Episode 9 - Framers: Cities, Rodents, and Archives

MB = Michelle K Berry

EW = Emily Wakild

EW: 0:00

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry. And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

MB: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

EW: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

MB: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.

EW: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

MB: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

Hi, Em.

EW:

Hi there. How are you?

MB: I'm doing great. Good to be here. We are about to embark on what will more than likely be one of our more maybe abstract and also perhaps random episodes, but we hope you'll just come along for the ride because we have initially envisioned this episode to center solely on rodents. And I think originally we were even so focused, we were so specific as to say we were going to just focus on the history of prairie dogs and telling the history of rodents in the Mountain West. But rats.... we couldn't figure out how to do it. Get it? (laughter) Okay, I love that. I've been planning that. It was hard to find stuff on prairie dogs. It would have taken more digging to find the prairie dogs in archival material, especially since we're sitting at our desks and not traveling around looking for it in archives across the West. But also not a lot of secondary, not a lot of historical studies have been written about the prairie dogs or about rodents in general. And since they're not really topics that you and I know, we would have had to do more kind of original research to make a whole episode about it. So we did what all good historians do when confronted with really difficult projects that seem to be dead-ended. We just changed topics. (laughter) But in all seriousness, it got us to talking about a whole bunch of topics that hadn't necessarily fit well in our other episodes. And so wethought about the fact that we should probably talk about the metropolitan West, about urbanity, and even about how history, the actual academic history gets made, the raw materials of our historical trade. And those often live in archives and those archives are usually in centers of more population in towns and cities. So historians spend a lot of time in those archives and most people in the modern West live in towns or cities. So these places are, no matter how much I want to deny the existence of cities, which we'll talk more about later, no matter what, these places, the archives for historians and cities for residents of the Mountain West frame so much of the experience with history, but also with the more than human. And so we're very excited to offer this episode on framers, cities, rodents, and archives.

EW: 4:41

Rodents are one of the pieces of the framework, right? They not only frame as actors, but they're also part of the framework of our modern life, even though sometimes we ignore them. And more often, we're ambivalent or indifferent to where they are around us. And I think that's especially true for squirrels. And squirrels, as this epitome of an urban rodent, are really socially acceptable, right? And I know this is because of their fluffy tail and their cute little ears, which makes it seem okay for these rodents to be running up our trees and down our sidewalks and all around. And so, you know, I have an urban existence. I, in my imaginary of myself, am this rural person, but I'm not, right? I live in a city. I live in Idaho's biggest city. And on a regular fall or spring day, I probably see 25 different squirrels in my neighborhood. And each one of them drives my dog absolutely bonkers. So I notice every single one of the squirrels. But I often wonder, why do we tolerate that? Why do we live right with the squirrels? Why are they there? Would it be okay if what I saw 25 of was rats or even possums or um even raccoons someone yeah yeah would that be okay um it'd probably be okay with me and the dog but someone would probably call pest control. And squirrels are so ubiquitous. And we seem just kind of resigned to that. And I think of that in particular when we have guests. So like last year, we had this amazing Brazilian student live in Boise and spend six months on this fellowship. And she loved the squirrels. I mean, every time she saw one, she would giggle and she would point and she would get excited, right? Because for her, they were really different. She'd also never seen snow before. So like snow and squirrels were this like perfect Western American thing. But yeah, it's interesting to think about what that ordinariness means for history. And does something as regular and banal as a squirrel have a place in history? And if it does, how do we look for the relationships that we've had with these animals that we barely even notice, right? Do they make it onto the list of what makes history? And one big reason why is that that's a historical process that those of us that live with trees around don't think about. That that's been an 80 year project in a place like Boise but another big reason why the squirrels are so ubiquitous is that we stopped eating them. Michelle have you ever eaten a squirrel?

MB: 7:40

No, Emily I have never eaten a squirrel oh dear yeah no nope that's a big no.

EW: Me neither. So, although I know people that do and have, but I have not myself. Oh yeah.

MB: I actually don't even think I know anyone who's eaten a squirrel [update - after listening to this episode my dad informed me that he ate squirrels all the time as a young man in Springfield, IL]. And I mean, I come from a family of hunters and I still don't. I mean, yeah, no, I don't even think, I mean, we used to rabbit, rabbits a lot. Sorry to all of our listeners who... are now totally grossed out and sad about Fluffy being eaten. But not a squirrel. And my reaction is funny, right? My reaction is like, why would you eat a squirrel?

