsnakes, red-legged frogs, desert tortoise. 

“We have houses to build for actual human beings; isn’t that more important?”

Well, yes, sure. But also, no. We need tiger salamanders, and all other plants and animals, because what’s killing them is also killing us. A California with a healthy tiger salamander population is a place where we’re all healthier. Tiger salamanders need both undisturbed habitat and enough clean, unpolluted water to fill their breeding pools every year. They don’t have it. It’s the same reason you might not have enough water in your well. It’s the same reason farmers can’t keep their crops from drying out. It’s the same reason cities are fighting over and diverting distant streams to keep the taps flowing. And it’s the reason why California had its first gigafire last year, which will surely not be the last, just as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will not be the last virus to spill from the bloodstreams of animals into our own, with our endless, violent encroachment into wildlands. 

My job is to protect the disappearing animal species of California. I think of these animals as ambassadors to the apocalypse. Tiger salamanders are trying to tell us something by their very disappearance — if the world isn’t healthy enough for us, it isn’t healthy enough for you either. We would be wise to heed the warnings of those species who are showing us where we’re all headed, because there is no more urgent form of communication than going extinct. 

***

I dream of water. Every day, as I wake to more smoke, more news of another fire ripping through nearby hills, I dream of heavy clouds galloping, gathering, rolling in from the sea — white-gray baskets sloshing with clean rainwater that burst open as they sweep across the West, drenching us, rinsing us, reminding us of what this world could, and should be. So much water that each dimple in the landscape fills up, turns green and writhes with life again. I dream of a world where people don’t simply care about the many creatures we share this planet with, but celebrate them. A world where tiger salamanders migrate by the thousands on the first good rain of the year again — so many they walk over each other’s backs — all of them wet and vigorous, breathing pure air through yellow-speckled skin, while the people come outside to line up and watch. Cheering them on.

***

Sam Keck Scott is a writer and wildlife biologist living in Northern California. His work has appeared in Outside, Orion, and Terrain.org, among others. He can be found at @samkeckscott

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

I don’t often get to use the term gobsmacked, but that is how I was rendered when I saw the film Jurassic Park. I remember the 1993 cinema trip vividly: clutching my popcorn, wide-eyed, as the first dinosaur, a brachiosaurus, ambled across the screen. Walking out with my parents, I jabbered with excitement: “Could we really make dinosaurs real again, Dad? Could we? Could we?”

These memories came flooding back as I read Natasha Bernal’s piece in Wired UK, exploring the world of biobanking animal cells. Bernal answers the question of whether extinct animals could be brought back with a tentative yes — science has long proved that “frozen cells from extinct animals could potentially be used to revive species” — but that is not what biobanking is about. The intention is to increase the diversity of living species, cloning to prevent further loss, rather than to bring back what is already gone. As a species dwindles, so does its genetic pool, and frozen cells from extinct animals could potentially be used to help prevent extreme inbreeding. 

Bernal’s case study is Tullis Mason, a chap who sports “three-quarter length shorts” even in a lab coat. Matson runs an artificial insemination company for racehorses from his family’s farm in Shropshire, England. However, on the side, he is also planning to save the animal kingdom by building the biggest biobank of animal cells in Europe. It’s not always a dignified business, with Bernal describing Mason hooking an elephant penis into a device that looks like “a huge condom,” but the science and the ethics her article explores are fascinating. We may not be about to bring dinosaurs back to life, but with help from biobanking, life already on this planet might still find a way.

This is why, back at Matson’s farm, there is a tiny, black, felt-like ear and two bat testicles the size of olive pits on a lab bench. The Seba’s short-tailed bats at Chester Zoo are usually housed in the Fruit Bat Forest, where visitors can feed them as part of a £56 “experience”. Though not currently listed as endangered, with global biodiversity at a tipping point, it’s likely that no species is entirely safe. This bat died of natural causes, but its genetic material will live on.

The first thing that Lucy Morgan, a scientific advisor at Nature’s SAFE, does is shave the ear. “Ears grow to a certain extent throughout our lifetime, so they’re a cell type that’s already wanting to grow and regenerate itself,” she says. “So when choosing a sample that you’re trying to pick to culture in the future, it’s a good one.”

She puts the ear to soak in chlorhexidine to clean it from bacteria and switches on a timer. After two minutes, she transfers it to a petri dish, and starts cutting it into small pieces the size of chocolate chips. Using tweezers, she puts them in cryovials filled with cryopreservant. The tiny testicles will be preserved whole. They couldn’t get any semen out of them – a common problem for animals that are too small to preserve in the traditional manner.

Safely pipetted into a cryovial or straw, an animal’s tissue, semen or ova are deposited into the cryogenic tank, ready to be unfrozen when they may be needed for repopulation programmes in zoos or, if feasible, the wild. In the case of some creatures, whose anatomical challenges do not currently permit artificial insemination using sperm or ova, the samples may stay there for decades. For now, all of Nature’s SAFE’s samples are in one location, but the charity aims to build a backup so that tissue can be split into different places and safeguarded for the future.

You’ve probably slammed on your brakes after a squirrel darted in front of your car. (Maybe, one time, you didn’t slam your brakes fast enough.) Imagine a road through a rainforest or a tropical savanna, a road teeming with not just passenger cars but logging trucks and mining equipment and heavy machinery, the carriers of industry. That is Brazil’s BR-262. Measured by roadkill, it is one of the earth’s deadliest roads for wildlife. BR-262 cuts across Brazil from the Atlantic coast to the Bolivian border and is causing the rapid decline of Brazil’s iconic giant anteaters through direct collisions and habitat fragmentation. And it’s one of many similar roads in Brazil, which has the fourth largest road network on earth.

For The Atlantic, Ben Goldfarb travels 112 miles of BR-262 to assess the disturbing impact roads have on wildlife, and how scientists and the burgeoning field of road ecology work to understand and moderate that impact. Roads do improve peoples’ quality of life, but there also are what he calls “the brutal costs of infrastructure.”

Often, practicing road ecology means knowing when a road shouldn’t be carved at all. Fernanda Zimmermann Teixeira, an ecologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, pointed out to me that no amount of eco-friendly engineering can blunt the habitat destruction that will follow the paving of certain Amazonian tracks. It occurred to me that, in a tragic twist, wildlife crossings and fences could even become a form of green-washing, a cynical tactic for laundering a harmful road’s environmental reputation. “We cannot talk only about mitigation—you have to talk about avoiding roads,” Teixeira said. “Passages won’t make any difference if we change the whole land use and burn everything.”

