776: I Work Better on Deadline

Ira Glass

OK. So here's a story you probably heard and a story you have not. Remember in 2018 when Hawaiians got that alert on their phones saying that a ballistic missile was inbound, headed for Hawaii, this is not a drill, seek immediate shelter. People scrambled to find places to hide. They put their kids in storm drains. It seemed completely plausible that a missile was on the way because this was after months of President Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un threatening each other with nuclear destruction, fire, and fury. OK, so that is the story you know. Here's the one you don't.

Ira Glass

This is Mike McFarland. And he figured he'd be viewing history because his lawn is in a part of Oahu that overlooks Pearl Harbor, which is where he figured the missile was going to land. There's still an active military base there. So he grabs his cat to bring her inside, flips on TV and radio. The same alert, "Incoming missile," is everywhere, which makes it more real and more terrifying. He props up an iPad at a window and points it at Pearl Harbor to live stream whatever's about to happen, which he admits--

Ira Glass

He starts thinking about his life and his grandfather, who died when he was little, and some whiskey of his grandfather's that he still had somewhere.

Ira Glass

By the way, and no offense to Mike, going into your bathtub will not protect you from a nuclear blast. Well, you know, it's funny where your mind goes when you think you just have minutes to live.

Ira Glass

They'd broken up maybe six months before this, after a year together.

Ira Glass

The exact words of the text-- "Lynn, I just got word that a nuclear missile on its way to Honolulu. I'm not sure where you are or if you'll even read this, but I thought of you. I wanted to let you know that looking back, you were the love of my life. If it is, in fact, over in a few minutes, thank you for the time we spent together." Then he lays there and waits. Before long-- 38 minutes after the original alert-- he and everybody else learned there's no incoming missile.

Ira Glass

Lynn would not see this message for hours, because right when the alert came over, she was actually on the runway at Inouye Airport in Honolulu, on a flight headed to California to look at colleges with her son, who saw the first alert on his phone.

Ira Glass

It's not till they landed five hours later that Lynn sees Mike's text. Today, she remembers just one sentence of that text, the key sentence.

Ira Glass

So she was glad to see it. She wrote him back, "Let's talk." And when Lynn got back to Hawaii, she and Mike met up, hung out a bunch of times to see how it felt. And then they got back together because of that text, sent from a bathtub, under a blanket, "You were the love of my life."

Ira Glass

It was nicer this time, being together. They were better friends, better at talking through problems. They built a massive garden together, raised nasturtiums and tons of vegetables, took care of animals at an animal rescue place. But they had their differences, and it didn't last. After maybe six months, they decided to split up on friendly terms. Lynn says she's glad they tried.

Ira Glass

Mike says no. He says he meant what he said. It was real. He just figured they were done before that moment came that accidentally ended up bringing them back together.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, people trying to fix things at the very last minute. It is the way that so many things happen, too many things. Just this week, it seemed like the United States was going to miss one of its very last chances to get anywhere near the 2030 climate goals to hold the Earth's temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

And then, not even at the 11th hour-- it was after the clock had run out-- Senator Joe Manchin did a turnaround and agreed to legislation that would cut emissions. Why is it always like this? Today on our program, we observe the power of a crushing impeding deadline to focus the mind and lead to action. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Quorum.

So, a bunch of people in a small town, Croydon, New Hampshire, population 800, wake up one morning not with an imaginary missile heading towards them, but something that felt, I don't know, dire, with a deadline they never saw coming. Sarah Gibson of New Hampshire Public Radio tells what happened.

Sarah Gibson

This story starts at a school budget meeting. In Croydon, barely anyone goes to these. Even the local TV guy, who sometimes films town meetings, did not show up this year. So there's not even a recording. But I'm going to tell you about it, because what happened that day triggered a very strange series of events.

The meeting takes place at the Croydon Town Hall, an old, white building with tall windows and a big, drafty room. There's an American flag from the 1800s framed on the wall, some built-in pews, and a bunch of folding chairs. Tom Moore walks in.

He's 43 years old, big, red beard, teaches high school math and woodworking, and has three little kids. Tom's been on the Croydon School Board for years. But this it's his last day. Doesn't expect anything dramatic to happen. He'd carved some wooden pens as goodbye gifts for his colleagues on the board.