EW: 8:20

Well, it's a whole lot of effort for not very much meat. So I think there is sort of... an energy calculation there that doesn't quite puzzle out. But it used to be that rodents made the menu and the rabbits that you talked about. And there are a couple of ways that we can think about this. And one of my favorite historical artifacts for doing this is a menu from a hotel in Chicago, the Drake Hotel, that offered this amazing bounty for Thanksgiving in 1886. And so I'm going to tell you about the menu, but I want to tell you a a little bit more about where I encountered the menu, which is in a book from the 1950s by Peter Matheson. And this is a book on wildlife in America, where Matheson took a year and went to every wildlife reserve around the country and made this amazing, really, it's a sonnet of to wildlife and to how the wildlife in America in 1959 was vanishing and disappearing. And so he has these pieces of it that are really just like poetry. He says, the wild creatures of the open spaces of clear water and green northern wilds of gold prairie and huge sky embody a human longing, no less civilized for being primitive and no less real for being felt rather than thought. And so Matheson captures the 1950s in the United States on the cusp of this wilderness movement that is yearning for open spaces. But he also reproduces this menu of what came before. And this Drake Hotel menu is titled "The Procession of Game." And it has nine different categories of animals to eat. And I'm going to tell you about a couple of them. So the soup is venison. And then there are two kinds of fish that are offered, broiled trout and baked black bass. And then for the boiled course, there's mountain sheep, ham of bear, venison tongue, and buffalo tongue. So imagine that for Thanksgiving. And then the roast is my favorite category because for roast, they offer loin of buffalo, mountain sheep, wild goose quail, redheaded duck, jackrabbit, black-tailed deer, coon. Canvas duck, English hare, blue-winged teal, partridge, widgeon, brant, saddle of the venison, pheasants, mallard ducks, prairie chickens, wild turkeys, spotted grouse, black bear, possum, leg of elk, wood duck, sandhill crane, roughed grouse, and cinnamon bear, right?

MB: That sounds like a species list, not a menu....And also, a brant is a bird that looks like a duck. I mean, that's just a quick Google search. I don't know what to tell you, but it looks like a lot like a duck with a black head. Just thought I'd let you know. I'm over here doing deep research as you talk. (Laughter)

EW: 11:38

Yes. That's right. That's right. So more birds on the broiled. Blue-winged teal, jack snipe, blackbirds, reed birds, partridges, pheasants, quails, butterballs, ducks, snipe, rice birds, starlings, marsh birds, plover. And here we go. Gray squirrel.

MB: 11:57

Yeah, look at that. There it is. Interesting. Just let me interrupt you before you continue. We will put this menu on the website so you can go look at it and check it out yourself. Keep going.

EW: 12:12

... right in the middle, right before the entree, right? And then entree antelope in mushroom sauce, braised rabbit, cream sauce, filet of grouse with truffles, venison cutlet with jelly sauce, ragu of bear, hunter style, and oyster pie. Salads include prairie chicken, shrimp, and celery, not to forget the greens, right, on this menu. And then the ornamental dishes are a pyramid of game wild goose liver and boned quail. So one of the things this menu does for me is show what a special occasion this Thanksgiving feast was at this hotel in Chicago. But it also, I think, really demonstrates how cities become this amalgamation for resources, right? And the resource here is wild game. So think of all the people it took to bring those animals to this hotel so whoever showed up to eat could have them. And the city also becomes this way of of framing animals for what they're used for and also what they used to be. And Chicago's famous for this in all kinds of ways because animals fed the city and the people in the city ate so many different kinds of animals and really they still do. But the variety of animals are much more simplified. Chicken and pig and cow rather than the 27 animals that are on this menu, right?