Yet new routes are coming, whether we’re prepared or not. The International Energy Agency has estimated that more than 15 million miles of new road lanes will be built by 2050, nearly 90 percent of them in the developing world—a trend the ecologist William Laurance calls an “infrastructure tsunami.” Many of the regions slated for massive road networks—Sumatra, Central Asia’s steppe, the Peruvian Amazon—harbor our planet’s most intact habitat.

Conservationists have staved off some especially frightening projects: A highway that would sunder the Serengeti’s wildebeest migration lies dormant, fought to a standstill by local activists. But the Hydra only sprouts new heads, forcing scientists into hard decisions. “The way I see it, many of these roads are going to be built whether we like it or not,” Rodney van der Ree, an Australian road ecologist who often consults with foreign governments, told me. He recently helped persuade officials in Myanmar (also known as Burma) to add underpasses to a highway that could disrupt the movements of leopards, tigers, and elephants. “From a biodiversity standpoint, they shouldn’t build the road at all,” van der Ree said, “but at least it’s a better outcome than it was.”

Read the story

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Ashley Braun | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (4,191 words)

On a crisp December afternoon, I convince my sister’s family to visit an unusual exhibit in the Cincinnati Zoo. Countless holiday lights glow in the surrounding trees as we walk toward a statue roughly the size of a chicken. The sculpture is of a pigeon, and we stand admiring how it gracefully arcs its smooth, bronze neck toward the sky while bending down its saw-toothed tail.

This memory of a bird recalls Martha, the very last passenger pigeon on earth, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in 1914. Most zoo-goers breeze past the sculpture, as if this pigeon were of no more interest than the kind that pecks through garbage. After we approach, my nieces, ages 5 and 11, flank the statue, downhill from a quiet Japanese-style pagoda, the aviary where Martha had spent her final years.

“Do you know what extinction means?” I ask the girls. They nod.

It’s when bad people come after you and kidnap you, ventures the 5-year-old. I smile, and as we walk into Martha’s pagoda, I try to explain what happens when the last of a living thing dies and there are no more like it anywhere, and never will be again.

Aunt of the year, I had just revealed a bitter truth to my 5-year-old niece.

I soon learned, however, that extinction is not actually so straightforward. We humans tend to tinker, to tweak. We try to fix what we have broken. Even as we attempt to preserve other living things — northern white rhinoceros, California condor, black-footed ferret — we change them. And that’s nothing new in human history.

“We have been doing this for as long as we have existed,” paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro tells me. “It’s not as if we have been completely innocent of manipulating species for the last 100,000 years.”

We hunt, breed, cultivate, and domesticate. Directly and indirectly, we leave the annotations of humanity written in the spaces where creatures live, in the quality of their neighborhoods, in their behavior, and even in the makeup of their DNA.

That’s true even for species like the passenger pigeon, which, as I told my surprised nieces, some researchers are trying to bring back from extinction. Or at least, they’re trying to bring back a façade of one.

Biotech to the Rescue?

Advances in biotechnology, from unlocking a creature’s genetic code to reprogramming the trajectory of its cells and editing its genes, are opening up new possibilities for conservation biology. With these tools in hand, humans are now confronted with opportunities previously relegated to imagination or science fiction. They offer astounding potential for making edits carefully, precisely, intentionally. They are giving renewed hope for still-struggling species pulled from the brink of extinction — and for species that human actions have already pushed over that edge.

However, humanity’s attempts to correct or rebalance our previous tinkerings with nature have sometimes led to further disaster. In 1935, cane toads arrived in Australia, brought from South and Central America to gobble up the beetles plaguing Queensland’s sugar cane fields. But these toxic toads poisoned and devastated a number of species, including the curious-looking and carnivorous marsupial known as the northern quoll. By 2003, the Australian government moved an insurance population of quolls to offshore islands free of cane toads. In 2015, after successfully training some of these house cat–sized animals to avoid the taste of cane toads, researchers reintroduced quolls to a national park on the mainland. But the island sanctuaries, also free of quoll predators like the dingo, became another kind of undoing: The trained quolls passed over eating cane toads, yes, but suddenly they became easy dinner for dingoes, who wiped out most of the reintroduced animals. In just over a decade without predators, quolls became naive to creatures they had spent 3,500 years evolving to escape.

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, hunting and pollution from DDT, among other factors, led California sea lion populations to plummet in the mid-20th century. With the help of strong legal protections passed in 1972, the population of these marine mammals has skyrocketed, heralding a successful recovery. So successful, in fact, that sea lions have become a pest in the efforts to preserve imperiled salmon and steelhead, long-dwindling fish species pinched by dammed rivers and shrinking habitat. Since 2008, sea lions voraciously dining on endangered fish near the Bonneville Dam, at the border of Oregon and Washington, have been targeted for lethal removal by the government. Nature is a tangled web of relationships, and the sea lions serve as a fable for human triumph in preserving one species while failing to save others intricately connected to it.

Ben Novak, the lead scientist working to rekindle the spirit of the passenger pigeon, helped me begin to understand some of the complexities of extinction. Since he was a teenager in North Dakota, Novak has been enamored with these hypersocial birds, legendary for blackening the skies over eastern and midwestern North America with flocks of more than a billion in the 1800s.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

“De-extinction was never about creating replicas of extinct species. We can’t,” Novak says. Instead, he explains, it is about creating something that looks and acts like an extinct species, an imitation that can fill an ecological hole caused by extinction.

Novak works for the nonprofit Revive & Restore, which is exploring de-extinction for the passenger pigeon, heath hen, and woolly mammoth. But that “reviving” work is only part of his organization’s mission; the majority of its work focuses on restoring threatened species that haven’t yet gone extinct. Unifying this work, as Tom Maloney, the nonprofit’s former conservation science director, tells me, is the drive to explore and develop potential “genomic and biotech tools to address some conservation challenges today.”

Years of human-caused problems, including overhunting, habitat loss, and introduced diseases, have fractured and shrunk many wildlife populations. Smaller, scattered groups can become genetically isolated and inbred. On top of potential impacts like infertility, low genetic diversity means fewer options for species to adapt to changing environments.