Sarah Gibson

He sits down. Everything seems normal. One of the townspeople in the audience is Jim Peschke, who knows this is not going to be normal. Jim is kind of a budget nerd, obsessed with the school budget. It's the town's biggest expense by a lot. This year, it's $1.7 million, the highest it's ever been. And every year, Jim comes in with a proposal to shrink it.

Sarah Gibson

Jim's an electrical engineer, a transplant from the Midwest. He and his wife pride themselves on having homeschooled their kids rather than send them to public school. A thing to know about this budget meeting-- it's not just to talk about the proposed school budget.

The way things work here is that whoever shows up gets to actually vote on what the budget should be. This has been the approach in Croydon-- really most of small town New Hampshire-- since the 1800s. It's a relic that most people no longer participate in. Today at the town hall attendance is low, about 40 people. The meeting starts and Tom finally looks down at that pamphlet. The title is Budget or Ransom?

Sarah Gibson

The snow shoes and violins, paid for entirely with grants. But to some people here, it felt extravagant and wasteful.

Sarah Gibson

This is Ian Underwood. He's the guy who wrote that pamphlet. Ian's a member of the Free State Project, a movement of libertarians who, 20 years ago, started to move to New Hampshire with the goal of getting elected to local office and creating a barely-regulated, barely-taxed utopia of sorts. They're becoming a more serious political force with wins across the state. The majority leader in the House of Representatives, he moved here as a Free-Stater.

Ian has lived here for about 15 years on a dirt road above the Croydon schoolhouse. He thinks public school is a failure. One of the high schools down the road has really low test scores, and every year they ask for more money. So Ian, at the meeting, makes a proposal, something he'd been planning.

Sarah Gibson

Ian was proposing cutting the budget by more than half, basically blowing up the system. Jim, who in the past had been shot down proposing much smaller cuts, knew Ian was going to do this. And he was ready.

Sarah Gibson

Tom Moore, the school board member with the wooden pens who has three kids in school, started to panic.

Sarah Gibson

Tom texts his wife, "Get down here, bring everyone you know." But the vote happens too fast. People raise their hands, yay or nay. The moderator counts. And the slashed budget passes, 20 to 14. The people of Croydon have spoken, the 4% of them who actually came to the meeting. Later, someone called a lawyer and a state official to see if there was any way to reverse this and learned the vote was binding.

Sarah Gibson

This is Tom's wife, Jennifer. Tom's not much of a drinker, so she knew whatever happened was bad. And it was pretty bad for them.

The new school budget meant that they, and many other parents, could have to start paying to keep their kids in public school. And it was a lot of money, potentially up to $9,000 per year, per kid. That's because Croydon is so tiny, it doesn't have its own middle and high school, so older kids go to school in nearby, bigger towns. And Croydon covers that tuition.

But with the budget cut so drastically, the town could only afford to pay half the tuition at some of those schools. So parents would have to make up the difference. For Tom and Jennifer, sending their three kids to one of the medium-priced public schools, that'd be about $20,000 a year. That's money they don't have. A lot of families here don't.

Sarah Gibson

For Tom, this cut felt like a violation of a basic tenet of our democracy.

Sarah Gibson

There were some alternatives to paying to send your kid to public school. The school board said kids could enroll in a learning pod instead, managed by private companies. It'd be a mix of in-person and online learning. And it was cheap enough to fit within the slashed budget.

Tom says, this would be a crap show. His kids didn't do well with online learning during the pandemic. They felt distracted and isolated. Meanwhile, members of the Free State Project were going online and celebrating, saying, look at Croydon, this is how we slash taxes and transform public education. Croydon parents saw this kind of thing on Facebook and felt like, all of a sudden, their kids were part of some experiment. And they were pissed.

Sarah Gibson

Here's some tape from a school board meeting, post-budget cut. It's a mom talking about her son.

Sarah Gibson

That meeting, significantly better attended. These parents had been told the budget cut was binding. But they thought, there must be some way out of this. They started calling around, going down internet rabbit holes, and looking for an escape route because democracies are never as simple as just a bunch of people voting. There's always a clause somewhere-- a guardrail for Americans against themselves. And then-- and it's not exactly clear who found it. A lot of people say it was this woman Lorraine.