MB: 13:47

Right. Well, and you know, it's, I mentioned that I resisted the city episode for a bunch of reasons. One, I don't think, I think when we think about urbanization in particular, the best historical studies are of the cities that we know more about up till this point. So I think we know quite a lot about New York City and about Boston and certainly about Chicago. Nature's Metropolis is probably the best environmental histories on a city that I can think of. And we're starting to get some more interesting histories written about Los Angeles and San Francisco. But I think so often those histories tend to be very human centered and there's not a ton of environmental history being written about those cities. And so that's part of my... I don't want to necessarily talk about cities, because I also know that personally...cities often feel bereft of "nature" to me. I do feel as though, even though I know darn good and well that concrete and asphalt are all products of the more than human, I still feel disconnected from sights and sounds that I prefer that are not necessarily all human made. And then you think about how gross cities are. They're kind of disgusting, right? And so you're talking about this menu, the Drake Hotel Very famous hotel. I've actually been to the Drake Hotel. It's really cool. It was actually financed by... Armor and Swift, the families that owned the major meatpacking companies in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, they financed this gorgeous hotel. And so, and when you think about meatpacking and we think about kind of the rise of that industry in these city centers, especially in Chicago, but also Kansas City and even Denver to a certain extent, we've got, it's going back to cows. And I told you it was going to go back to cows. Always, always. The filth that those early meatpacking factories produced, that just added on to the kind of filth that already existed in what many have called the organic city, which existed up until at least the early 20th century, when, as you just said, cities were full of all different kinds of animals and all different kinds of ecosystems because people were still... attempting, because they really needed to grow their own food, have their own animals, butcher their own animals. Animals were transportation, especially horses. You know what horses do. They poo everywhere all the time. I think mostly the cultural norm was not to put a shit bag on the back of the horse and the horses just pooed all the way down the road. So there were just mountains of excrement from the transportation animals that existed in these 19th century cities. There was not infrastructure. So the cities are just, they just reek with the smell of sewer and right of all the kinds of, um, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Uh, waste, that's what I'm looking for. It's real early Emily Wakild! (laughter) The waste that humans produce in their daily lives, right? And in bigger, like East Coast cities, especially in tenements and in more impoverished areas of the city, they would just like open up the window and throw the chamber pot and whatever was in it right out the window onto the city street. And so you can just, I always just think about the smell and kind of trying to avoid walking through all of the grossness of city streets. I think you see it less in a modern city, but sometimes it's still there. I'll refrain from telling you stories about, you know, things I've heard about that happen here in Tucson, Arizona, or also in, of course, San Francisco. But what's interesting to think about is that one of one of the major coming together of city governments and of city residents was trying to figure out how to clean up cities, how to make them more healthy to live in for humans. Because of course, living in cities, was gross, but it was also kind of dangerous to human health, especially various kinds of outbreaks of cholera and what have you. And so city ordinances were passed to do a couple things. One, to clean up the city. Let's start garbage collection, for example. But then let's also try to make the city, quote unquote, more beautiful. And so by the late 19th century, we're seeing folks like Frederick Law Olmsted, who's thinking about the fact that cities are hard on nerves and that people need to be able to get out of doors and access, "nature" in order to be mentally and physically more healthy. So things like Central Park emerge. But that's not just an East Coast thing. That's the one we all know about. It's often the one that I think shows up in environmental history classes. But cities all over the West, I mean, I've been to yours, you've lived here in Tucson. We have a lot of parks. I've been to Boise. You have great, beautiful parks in Boise. Denver's another example. Denver City Park, you know, is first established in 1882. That's contemporary with Central Park. Central Park was a little bit earlier, but it's still sort of that same era. And again, you can imagine, I mean, Denver really is a city on the plains. People think of it as a mountain city, but it's not. It's on the eastern slope of the mountains where the Great Plains start. So you can imagine when City Park in Denver, which is now just gorgeous and full of, as you're saying, squirrels that steal your lunch, And we've already talked about how geese, we talked about in our birds episode about geese and their ubiquitous presence, especially in places like city parks. So it's full of "wildlife." It's full of the more than human in really fun, interesting ways. But that was partly intentional. The city had school children plant shade trees that are now there because it was just this blank space almost dry, arid-looking kind of land when it's very first cordoned off to be an eventual park because it's in the arid west on the Great Plains. So they had to really manufacture the trees and then, of course, the grass that grows and the lawn. And, of course, now we're rethinking lawns and how detrimental they are for all kinds of reasons in the U.S. West. But nonetheless, I think that this is really an interesting point that cities– exist in both organic and sort of inorganic ways. And that's a historical story. And that no matter what, animals have always been present in that story. Animals, insects, plants, all of the more than human beings that we've been talking about in the entire podcast have not just been present in the rural or in the wild, quote unquote, right? Forests, parks, I mean, national parks, et cetera, but also right in cities, right in the place where most people live in the 20th century.