Imagine a species’ entire population as a series of interconnected ponds. Individuals — and their genes — can flow between ponds when they overcome various barriers, such as geography. The more individuals, the larger the ponds. The more genes, the more options for life to find ways to thrive. A fairly successful yet underused approach to fixing the problems in a species with small, disconnected “ponds,” or populations, involves bringing new animals — and by association, their new genes — from one pond to another to boost its growth, a technique known as “genetic rescue.” This becomes more challenging when a species is reduced to a single pond.

As Maloney explains, Revive & Restore wants to evaluate today’s biotechnology tools — such as genome sequencing and genetic engineering — and their potential for taking genetic rescue to the next level. Sequencing a black-footed ferret genome reveals the complete DNA package of that species and can help decipher things like where genes responsible for certain traits are located, what those genes affect, and how much genetic variation exists for a trait. These insights — knowing which genes lead to a drop in ferret fertility, for example — could hypothetically guide wildlife managers to introduce ferrets with certain genetic profiles from one population to another.

The Black-Footed Ferret’s Disappearing Act

The next step could mean moving from genetic insights to an intervention like genetic engineering for black-footed ferrets, an exploratory effort with which Novak is also deeply involved. While that move may sound desperate compared to more traditional conservation measures, the prospects for these raccoon-masked relatives of the common ferret have been desperate for a long time.

With swift, serpentine bodies and keen, bewhiskered noses, black-footed ferrets are built to hunt prairie dogs. They live in the sprawling burrows of, and feast almost exclusively on, these rodents, a quirk of evolution that served this member of the weasel family well until Europeans began ranching and farming the North American Great Plains. European Americans brought habitat destruction, poison, and, via a ship from Asia, the non-native sylvatic plague to the American West, decimating both prairie dogs and their once-top predator.

Twice in the 20th century, black-footed ferrets, whose habit of popping their heads out of burrows lends them an inquisitive air, were presumed extinct. Then, in 1981, after a ranch dog named Shep brought home a dead ferret, biologists sought out and found a pocket of these ferrets alive near a small Wyoming town. With plague and canine distemper virus threatening to wipe out the newly rediscovered species, researchers gathered the remaining ferrets into captivity. Eighteen survived, but some were closely related, which meant that, genetically speaking, the entire species appeared to have been reduced to seven individual animals.

“That’s how we got to be in such poor genetic shape,” says Travis Livieri, a wildlife biologist who has worked with these ferrets since 1995. “Which is kind of where Revive & Restore comes in.”

While a captive breeding and reintroduction program has boosted the population of black-footed ferrets up to about 650 animals today, roughly split between captivity and the wild, they have shown signs of fertility issues, and all ferrets require immunization against plague.

“Giving a vaccination and a booster shot to every single ferret that’s born in the wild is not a sustainable plan,” Maloney says.

Still, two black-footed ferrets who died in the 1980s — but whose genes aren’t represented in today’s population — persist in the San Diego Zoo’s Frozen Zoo. Here, cells from each animal live on in vials, frozen to around -321 degrees Fahrenheit in shining vats of liquid nitrogen. In 2014, Revive & Restore sequenced their genomes as well as those of two modern black-footed ferrets, one of which was sired in 2010 using frozen sperm taken from a wild ferret from the 1980s. The results offered hope that researchers can turn frozen ferret DNA into a genetic booster shot for today’s populations.

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

While the black-footed ferret’s population “pond” has grown in size, much of its genetic diversity was lost when the waters shriveled in the 1900s. Like a pond with low levels of oxygen in its waters, life isn’t impossible for the ferrets, but it is more challenging. Ferret managers want to stir up those proverbial waters and add more oxygen.

Along these lines, in 2018, Revive & Restore acquired an endangered species recovery permit for its pilot experiments to evaluate genomic options that might boost the ferret’s genetic diversity and solve its ongoing plague problem. Currently in the petri dish phase, the team is attempting to clone the cells of a modern domestic ferret and a black-footed ferret that isn’t genetically unique, key steps before making attempts with the precious three-decades-old frozen cells.

Another challenge is getting the ferrets’ immune response from the plague vaccine — their antibodies — to become a trait that wild parents can pass to their young. The research team is starting in lab mice to test delivering the plague antibody’s DNA instructions, which usually appear in immune cells, into fertilized eggs using a virus. The aim is for the offspring of those mice to inherit that immunity. Pending these results, Revive & Restore would seek another federal permit, and welcome public input, before cloning or genetically engineering a living, breathing black-footed ferret.

“It sounds really like high-tech science fiction,” says Revive & Restore’s Bridget Baumgartner, who is working in the lab on the black-footed ferret effort. But the transgenic animals would produce the same antibodies as vaccinated animals. “We’re just skipping the vaccination step.”

Conservation biology experts are fascinated at the possibility of genetically altering ferrets to innately resist plague. Sarah Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor at Michigan State University who researches conservation genetics at its Kellogg Biological Station, thinks Revive & Restore’s immunity effort “could be a great example of when genetic engineering has realistic potential to help conserve a species.” She was less optimistic, however, about the nonprofit’s long-term prospects for rejuvenating ferret diversity, expressing several reservations. For starters, ferrets have a quick generation time and could undergo a lot of adaptation to their particular environments in just a few decades. Introducing genes from animals that lived in the 1980s — who are missing those adaptations — might actually set back a population living in a 21st-century environment. In addition, something called “genomic swamping” can occur when a small, inbred population quickly becomes overwhelmed by a very successful but limited boost in genetic variation. Soon, almost everyone in that population may become related to the newcomers, actually speeding up inbreeding.

Livieri, who has consulted with the team at Revive & Restore, welcomes its pioneering approach. “Plague and genetic diversity are huge challenges. That’s not something that is just going to magically go away over time,” Livieri says.

Still, black-footed ferrets have come far. Livieri recalls his last encounter, in October 2000, with one of the first wild-born ferrets, post-reintroduction. Her young had dispersed, and he knew this old female’s time was limited. “I just sat down on the burrow next to her,” he says, “and I’m sure she didn’t want to hear it, but I thanked her. She was one of the things that gave us hope.”