But in any case, parents land on something buried deep in New Hampshire state law. RSA 197:2-- it basically says that they can petition to hold a special meeting where the town gets another chance to vote on the school budget. But it's a long shot. Not only would parents have to win the revote. The revote would only count if half of croydon's registered voters show up and cast a ballot. That's 283 people. For Tom, who used to be on the Croydon School Board, that number seemed impossible.

Sarah Gibson

He says the school board was lucky if five or six people came to watch. After I heard about this revote, I decided to stick around Croydon because I really could not tell what would happen, and because this seemed like a test for some big questions a lot of Americans are asking about the future of public schools and our democracy.

Slashing the school budget to $800,000 would save each household in Croydon an average of $2,000 a year. And this town leans conservative, went for Trump. A lot of people, they want lower taxes and minimal government. And the question of the school budget was not going to be decided with PAC money or TV ads, but the old fashioned way-- neighbors talking to neighbors-- people they actually know-- to try to persuade them, one by one.

They needed 283 voters to show up in person. And they had a tight deadline, about 40 days. One thing about democracy the founding fathers forgot to tell us-- it can be a real pain in the ass. To reverse the budget cut, a group of mostly public school parents put their lives on hold. The first three weeks were an organizing frenzy-- meetings, constant Facebook messaging. They ordered lawn signs and hand-painted bigger ones that they stuck in the back of pickup trucks and put all over town.

There were two moms at the center of this, sisters-- twin sisters, actually-- Angi and Amie, who I spent a lot of time with. Amie is the one you heard in that town meeting talking about her high school son. A month and a half after the meeting in March, with just one week to go before the revote, Amie and Angi are driving from house to house, trying to convince people to come to the revote. They've never done a campaign like this before.

Sarah Gibson

Angi and Amie grew up in Croydon. Their car has an American flag tinted on the back window. They've been well-liked since they were kids. In high school, Amie got voted best all-around. Angi-- most sarcastic. The Freaks, they're called. That's their family's last name.

Sarah Gibson

They go to visit a guy named Brian, whose mom is there.

Sarah Gibson

So that's one yes.

Sarah Gibson

Two, actually.

Sarah Gibson

But at another house--

Sarah Gibson

And then they go to the house of someone they grew up with-- Nick Avery. Their kids went to school together.

Sarah Gibson

Before they went out door knocking today, Angi and Amie got advice from a professional campaign organizer that if someone says no, just move on. Reasonable advice-- they ignore it.

Sarah Gibson

Nick starts talking about Croydon's one-room schoolhouse, still in operation, which he and the sisters went to as kids. He doesn't get why it needs so many more staff and resources these days.

Sarah Gibson

May in New Hampshire is wild turkey hunting season. By the end, the sisters have spent 30 minutes with Nick. It doesn't move them any closer to their magic number of 283 voters. But it's something you don't see much these days-- people who don't agree actually talking to each other and listening. And it was nice to hear.

Sarah Gibson

By the way, Angi and other parents did talk to neighboring school districts about whether they'd let in Croydon students for half price. And they were basically told, no way. Meanwhile, the other side has a way easier campaign ahead of them because the only thing the budget cutters need people to do is nothing-- just skip the meeting.

That way, the revote won't meet quorum, and it won't count. To reinforce this message, the man who proposed the budget cut back in March sends out mailers. They say, "If you like the budget you have, you can keep it. Just stay home on May 7." Jim Paschke, the budget nerd who'd been trying to cut the budget for years, is feeling pretty confident.

Sarah Gibson

The way he sees the math, there are only 80 or so kids in the school district. So sure, their families will show up to restore the budget. But he doesn't think they'll get enough of their neighbors to join them.

Sarah Gibson

It's Wednesday, May 4, three days till the revote. Some of the parents organizing, who call themselves We Stand Up For Croydon, gather in private-- start tallying up the confirmed numbers. They want to know how close they are to 283.

Sarah Gibson

That's Angi saying it's terrible. They need about 50 more. The next day is the final push-- the phone bank.