EW: 20:31

Absolutely. I mean, and this isn't a surprise, right? We're not alone in cities and all of this infrastructure you've just described that's been put in for human health has been really good for the more than human, or at least some of them more than human. And so I think one of the things that I did trying to think about this episode was I went through the Idaho Statesman website. Idaho's longest serving newspaper, right? Which you can search online. And it is this like super nerdy, guilty pleasure of a historian to be like, Oh, I wonder what was written about squirrels. And so I did the super deep dive into what the Idaho Statesman said about squirrels. And Squirrels bit humans, a lot. This was like not just stealing your lunch, like you said, but really there were a lot of headlines, especially from the sort of time of building of Boise, 1915, 1916, when all of the infrastructure to contain the river was put into place, when the grids and the streets were put in there. So there were squirrels. One squirrel was shot after it bit eight different people. Right. That's it.

MB: 21:53

That's an aggressive squirrel. There's quite some tolerance on the human side. Right? Crack it up at the first five. Everyone's like, it's only been five. But no, absolutely not eight.

EW: 22:03

He's done. He's done after that. Right. But one of the other things that came out that was really interesting is that the livestock board, this, you know, sort of powerful entity for regulating all kinds of animals, approved a bounty on squirrels. And their focus was ground squirrels, but it was squirrels writ large of two cents per tail. And in 1917, the board approves this. It's advertised. They place an for advertisement. It's in the newspaper. And by early 1919, it's completely reversed because they got too many. Too many people were turning in too many squirrel tails for bounties. And the livestock board needed the public to be notified to stop dropping off these tails at their office and demanding payment. And so something like that needs a broader contextualization, which is what history can do. And I think animals are one of these really interesting areas where as soon as you start digging, and as soon as you sort of peek intentionally, you find them everywhere, you find them in newspapers, you'll find them in archives as well, because they are alongside humans in cities, everywhere you look, we just haven't given them the attention that perhaps they deserve. And perhaps it would change our understanding of the world if we we gave them a little bit more attention in a historical way.

MB: 23:30

Yeah. And, you know, the famous historian and philosopher of urbanity, his name is Lewis Mumford. And if people haven't read him, they should because he's fascinating. But, you know, he called the city the theater of social action. And I think what we're describing here is that it's also a theater of ecological action as well. And you're I'm assuming you use Chronicling America, which we have to tell our readers that we'll link it on our website. And you, too, can be a nerdy historian as you're sitting on the couch doing whatever - like just perusing newspapers, historic newspapers up till 1963, some as early as the 1700s for every state in the country. And this has been a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We've done a lot of it here in the state of Arizona. And it's cool because there's all different kinds of newspapers that live in archives that are now being digitized and put online so that more people can access them and more people can know them. And so that they're safe because, of course, archives disappear for a variety of reasons. Things get downsized paper crumbles, archives flood. I mean, there's a bunch of ways in which the actual raw material of the past is vulnerable to decay. And so being able to digitize it, it's not... perfect. Doesn't mean it's going to be there forever and ever, but it is a really great way to further back up the archives and then offer it up to a bunch of people all over the place to be able to access it. So I don't know if that's what you used for the Idaho Statesman. I'm not sure if it's on there, but there's a lot of cool newspapers. And what's funny is that when you look at the newspapers, when you go into these archives and you're looking for something else, even if it's a history of the livestock board, right? Then all of a sudden you're realizing, and this is exactly what happened in my research for Cow Talk, all of a sudden, I went in to research the history of ranching. And ranchers in particular are very human-centric. And the more I read, the more I looked in the archives, the more the animals were everywhere. But I didn't go in necessarily looking to write a history about cows. But the cows couldn't be denied. And neither could... microbes and neither could the insects and neither could all of the different plants that just wouldn't stay where they were supposed to stay, right? Or the grasses that grew where they weren't supposed to grow or didn't grow when they were supposed to grow or all the things. And so it's fascinating how, in some ways, historical research is kind of accidental. And I'm hoping that the historians who listen to our podcast do not send us angry emails about this. But I think not only is historical research comprised of a lot of happy accidents, archives themselves are somewhat of an accident, right? There's that great, who's the historian who calls it the accidental ecosystem in cities? Help me remember his name.