The Tightrope Walk of the Northern White Rhino

While the black-footed ferret peered into the abyss of extinction and tiptoed back, the more-than-two-ton northern white rhino is currently executing more of a tightrope walk. Just two females of this rhino subspecies remain, and due to frailty in one and a reproductive disorder in the other, neither are able to reproduce, even if they had a mate. Poaching for rhino horn and civil wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and nearby Sudan have driven the northern white extinct in the wild. Many refer to this walking-dead state as “functional extinction,” but Novak disagrees.

The living females “cannot by themselves create a new generation, but there are 12 cell lines frozen at the San Diego Frozen Zoo, which could become new individuals” even after the last two animals die, he says. He considers the species evolutionarily frozen in time. This rhino’s “pond” may have shrunk to a puddle, but its edges are frozen, not dry. The species’ future, not yet evaporated, is locked in ice.

A global collaboration borne in San Diego is trying to thaw this powerful and prehistoric-looking animal’s future back into a form most would recognize as rhinoceros. This rhino’s second chance arose from a casual conversation between two scientists who are friends: Oliver Ryder, head of the San Diego Zoo’s Frozen Zoo, and Jeanne Loring, a professor emeritus at Scripps Research and founder of Aspen Neuroscience, who is an avowed lover of zoos (“The one thing I wanted to do when I was a kid was to get locked into the zoo overnight,” she says). Around 2008 and freshly arrived at Scripps, Loring wanted her human stem cell lab to celebrate receiving a major grant and turned to Ryder to inquire about a tour of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. Her friend said he could arrange it — in exchange for teaching his zoo team about her lab’s stem cell work.

That conversation led to a side project between the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and Loring’s lab, which by 2011 was reprogramming frozen cells from northern white rhino skin into flexible stem cells capable of becoming any other cell type. The egg and sperm cells cultivate the most interest, and the goal is to create and unite them. To date, however, scientists have achieved this feat only in mice, so numerous challenges separate stem cells from baby rhinos.

Today, the San Diego Zoo has built a specialty laboratory for this work, after Loring’s team trained the zoo’s scientists. According to geneticist Marisa Korody, who works in the lab, they have reprogrammed nine of the 12 northern white rhino cell lines into stem cells from the Frozen Zoo. Much of the recent work has been “identifying and optimizing and applying the human technology to the rhinos,” says Korody.

But even creating a northern white rhino embryo in a petri dish wouldn’t be enough. That baby needs a womb in which to spend the next 16 months before birth. I meet the southern white rhinos with those wombs at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park on a sunny afternoon. These six large ladies, potential surrogate mothers, seem feisty, snorting and throwing around heft and horn over the hay in their muddy enclosure, though Loring describes them as “adorable” and “easily trained.” Two of them, Amani and Victoria, are pregnant, artificially inseminated via another southern white from an adjacent pen. I later learned that Victoria gave birth to a healthy southern white calf this past July.

The zoo is developing these and other advanced reproductive science techniques, including training the massive mothers-to-be to amble up for rectal ultrasounds, in anticipation of one day implanting a northern white rhino embryo into their southern white rhino wombs. Figuring out how to implant rhino embryos is also on the team’s to-do list, a task that has taken on new urgency. This September another international team announced it has harvested fertilized eggs from the last two northern whites using frozen sperm from deceased rhino fathers. That team, under the banner of the BioRescue project, successfully created two embryos, currently frozen, and plans to transfer them to surrogate southern white mothers in Kenya and the Czech Republic. Avantea, the Italian biotech firm that produced the precious embryos, said they “are confident” their team can produce another 12 to 15 in the next three years, and the San Diego Zoo confirmed ongoing discussions about their six southern white rhinos potentially becoming mothers for future embryos. But after their births, would these implanted northern white rhino babies someday face a similar fate as the genetically bottlenecked black-footed ferrets, whose metaphorical pond is larger but low on oxygen?

“We have as much genetic diversity in those cell lines as there is in the southern white population now,” Barbara Durrant, a reproductive physiologist with the zoo, says of the northern whites. Southern whites also nearly disappeared, but thanks to measures protecting and managing the population in private game reserves and conservation areas, they rebounded from fewer than 100 animals around the year 1900 to around 20,000 today. Developing these advanced reproductive technologies, the team says, can help other endangered rhinos.

Should the last northern whites die before a test-tube baby is born raises the question of whether a resurgence would count as de-extinction. Novak says no, because he doesn’t think they qualify as truly extinct in the first place. With living cells, and now even living embryos, in the freezer, the genetic line would remain unbroken for this species, just temporarily on ice. But resurrection? Maybe.

Ethicist Greg Kaebnick agrees it would be a continuation of the same species, requiring plenty of human intervention, but not a wholly human-fabricated imitation.

The latter is the realm of the passenger pigeon.

The Passenger Pigeon, Biological Storms, and Gene-Editing

My sister’s family and I shuffle through Martha’s memorial at the Cincinnati Zoo. The pagoda is lovely, its wide, wooden doors carved with birds and its rafters ornamented with origami pigeons. Model passenger pigeons tend a stillborn nest, their red, glassy eyes oblivious to the newspaper reproductions that hang behind them, lamenting their extinction. Placards detail their journey from massive migratory flocks, total population of perhaps 5 billion to zero in a few decades. Humans hunted the birds out of existence for food and sport. The telegraph, 19th-century social media, revealed their colonies’ real-time locations to industrious hunters who felled their oak and beech homes and stole or crushed their nests. Railroads, newly connecting the nation, hauled away the hoards of slate-blue bodies with russet breasts to far-off cities.

Elegized by American conservationist Aldo Leopold in 1947 as “a biological storm,” the pigeons reshaped the continent’s forests, as their colonies broke open canopies like lightning and fertilized soils with excrement and corpses. This is the ecological hole Novak is seeking to fill. With no passenger pigeon cells alive anywhere, he is turning to their closest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, aiming to edit its genome to display critical passenger pigeon traits, such as tail shape and social behavior. (Those traits eventually will be gleaned from at least four genomes sequenced from museum specimens of passenger pigeons.) Similar efforts are underway to edit the genome of cattle breeds, transferring the natural trait of one to another.

“What we’re doing with a passenger pigeon is essentially the same thing,” Novak says. “We’re moving in several genes and creating a genome that ultimately has the majority parentage of one species and a small contribution of another.”