Sarah Gibson

Angi's here in her go-to outfit-- t-shirt, jeans, eyeliner, and mascara. There's not good cell phone service in Croydon. So the volunteers have gone to a nearby town, ordered pizza. They have a big list of names, and they start making calls. Angi's focused. She rubs her temples a lot. There's a problem with the list of names.

Sarah Gibson

The majority of volunteers here are-- surprise, surprise-- moms. Most have jobs and kids who are currently in school. They've disagreed on some things in the past like mask mandates. But when it comes to funding public schools, they're all on the same page.

Sarah Gibson

One of them is Amanda Leslie, mom of two, English teacher, who also grew up here. Usually when she and I talk about the budget cut, she uses a lot of colorful language. But when she gets on the phone, she puts on her teacher hat. She calls a family she's known for years.

Sarah Gibson

My producer, Chris, is with Amanda when she ends the call with Ed.

Sarah Gibson

The guy Amanda was on the phone with-- Ed-- he had concerns I've heard from other people in town. They don't think the May 7th revote is fair. The town already made its decision in March. If people wanted to be part of the budget process and ensure their kids' school got funded, why didn't they show up then?

May 6th, the evening before the revote. The parents just finished setting up the space-- a YMCA camp, which is the biggest venue in the area they could find. The Croydon town hall couldn't fit 283 people. Angi is in the parking lot, headed to her SUV. She has a new concern. She just heard that her opponents want to make a presentation before the vote.

Sarah Gibson

This presentation is totally allowed. But Angi wonders if it's a tactic to run the clock so people will leave before the vote.

Sarah Gibson

Angi's also a bit frustrated because some people don't have plans but are like, I don't know if I can find two hours to spare to come. And Angie feels she and other moms have been working nonstop to save Croydon's public school system. Angi's accumulated stress-- it reached a breaking point when she and some volunteers were setting up today.

Sarah Gibson

Angi's not sleeping great. I'll send her a text in the middle of the day-- get a response at 3:00 AM the next morning. Angi tells me she's still feeling optimistic. But no one knows how tomorrow will play out. Here's Jennifer, Tom's wife. She tells me she's not sure it's going to work.

Sarah Gibson

Her husband Tom feels the same. The other side seems much more relaxed.

Sarah Gibson

This is Jim Peschke, talking about what he's going to do tomorrow during the revote. He's come up with a metaphor. I've heard it before at a school board meeting.

Sarah Gibson

Get it? He won't get a turkey, and the parents won't get their big budget back. Finally, the day of the vote-- May 7. Voters are lined up at the registration table by 8:00 AM. It's cold. There's no heating in the hall, but there's a fireplace roaring at one end.

For every democratic process, there are rules and often a public official responsible for enforcing them. Here, it's the moderator-- a man named Bruce Jasper. Today is his first time moderating a town meeting. And if Angi were hoping this would go quickly, it's not looking good.

Sarah Gibson

To be clear, he's not trying to run down the clock. He just seems really into being the moderator. He gives the number of chickens on his childhood farm, the number of people in his graduating high school class.

Sarah Gibson

At first, people figure, maybe Bruce is stalling to give stragglers time to find their seats. But pretty soon, it's 9:20 AM. And people are getting antsy-- glancing at each other. Wait, this is the school budget revote, right? Bruce eventually transitions from his biography to the rules for the proceedings. He loves a good rule.

Sarah Gibson

Someone eventually shouts out, move on! Angi and Tom give their presentation, and then--

Sarah Gibson

The two high schoolers, one after another, deliver their speeches. Parents had this plan a while ago. Let the kids have their say. It's about their future. But sticking to it is kind of surprising, given how anxious they are about time. I find Angi's sister, Amie, near the breakfast buffet.

Sarah Gibson

A bit later, the other side-- the people who want to stick with the budget cut-- makes their presentation. It's pretty short-- 15 minutes. Toward the end, people applaud early to try to usher the guy off stage.

Sarah Gibson

And finally, 70 minutes in, it's time to vote. People form a long line to put their ballots in the box. It's the OG Croydon ballot box, by the way-- wooden, from the 1890s. Angi's standing in shock, taking this all in. And guess who she sees? Nick Avery, the guy who she and Amie spent half an hour talking with during their door knocking.

Sarah Gibson

The room starts clearing out quick. Volunteer clerks begin counting votes. Tom is giddy.