EW: 26:19

Peter Aligona. Yeah, that's an amazing book.

MB: 26:19

Yeah, it's a great book. And he calls cities accidental ecosystems. And I think you and I would both kind of agree with that, although sometimes it's very intentional, like the planting of the trees, the shade trees by the children. But from that grows an ecosystem that maybe the city people who were asking children to plant the shade trees weren't expecting. So yeah, cities are an accidental ecosystem. I think that archives are an accidental ecosystem in really cool ways. And this gets at kind of how history gets made. So people... It used to be, and we won't totally nerd out and think about what the future of archives are. But thinking historically, archives were collected by folks who thought they had an important story to tell. That's important because you had to understand yourself as being socially important or worthwhile. So, of course, lots of archives did not include marginalized groups, groups that weren't considered important in sort of creating and developing archives. The history of a particular place or a particular region or whatever, and folks would gather together their stuff and, present it to an archive and the archive, the institutional archive, would accept the stuff. So the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, for example, gathers up all of their materials that they have that they think might be important and they drop it off at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. And now the University of Wyoming has, I don't even remember how many hundreds of boxes for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association papers. And there's all kinds of stuff in there. And it was not necessarily curated by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association before giving it. You could think about individual people who give their papers to archives, right? Like grandpa kept all these letters. Let's put them in a box and give them to the University of Arizona Special Collections. Historians then go in and we're looking for particular things. And we sometimes find those particular things. And sometimes we find so much more that we're not anticipating. I would find things in those boxes in Wyoming, you know, that were just not in a file. They were just sort of the bottom of the box, almost like tossed in without thought, but they were still really profound. They were drawings. They were, um, cartoons sometimes that someone had drawn about a cow or an image of an old cowboy holding a hat and looking kind of sad at it. Like just fascinating stuff. So archives themselves are ecosystems. They are sometimes very intentional and then unintentional things grow from them. And there are hidden subjects in all of the archives. And I think sometimes, very often, in the historical past and in the field of history, the hidden has been the more than human, specifically animals, but all kinds of more than human. And I think that's changing.

EW: 28:57

It absolutely is. There's this amazing piece of an archival journey that allows us this creative space. I feel like in our world right now, we talk so much about artificial intelligence and what the future will bring. I think the bounty on squirrels and the menu and all these other examples show us the past was also creative beyond our imagination. And if we start asking interesting questions, there's so much that we can find evidence of that we don't have to make up. We don't have to invent, right? We can actually see the world in a different way, looking through the lenses of these cartoons sketched on the side of an economic tally of livestock, right? And there's so much interesting power in that reimagining of the people before us that's concrete and that tangible and that we know we're a part of because we're the evolution, right? Or the sort of generational growth out of that. And so the other thing that I think more than humans and cities and archives do is they alert us to the change that's happening all around us. And so often we make change purely a human endeavor. And think of it as something that is only led by and driven by humans. Some of us resist, of course. Like, don't get me started about updates on my iPhone. So, you know, some of us, like... hold on....

MB: 30:27

Hold on! Don't get her started. Never ask her about the update. Don't ask her anything about technology at all. Please don't. (laughter)

EW: 30:35

Yes. Obviously a Luddite. Completely here. Adverse to technology. There's this saying my dad used to say all the time, right? Which is that nature is not a jar of strawberries. You can't put it on a shelf and expect it to stay the same. And so often our conception of the more than human world is that it And that it doesn't change. We're the ones that are changing all the time. But that strawberry or that squirrel or that wolf is the same wolf it's always been. And that's just fundamentally not true. And actually, what's powerful is thinking about the complexity of the soil and the sunshine and the water and the place that grows. those strawberries and so much of the modern world focuses on the jar, right? And like how we contain it and how we save it and how we keep it protected from all of our evils. And we rarely conceive of what, that jar could really be. And oftentimes it's a city, right? And that's not this unadulterated, imagined to be perfect place is like Peter Matheson's concept of a wildlife reserve. But it's still really powerful to think about the hybridity of these urban environments are not all negative, right? And it's not a clear divide between in here and out there, nature or human.