A precise hybrid, he calls it, made possible by the blockbuster gene-editing technique known as CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), has enabled scientists to precisely shape an organism’s genetic makeup with unprecedented ease. At the moment, however, Novak’s ambitions remain only a remote possibility. For starters, no one knows which genes made a passenger pigeon unique, and most bird research involves chickens, a poor model for pigeons and wild birds.

Novak’s Ph.D. research with Monash University in Australia focuses on developing animal husbandry and genetic engineering protocols to make the common pigeon a better proverbial lab rat for genomics research. While the passenger pigeon’s “pond” dried up when Martha died more than a century ago, Novak essentially wants to create a new, very similar pond, drawing water from the healthy pools of band-tailed pigeons. But developing the tools to pour new life into a desiccated species is one challenge, and deciding how — and whether — to use that power is another.

***

Editing an animal’s genome gives many biologists pause. Fitzpatrick considers Revive & Restore’s gene-editing efforts “extremely intriguing,” but says she does “not think they represent the most effective or realistic ways that genomic tools can be used to conserve species.” One reason, she says, is that some traits, such as behaviors, can have complex genetic foundations, drawing from multiple genes sprinkled across the genome. That presents challenges for both identifying and targeting the right complement of genes to recreate, say, a hypersocial pigeon.

Shapiro, who advised Novak’s master’s research in her University of California–Santa Cruz lab, wonders whether, if successful, de-extinction is even the right thing for the ecosystem. Should Revive & Restore eventually genetically edit band-tailed pigeons to look and act more like shadow passenger pigeons, they likely would be more biological drizzle than storm. By most estimations, reintroducing shadow passenger pigeons into the wild would only achieve a fraction of their former ecological power.

Still, Shapiro, who sits on Revive & Restore’s board of directors, wholeheartedly supports its version of genetic rescue for endangered species like the black-footed ferret and thinks the nonprofit is proceeding responsibly. Yet, she worries, with good reason, “that everybody is going to be so scared that we don’t have all the information, that they’re never going to take a risk.” Instead, she thinks we should work to better understand these technologies, adding them to our conservation toolkit alongside more traditional measures like protecting land.

***

Inside the San Diego Zoo, just past the elephants, a sign reads, WE DON’T HAVE TO BE THE CAUSE OF EXTINCTIONS. Yet, unless we act, some of those extinctions are inevitable.

So: to genetically modify or not?

That tension runs through these projects, often prompting comments from critics about how researchers are “playing God” or interfering “too much” with the natural world. Yet doing nothing is morally difficult for humans, especially when we are responsible for the troubles in the first place. How do we balance the urge to intervene, to save, to revive, against a revulsion for over-humanizing nature, in an already humanized world?

Changing genomes doesn’t especially bother Kaebnick. The ethicist recognizes the excitement and spectacle around these technologies, but for him, the story behind human interactions with nature matters more than concerns about “playing God.” “To talk about something as ‘natural’ is to say something about how it got to be the way it is, why it is the way it is, or why it’s there at all,” he says. “There’s a place for humans in the story without it completely undermining naturalness.”

And as Livieri points out, coming up with the tools for recovering wildlife, whether gene editing or habitat protection, isn’t the hardest part. It’s engaging people with the natural world. “If we don’t have the political and social will to do it, all the tools in the world won’t mean a darn thing,” he says.

One wall inside Martha’s pagoda touts the Cincinnati Zoo’s efforts to save threatened species, including the cheetah, an iconic animal that requires large swaths of well-protected land to survive. My five-year-old niece, looking crushed, whimpers to my sister, who hugs and tries to reassure her daughter. Cheetahs are my niece’s favorite animal, and she doesn’t want them to disappear.

* * *

Ashley Braun is a science and environmental journalist based in Seattle, Washington. In addition to her work as a fact-checker and editor, she has written for The Atlantic, Slate, Scientific American, Science, Discover, and Hakai Magazine.

Editor: Katie Kosma
Fact-Checker: Sam Schuyler
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

Matt Jones | The Southern Review | Summer 2018 | 22 minutes (4,337 words)

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

The space race killed the sparrow.

Of course, there were other factors.

There was the decision in ’46 by the Brevard Mosquito Control District to slather the Merritt Island salt marshes in DDT dropped aerially from a No. 2 diesel–fuel carrier.

Then, because the mosquitoes grew resistant to DDT, there was the application of BHC and Dieldrin and Malathion.

There was brand name FLIT, a petroleum derivative, the same stuff that was sprayed over the Spanish moss that hung from the rafters of the Rhythm Club in Natchez the night the one-story building went up in flames killing 209 people.

There was Paris Green powdered finely over the dikes, the same stuff that killed Parisian rats; the same popular pigment used in the paintings of Cézanne and Van Gogh; the same crystalline powder that, despite its name, gave fireworks their blue hue.

There was the direct and indirect poisoning from various insecticides. The physiological problems. The eggshell thinning. The reproductive failures.

There were the dikes themselves. The impoundments built up along Banana Creek and Banana River. The flooding of the salt marshes to drown out the mud-loving mosquitoes.

There was the railroad causeway that went up just north of Roach Hole in 1963.

There was the loss and degradation of habitat. The disappearance of cordgrass and seashore saltgrass.

There was the invasion of dense sea myrtle and snakes and raccoon and aggressive redwing blackbirds.

There were the controlled burns.

And the flooding. So much flooding.

The Orlando Jetport that opened to the public in ’62.

There was the SR 528, otherwise known as the Martin B. Anderson Beachline Expressway: the Bee Line that stretches from the Space Coast all the way to Disney.

And make no mistake: Disney was involved.

But more than anything, the fate of the dusky seaside sparrow was intertwined with the space race that started sometime around ’55 with Khruschev, Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, Kennedy, and that Special Message to Congress on Urgent National Needs in which JFK so boldly declared, “It will not be one man going to the moon — if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation.”

That was the real deathblow to the dusky seaside sparrow: man’s ambition. The year NASA purchased most of North Merritt Island, where the largest colony of dusky seaside sparrows lived, was the same year John F. Kennedy stood in front of a crowd of thirty-five thousand people at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas, and said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Many ornithologists had observed that these particular birds, no larger than canaries, their feathers black-and-white, kept a limited range for hunting, nesting, and habitation. They were known for their unique tendency to stay close to home. They were a nonmigratory species. So perhaps — just maybe — the duskies were also responsible for their own demise. Perhaps they were simply either unwilling or unable to adapt. Maybe they simply lacked the boldness that made us humans consider leaving our first and only home.