Sarah Gibson

Angi comes up to him. There's a problem.

Sarah Gibson

The total number of votes appears to be six more than the number of people who checked in at the door and received ballots. Some people start wondering, was it a counting problem or something sneakier? Maybe the other side slipped in some extra ballots to invalidate the vote.

Sarah Gibson

In case anyone needed another reminder that democracy is unpredictable, here we are. The voters who cast their ballots-- some of them have left. And if there's a redo today, it definitely won't make quorum. Meanwhile, the moderator, Bruce, is on the phone with someone from the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office.

Sarah Gibson

And then, finally, Bruce is back at the mic.

Sarah Gibson

They got what they needed and nearly 100 more. Someone just counted wrong the first time. It's a landslide.

Sarah Gibson

People are hugging and high-fiving. Angi reaches out to shake hands with a guy she's known for years. They messed with the wrong town, he tells her. They, meaning the budget cutters and the libertarians who championed this. Just a few of them are here, and they don't look happy. We called up Jim Peschke, the guy who spent the morning turkey hunting. He didn't catch one. Here's what he said about the revote.

Sarah Gibson

So he accepts the results even though he doesn't agree with them, which, in 2022, is not always something you can count on. And some of the budget cutters-- they're not done. They lost the battle this year but aren't abandoning their mission. Many parents told me that this scare-- it woke them up.

They're continuing to organize, run for office, and show up to meetings. A few days later, the Croydon School Board met. A lot of people came out. And frankly, it was uneventful-- long, tedious. And sitting there, I wondered whether people will keep showing up year after year when there isn't a crisis because, ultimately, how much time are most of us willing to give to democracy?

Ira Glass

Sarah Gibson of New Hampshire Public Radio-- that story was produced by Chris Benderev. Coming up, murderous snails tear through an island, leaving a trail of carnage. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life-- I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "I Work Better on Deadline"-- stories of how deadlines can release an explosion of energy from people who never would have taken action any other way to fix problems that probably should have been addressed long before.

We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Snail in the Coffin. So I think of myself as a not terribly industrious person who happens to have organized his life around a very unforgiving weekly deadline. And really, only because of the deadline, I'm filled with enough terror to finish stories and get a radio show on the air with a coherent beginning, middle, and ending to it, week after week, with a team of people.

Without the deadline, I really would never be anywhere as productive. But the stakes of this whole thing are really pretty low, right? If I and my coworkers don't turn out a new show, so what? One less radio episode in the world. Nobody suffers. Nothing dies. The world continues as it was. Not so for the people in this next story. David Kestenbaum explains.

David Kestenbaum

This is a terrible way to start a story, but it's a fact. I've been kind of obsessed with extinctions recently. Sure, the dinosaurs because who doesn't like a good asteroid extinction? Or maybe it was a comet. There's also the Permian mass extinction, which wiped out over 80% of stuff in the sea-- totally fascinating. I think I'm interested because of this idea that now we may be living through another mass extinction-- one we are causing.

According to the international organization that tracks this stuff, one in eight bird species are threatened. 1/5 of all reptiles, 1/4 of all mammals, and plants-- 40% of all plant species could disappear. 40%-- it's hard to get your head around that. But I sort of feel like I should. Even before this, I did this thing. I regularly tried to imagine my parents' deaths, just to be prepared-- and my own death, which is a kind of personal extinction. It's a way of getting used to the idea of things ending. You can also try to imagine the extinction of democracy. See? It's a fun game.

This, of course, is an entirely theoretical exercise on my part. But there are people who actually stare into the abyss of it-- of the things facing extinction-- and try to do something. In talking to people, I found this one story I think has never really been told. It's about a snail-- one single species of all these in trouble-- and this chain of really ingenious people who are determined to save it. The story starts with Justin Gerlach, who now is a fellow at Cambridge University. But, in 1992, he was a grad student standing on the island of Raiatea in the middle of the Pacific-- lush tropical place with cliffs-- looking for this snail-- kind of famous in snail circles. It's fancy name-- partula faba.

David Kestenbaum

Sadly but not surprisingly, he says, Captain Cook never wrote anything in his diaries about the snail. It was named afterward. Scientists ended up learning a lot about genetics from partula snails years later. This one-- particularly kind of dignified as snails go-- about an inch long.