MB: 31:57

Right. And I think so that gets back to our consistent theme in More Than: A Podcast. Everything's more than you think it is. So a city is more than human and more than human made. I think partly this jar idea and putting nature on a shelf comes a little bit out of the Western binary that nature is outside of human beings. And I also think at least in the latter 20th and into the 21st century, we are the recipients of a mentality of public lands policy in this country anyway, where we have literally tried to set aside nature as something apart from humanity. And they're called wilderness areas. And this is maybe going to shock some listeners who would think, that we would be big proponents of wilderness areas. I'm not anti-wilderness areas, but I do think there is some problematic conceptualizing that happens as a result of having places called wilderness areas. This comes straight out of William Cronon. He wrote an incredible article in the 1990s, which seems like yesterday, but it was many years ago now. But it really took the environmental history field by storm because it suggested what I just said, and that is that there is, the title of the article is "The Trouble with Wilderness." And the trouble is that the idea of wilderness is just that. It's an idea. It itself is on some level socially constructed. And so when we set nature aside and we think that we can put it out there and we can put a little boundary around it and say humans can't come in, right? We know that isn't true because we know, for example, right here, we talked about buffelgrass in one of our episodes. We've got Pucsh Ridge Wilderness Area that's just over on the north side of Tucson, northwest side of Tucson. And it's full of buffelgrass, right? And it's also wilderness. And there's all kinds of policies that govern that particular space. We also have amazing bighorn sheep that are coming back in that particular area that are being protected in really cool ways. And so there's really interesting things happening in that wilderness and in wilderness areas across the country. But it's not apart from the state park that's right next to it. And it's not apart from the creeping ex-urban community of Oro Valley that is right next to it. There is no way, I don't think, especially in the 21st century, to cordon off nature and think about it as being wild and not necessarily urban. We have to begin to think about the ways in which all of this is connected in really powerful ways. And again, like you said, Em, that things change, that these animals and all of the more than human are not static. Neither are wilderness areas. We didn't set them aside in 1965 and after, and they just stayed the same. They didn't stay the same. They're changing all the time. And that's such an important historical way to think about the more than human and humans' relationship with it.

EW: 34:57

Well, I mean, the squirrels stop biting humans. Have you ever been bit by a squirrel? I've never been bitten by a squirrel. Neither eaten nor been eaten by a squirrel in the city, right? And so there's this amazing study of squirrels in the city by Etienne Benson. And he looked at, especially in the Eastern US squirrels. And I think what Etienne's work does is make squirrels a subject of history, which is also this cool evolution, right? And he asks these amazing questions about like, when did squirrels become a part of urban culture? And why were they there? And there's this complex, as you say, way of thinking about how they were introduced and they were fed and they were lured there to be part of the landscape, right? And so that very pieces of it was very intentional. And history itself has changed. Etienne's work shows us the very nature of the questions we're able to ask about the past has changed. There's this hilarious spoof on social history from the 1970s that was actually published in the Journal of Social History in 1974 called Household Pets and Urban Alienation. And it's a mockery of bringing women into Not bad. Yeah, I know. Not women? What? And pets, you know, are alienated because of urban life. And we need to understand how it is that, you know, like they came to be saved from dog catchers. And, you know, and what's so interesting about this spoof is so much of it actually tells us about human choices from the past. And I often have my graduate students in my animals and history class read that problematically, because it was actually published and to show how much not just change happens, but the field of history has changed. Not always, you know, in a way that maybe is where we want it to go, or where everyone wants it to go. But that that tension and that change, I think, has been really important for opening up the way we think about the past.