But as surely as Americans would one day step foot on the moon, so, too, would the dusky seaside sparrow travel beyond the land it had always known, touching down finally about an hour west across the center of the Sunshine State in what was then being touted as The Vacation Kingdom of the World.

* * *

After he journeyed to the center of the earth, but before he traveled twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, science fiction author Jules Verne set his sights on outer space.

Following the end of the American Civil War, Verne released the fourth book in his Voyages Extraordinaires series: From the Earth to the Moon. In it, members of the Baltimore Gun Club attempt to build a cannon so long and powerful it can launch three men to the surface of the moon.

The novel got a lot of things wrong.

For instance, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Soviet rocket scientist and one of the founding fathers of astronautics, critiqued Verne’s theory of using a cannon to reach the moon. The explosive force required to achieve the escape velocity necessary to exit Earth’s atmosphere would have disintegrated the cannon, the men, and the dreams inside each of their heads. Even so, From the Earth to the Moon inspired Tsiolkovsky, and many of his theories were later used to shape the Soviet space program that would eventually send both the first satellite and the first animal into orbit.

And there were plenty of things Verne got right.

One of them was placing the location of his imagined launch site at N 27°7ˊ0˝, W 82°9ˊ0˝, an area more commonly known as Florida. In doing so, he planted the Sunshine State in the American subconscious as a sort of gateway between myth and reality — here and there, Earth and moon.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.

• Longreads Newsletters
• Daily Updates

Fools would call it fate that Verne wrote about Florida, but Fate is a town in Texas over six hundred miles west of Florida, just a half-hour drive from Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where John Fennedy was assassinated. Fate — the town — was also the place where Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow got remarried. When you start to pick apart fate — the idea, not the place — you begin to realize it doesn’t make sense. Fate is a cannon inside your head capable of shooting you to the moon, but the future is something much different.

Nearly a century after the publication of From the Earth to the Moon, a joint NASA–air force team was busy looking for the location of their new launch site. Of the eight sites up for consideration, there was Brownsville, Texas; the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico; and Cumberland Island, Georgia. The engineers had to consider access to deepwater transport, the populations of surrounding towns, and the type of land available and the cost of it.

The same can be said of Walt Disney, who, before selecting Orlando as the future site of Walt Disney World, visited investors in Niagara Falls; the St. Louis Riverfront; Marceline, Missouri; and the blighted area of Kansas City known only as Signboard Hill. After settling on Florida, Disney and his team first considered a six thousand-acre parcel of land on East Lake Tohopekaliga and sites in Sebring and New Smyrna Beach. After weighing factors such as weather and access to tourists and price per acre, Disney purchased almost thirty thousand acres of Florida swampland between Orlando and Kissimmee by way of various shell corporations.

Nowhere in the official documentation was a quality such as fate admitted into the decision-making process for either NASA or Disney. However, there was the strange fact that, on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated — November 22, 1963 — Walt Disney reportedly looked out the window of a small twin-propeller plane and decided that the stretch of freshwater lakes and interstate construction below would be the site of his next greatest project. Now, you might be able to call that fate. But the piece of land Disney saw from his window had already had a host of other names.

In fact, it was a tiny island in the center of Bay Lake that Disney was rumored to have fallen in love with when he and his associates flew over it on November 22, 1963, while scouting potential locations. When Disney first purchased this island, it was known as Riles Island, and before that, Idle Bay Isle and Raz Island, and later on, Treasure Island and Discovery Island, and before being abandoned altogether, it would eventually become known as the final resting place of the last dusky seaside sparrow.

* * *

The race to the moon was first a race to send a living creature beyond the Kármán Line, that invisible altitude sixty-two miles above sea level that separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. Technically, the United States won that first sprint in 1947 when they launched fruit flies on about a one-hour round trip journey into the thermosphere and back. In the immediate years following the success of that first journey, the U.S. sent up white mustard, scarlet globe radish, Radium Brand spring rye, and wild lily seeds that were all soaked and planted in the ground upon their return. In an alternative history, the road to the moon would be lined by radiation-kissed wildflowers and root vegetables that glow in the dark, but in this version of events, the route to the moon was perilous, the shoulder littered with irradiated perennials and roadkill. If the moon were a goddess hungry for sacrifice, then each failed biological payload was evidence of her insatiable appetite.

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

The death of Albert I, the first rhesus monkey to be rocketed into outer space, was soon followed by the death of Albert II. There were also dozens of white mice and hamsters, anesthetized cats, dogs, frogs, and fertilized chicken eggs. It was only in 1957 that the Soviet Union successfully carried an animal into orbit. The dog’s name was Laika, and, at the time of her launch, the Soviets had not yet developed the technology to retrieve spacecraft from orbit. She is thought to have died hours after takeoff, but her vessel orbited above Earth for five months. The Germans called her the “She-Hound of Heaven.” The Americans preferred “Muttnik.”

Only a year after that, the United States launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile manned — or monkeyed — by a Navy-trained South American squirrel monkey named Gordo. While Gordo made it into the upper reaches of the thermosphere, past where the International Space Station currently orbits, his capsule’s parachute failed to open when he reentered Earth’s atmosphere, and he sank into the depths of the Atlantic. Scientists believe Gordo was alive at the time of impact because the in-flight telemetric data being transmitted back to Earth indicated a slight elevation in pulse at splashdown.

While the U.S.S.R. eventually won the space race in 1961 by sending Yuri Gagarin into orbit, the Americans stole the show again on July 16, 1969, when NASA launched a Saturn V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida. Four days and nearly 240,000 miles later, the three-man crew of Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong arrived at their destination. Collins piloted the command module Columbia as Aldrin and Armstrong descended toward the moon’s surface inside the lunar module named after the national bird of the United States: the Eagle.

Armstrong’s heart rate jumped from 77 bpm to 156 bpm as Aldrin called out the altitude readings: “750 feet, coming down at 23 degrees . . . 700 feet, 21 down . . . 400 feet, down at 9.” When they finally touched down, Armstrong quietly said, “Houston. Tranquility Base here. Eagle has landed.”

The dusky seaside sparrow was still stuck back down on Earth. In fact, in that same year, one biologist observed that only thirty singing male dusky seaside sparrows remained on Merritt Island. The scientific community had been sounding the alarm about the disappearance of the dusky for years, but there was little concern shown beyond the small circle of ornithologists studying Florida’s Atlantic coast. The average sparrow is about as large as a human heart, though not nearly as important to the survival of actual humans. Perhaps the greatest thing the dusky seaside sparrow had working against it was that it was not as glorious or impressive as other species. It was no bald eagle. It was no heart. It was no moon.

What the duskies needed was to develop the same kind of drive that made Kennedy look toward the stars, that made Disney look down from the sky at a tiny patch of island in the center of Florida’s Bay Lake and say, There. There’s the spot where I’ll change the world. Either that, or they simply needed support and publicity if they were going to survive.

Luckily, support did arrive. In 1971, the same year the Walt Disney World Resort opened just fifty miles west of Merritt Island, the federal government allocated over $2 million to purchase 6,250 acres beside the Indian River to create the Saint Johns National Wildlife Refuge, home to the only other dusky population that was known to exist.

Even so, the dusky completely disappeared from Merritt Island over the course of the 1970s. The habitat west of the refuge, along the Saint Johns River, was ill managed. The Bee Line Expressway that stretched between Florida’s Space Coast and Orlando was expanded. Residential properties were erected. The marshes were continually drained, invasive shrubs grew in thick, and ranchers conducted controlled burns to create more pastureland. Because the bald eagle had been declared an endangered species in 1967, and because it had flown all the way to the moon, new environmental protections were put in place and its population steadily rebounded. However, by 1979, only six duskies remained in Saint Johns National Wildlife Refuge. Biologists were able to trap only five for a captive-breeding program that was the last chance to save the species. There was just one problem: all of the surviving sparrows were male.

* * *

While the duskies dwindled on the Florida coast, their new habitat was being prepared in the center of the state.

Originally intended to debut as a pirates’ getaway that would emulate the 1950 Disney film of the same name, Treasure Island was built up with fifteen thousand cubic yards of soil and a thousand tons of trees and boulders, transforming it into a tropical oasis where, with the purchase of a Special Adventure ticket, guests could sail across the Seven Seas Lagoon into Bay Lake to spend the day exploring the wreckage of a fictional ship, the Walrus, and observing a variety of imported flora and fauna.

Opening to the public on April 8, 1974, Treasure Island became a singular place in the Walt Disney World Resort. There, visitors could spot brilliantly colored macaws and cockatoos from Cap’n Flint’s Perch and stumble across vulturine guinea fowl while traipsing through the Indian orchid trees, blue passion flowers, and Chinese gardenias that stretched all the way from Black Dog Bridge to Scavenger Beach.

Despite its being billed as a “tropical island paradise,” Treasure Island failed to attract many visitors. So in 1976 Treasure Island closed down for redevelopment. A snack bar was added, along with an aviary, and the pirate references were scrapped. A few months later, Discovery Island opened as not only a tropical destination for Disney tourists, but also a breeding facility for rare birds that would shortly thereafter be accredited by the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums.

The five surviving dusky seaside sparrows that had been captured in Saint Johns National Wildlife Refuge were named after the colors of the identification bands affixed to their tiny legs: Orange Band, White Band, Red Band, Yellow Band, and Blue Band. While some of them would eventually wind up at Disney’s Discovery Island, they first traveled to the Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo in Gainesville, Florida. In a cooperative effort with several organizations, including the Wildlife Research Laboratory of the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission and the Florida Museum of Natural History, the last male duskies were entered into an experimental breeding program, where they were mated with females from a closely related subspecies that was native to the Gulf Coast: the Scott’s seaside sparrow. The goal of this program was genetic backcrossing, in which hybrid offspring, being 50 percent dusky, would mate with the remaining pure duskies to produce chicks of 75 percent purity, and so on for several generations, in hope of eventually producing a bird that was at least 90 percent dusky.

While Red Band died of a tumor early in the breeding program, the remaining four duskies made the journey to Discovery Island to continue the crossbreeding experiment. It was just about this time, and halfway across the theme park, that Walt Disney’s original dream was being resurrected from the ashes. Eleven years after the Walt Disney World Resort first opened, so, too, did EPCOT Center.

Originally modeled on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow, Disney first imagined EPCOT Center (later renamed Epcot) as a kind of urban utopia, unmarred by crime and poverty and waste, radiating outward in concentric circles of entertainment, shopping, green space, industry, and high-density apartment housing for twenty thousand live-in residents. More than anything, Epcot was supposed to function as a model “progress city” that tourists could visit, enjoy, and later try to emulate in their own hometowns.

Walt Disney often spoke of Epcot like Kennedy spoke about the Moon. He spoke of challenges and new technologies and better tomorrows. He called Epcot a “virgin land” and a place “that will always be in the state of becoming.” As something that wasn’t quite fate would have it, this turned out to be true, just not in the way Walt Disney had imagined.

Housed in a building known as Spaceship Earth, an eighteen-story geodesic sphere designed with the help of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, Epcot wasn’t the fully functional live-in city Walt Disney had originally pictured, but it was an attraction that promised to offer guests a glimpse into how something like a future was created.

The attraction itself was composed of a time machinesque experience that took guests on a sixteen-minute, dark ride through a history populated by animatronic figures. While guests were on the ride, lights and projectors drew their attention to a series of important historical moments—the origin of prehistoric man, the invention of the alphabet, the fall of Rome, the Renaissance, and the Apollo 11 Eagle landing on the moon — all of which, much like time itself, quickly faded into darkness and receded into the past as the train of guests crept forward.

In Epcot’s early days, the entire journey through time was narrated by Lawrence Dobkin, a voice made famous during the golden age of radio. At the end of the ride, guests would arrive at the top of the track only to be met with a large planetarium full of twinkling stars and galaxies so close they seemed attainable by simple extension of the arm. Then the vehicles turned around and made their descent back into reality, the artificial sky slowly fading from view. This was just about the point in the ride where Lawrence Dobkin’s ethereal voice echoed, “Tomorrow’s world approaches, so let us listen and learn, let us explore and question and understand. Let us go forth and discover the wisdom to guide great Spaceship Earth through the uncharted seas of the future. Let us dare to fulfill our destiny.” For those who didn’t have the time or money to purchase the Special Adventure ticket that would have taken them out to Discovery Island, it sure would have been neat to have the silvery tweee-tweee of the dusky piped in through the speakers.