MB: 37:21

Yeah. And I think it helps us when we shift just a little bit to thinking about the power of the more than human, the agency, to use a fancy jargony word, that the more than human has in historical developments. It makes us think even about kind of older kinds of historical approaches a little bit differently. So, you know, we study a lot of law, old, you know, sort of traditional law, I almost said old (laughter), traditional historical study was highly political. It was about really formal political stuff like the passing of laws and about presidencies and about all of those sorts of historical developments. And that's still really all interesting stuff to study but instead of just asking new questions, we can ask new questions about older kinds of topics or older kinds of areas of interest and revise some of the ways in which we understand those things. I'm thinking of FIFRA, which is the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. Of course, that's what I'm thinking of. (laughter) But I am actually thinking about it because I taught nature and technology this semester. And I think one of the really... One of the things that makes my students go, oh God, I get what you're saying about this binary between nature and human being spacious at best. I get it. They get it when we start talking about chemical kinds of applications. So, and especially the ways that they affect human bodies, right? So we can think about DDT and trying to control mosquitoes and other kinds of insects, bug bed bugs. It was applied for all sorts of things. We can think about those kinds of chemical applications and what we ultimately know they do to human bodies, what we know they do to migrant farm workers' bodies, to women's breast tissue, to a bunch of things, right? And so the way they live in water, the way that they are endocrine disruptors. We can go all over the place. But what all of them show is that the human body is vulnerable to both technological developments and also to the natural world. So you have squirrels, but we have roof rats in Tucson, Arizona. And I know this because I have found four dead ones right outside my window where I'm sitting right now, killed by, yes, a household pet. I don't know that he's a household pet, a feral cat who has decided that he loves our backyard. Our backyard's cool as shit. I don't blame him for loving the backyard. But he's here. He's ours now, apparently. But he has been on rat patrol for several weeks. And I called someone to just see if we could make sure that there were no holes anywhere that could actually access our little attic space that we have in the house. And he, of course, offered to do, you know, kind of poison trap stuff. And I said, I really don't want to do that. I'm just nervous about the kinds of poison that we're using and rat poison can be pretty nasty. And he assured me that the rat poison they use now is perfectly safe and doesn't go up the food chain and it's all perfectly fine. And I don't know, I'm not, I'm not an expert on, on rodenticide. So I'm not going to say one way or the other, but I just am still very nervous about it because of course, so much of those kinds of chemical solutions to "pest" problems are a reaction to something that's happened on behest of the more than human. So we get rat poison really from, you got it, Fermented sweet clover. So fermented sweet clover in the 20s, a bunch of cows are dying. They're bleeding out basically. And everybody's going, what the hell is happening? Scientists work for a generation trying to kind of isolate what is happening in the sweet clover that's causing this. And they end up finding eventually through their research coming up with the emergence of a powerful anticoagulant. And it's known as warfarin. And we know it. It's out there in the world. And we have used anticoagulants for a long time to kill rats. They kill squirrels, kill mice, all kinds of urban rodents. But it's also used for human beings who have bleeding disorders. So again, there's that, wow, you think you're not a squirrel, but you kind of are a squirrel in many really interesting ways.

EW: 41:44

Yes, and it all comes back to cows, right?

MB: It all comes back to cows.

EW: It all comes back to cows. Well, I think that one of the big pieces of thinking about how those relationships between wild animals and feral animals, problem or nuisance animals, and ones that we giggle at because they have fluffy tails, right? I think all of that sort of petri dish that happens in cities in a really compacted, really proximate relationship. And if we allow ourselves more expansive language and deeper stories based on actual evidence, right, whether it's laws or scientific research or menus and newspaper headlines, that actual evidence allows us to imagine a different future, not just a different past. Environmentalists have a tendency to talk about loss in a world full of extinction and crisis. And we have to protect what we care about because protecting it is that jar (of strawberries), right? And we could creatively imagine a world that exists beyond crisis in this more than human realm. And it's a world where maybe the squirrels stop biting humans so they can live more happily in the city and where we the cows teach us about our own biology and we can use that to sort of work together to inhabit this one planet that we have.

MB: 43:35

I have nothing else to say other than that makes me think and hope (that is kind of Emily's and my buzzword), that maybe I could begin to see the city as beautiful. No. We could try? All right. That was awesome. And we hope you enjoyed it, listeners. We know that was a random one, but hopefully you learned a little bit about how historians do what they do, where the field of environmental history has been and where it's going. And even a little bit, I think you learned a whole hell of a lot More Than you ever thought you would about, squirrels.

EW: Thanks, listeners. Have a good day.

MB:

And that's it for this episode of More Than: A Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than: A Podcast.