* * *

Success stories of imperiled species coming back from the brink of extinction are not unheard-of. In fact, the Endangered Species Act, passed by Congress in 1973, played a part in saving the nene, the American peregrine falcon, and what John F. Kennedy once called a bird that “aptly symbolizes the strength and freedom of America”: the bald eagle.

The dusky seaside sparrow was among the species protected by the Endangered Species Act. However, the crossbreeding program that took place on Disney’s Discovery Island presented an interesting challenge. As reported by the Chicago Tribune, the hybrid sparrows, at least in the view of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, were a “nonspecies — deserving neither federal protection nor the right to be released on federal lands.”

Between the remaining four duskies — Orange, Yellow, Blue, and White — only five viable hybrid chicks were produced. One was a male of 75 percent purity, while the other four were females that were 25, 50, 75, and 87.5 percent dusky, the last of which was thought by ornithologists to have looked nearly indistinguishable from an original dusky.

The original duskies and their chicks lived in eight-by-ten-foot screened-in cages stocked with clumps of native cordgrass, crickets, and insect larvae. At the top of each cage was a miniature sprinkler system that rained down pockets of mist when the weather was at its hottest. Their faux habitats were hidden from the public eye, tucked away safely between the toucan exhibit and the Discovery Island restrooms. By the time Blue died and then Yellow and then White, the Discovery Island tour guides spoke in hushed whispers about the only two birds left with any hope of saving the species — Orange and the 87.5 percenter.

* * *

It really can’t be overstated: 1986 was a year of failed flight.

On January 28, the NASA Space Shuttle orbiter Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida. On the CNN live broadcast, Tom Mintier had just said, “So the twenty-fifth space shuttle mission is now on the way after more delays than NASA cares to count,” when the Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean seventy-three seconds into its flight. It was the Challenger’s tenth launch. There were at least eight delays, from bad weather at the transoceanic abort-landing site in Dakar, Senegal, to a malfunction of the microswitch indicator used to ensure that the hatch was safely locked.

For the people watching, either from their living rooms or the grassy lawns alongside the Florida coast, it appeared as if the orbiter had unexpectedly exploded in a giant fireball. But there was no explosion, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Despite the fact that history would remember the flight of the Challenger as ill-fated, fate had little to do with what happened on that cold January morning in 1986.

The disintegration was actually caused by an O-ring seal that failed shortly after lift-off. During preliminary tests, a number of NASA engineers filed reports and voiced concerns that the O-rings were faulty, even going so far as to redesignate the small rubber parts “Critical 1,” knowing that the failure of a part so seemingly miniscule as the O-ring could open an almost indiscernible gap in the infrastructure of the orbiter, through which gases would leak and combust. Both NASA managers and engineers had been aware of this problem since 1977.

The Rogers Commission, charged with investigating what caused the Challenger to disintegrate just over a minute into its flight, concluded that the tragedy had little to do with fate and more to do with “go fever,” a uniquely human condition rooted in our ability to overlook issues and ignore risks based on a desire to succeed, even in the face of irrefutable danger. The commission eventually surmisedat what had happened to the Challenger was “an accident rooted in history.”

The same could be said of the ill-fated dusky seaside sparrow. Of the few remaining birds with dusky blood still in them, only Orange Band and the one hybrid female chick — the 87.5 percenter — offered a viable path forward, to redemption, to achieving a dusky that was over 90 percent pure. If there were ever a place where finding salvation seemed not only possible, but also likely, then it would have to be at Disney World, Where Dreams Come True.

Science fiction author Jules Verne has been called a “merchant of dreams” because of books like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth. He trafficked in dream machines, in opulent submarines, elephantine locomotives, and cannons capable of blasting men all the way to the moon. That was the beauty of a Vernian dream: the future was capacious. There was room enough for anyone and everyone. In an eight-by-ten-foot bullet-shaped room called a “projectile coach,” Verne was able to comfortably fit fifty gallons of brandy, two dogs, six rifles with plenty of ammunition, a dozen small shrubs, a half-dozen chickens, several cases of wine, enough food and water to last an entire year, and three adult men all bound for the moon.

The employees of Disney’s Discovery Island could have learned something from Jules Verne, who knew so well how to preserve the future in an eight-by-ten space, dimensions that proved too small for the dusky seaside sparrow. In 1985, Orange had given birth to another 87.5 percent dusky, the sister of the hybrid female with which he ultimately failed to mate. The chick broke its neck while learning to fly against the wall of the cage. Charles Cook, the head curator of Discovery Island at the time, said, “It was a terrible misfortune. They fly in a straight line. They take off like a jet fighter. They have to learn their boundaries.”

Orange Band died on June 17, 1987, just an hour’s drive from Merritt Island, fifty or so miles as the crow flies. He was blind in one eye and estimated to be as old as fourteen. “At the end,” Tom Sander of the Florida Sun Sentinel reported, Orange “was treated like royalty, kept in a special eight-by-ten-foot cage, cooled and bathed by a soft artificial rainfall, fed a particularly nutritious diet of crickets, seeds and grubs and protected from infection by a requirement that his human guardians disinfect their boots every time they came to pay a visit.”

The sort of rosy ending that Sander imagined has long been a fixture of our storytelling: that everything will be OK. That against all odds, humanity is destined not only for survival, but also for greatness.  But if history has shown us anything, it is that there is no such thing as destiny.

There is no such thing as fate.

There is only the future, itself an accident rooted in history, an inadvertent offspring of the past so similar in appearance and design that it is sometimes indistinguishable, even to the trained eye.

***

Matt Jones has published fiction and nonfiction in New England Review, The Atlantic, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Tribune, The Threepenny Review, and other publications. He has received support from the Ohio Arts Council, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Vermont Studio Center, and The Leopold Writing Program. He is currently working on a book of nonfiction.

This essay first appeared in the summer 2018 issue of The Southern Review, the quartly print journal founded at Louisiana State University in 1935. Our thanks to Matt Jones and the staff at TSR for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

Longreads Editor: Aaron Gilbreath