David Kestenbaum

The snail, when Justin got to the island, was in trouble-- because of us. Justin told me the story with a kind of professorial calm. He's had a front row seat to species extinction for a while now. What happened, he says, is that, at some point, a different snail had been brought to the island-- the giant African land snail-- basically a garden pest, he says. It got out of control. And the solution to that problem was to introduce another snail-- a predatory one that people hoped would eat the African land snail.

David Kestenbaum

Maybe you can see where this is going. The new snail had no interest in this assignment.

David Kestenbaum

Including Captain Cook's bean snail. Climate change, for sure, is putting a lot of species in danger. But most creatures on the endangered list-- they're there for reasons like this-- much more basic stuff. We cut down some forest to farm or build homes. We catch too many fish. Or we bring some foreign snail to an island. So Justin's on the island to rescue any survivors he can find. He heads out and gets to this one valley where the invading snails had apparently just swept through, maybe a week before.

David Kestenbaum

He had this thought.

David Kestenbaum

There's like a massacre or something.

David Kestenbaum

That's snails are slow-- joke number one for this story. There'll be another.

David Kestenbaum

If it seems hard to imagine how an animal with no arms or hands or claws or talons, whose name is appropriately synonymous with slowness, can kill anything at all, I found a video online. It's gruesome. The predatory snail just kind of sucks the other snail out of its shell while it struggles to fight back. Justin does find one-- one bean snail in that valley. He puts it in a plastic container. And then a piece of luck-- he finds an old vanilla plantation the predatory snails hadn't reached yet. And there are dozens of bean snails.

David Kestenbaum

And with that, Justin found himself in a remarkable position. He had some of the very last of a species that had been around for a million years-- the last on earth. After Justin collected the snails, he packed them up and took them on a plane. The snails rode in the overhead bin. He checked them from time to time. The snails that Justin collected, along with some others that had been gathered the previous year, were sent to a handful of places that could care for them.

The plan was simple. If you could get them to breed, then you go from tens of snails to hundreds, thousands. And you could put them back in nature. Some of the snails were sent to the Bristol Zoo. Visitors would walk right by them-- no idea they were looking at what could be the last of their kind on earth.

Melissa Bushell was one of the keepers in charge of them, in the hopes that their numbers would increase-- and, I have to say, kind of the perfect person to try to pull this thing off-- dedicated, methodical, and, aside from a detour as a bartender, she can trace this career choice way back. Melissa recently transitioned, by the way. She asked that we share that.

David Kestenbaum

Melissa, usually listening to classical music on the radio, would tend to the snails, feed them twice a week a mixture of porridge oats, trout food pellet, and cuddle bone ground into a powder, change out the sheet of plastic wrap that covers the top of the glass boxes they were in, and see if their numbers would increase. Melissa spent a lot of time watching them. There's a little dance they do when they mate.

David Kestenbaum

Told you.

David Kestenbaum

Then, a few weeks later, a baby would be born-- just the size of a period you might write with a pencil at the end of a sentence. So the breeding was working. But there was a problem.

David Kestenbaum

The snails were reproducing but not fast enough to replace the ones that were dying. No one could figure out why. I want to be sure you get a picture of just how much effort and expertise went into this. It was a whole team of people. They did autopsies of each snail when it died, taking them out of their shells, preserving them, slicing them, looking at them under a microscope.

They even reached out to Justin, who'd rescued the last ones on the island as a grad student. Justin, thinking maybe there was a problem with the diet, went back to an old museum collection that had snails preserved from over 100 years ago. Surprisingly, he found ants in some of their stomachs. But they determined the snails probably weren't feeding on ants. The snails probably had just eaten fruit that had ants in it. No one had any idea what was wrong. Their numbers continued to drop without explanation.

David Kestenbaum

Edinburgh Zoo. If there's anywhere that could save them, it was Edinburgh. If the president were sick, that's where you'd send him, if he were a snail. Years before this, Edinburgh Zoo had been sent a single snail-- the very last of its kind in captivity-- just one-- a subspecies called Partula taeniata simulans. They kept it alive. And somehow, it was pregnant. It gave birth. And soon, there were hundreds and hundreds of them. And they were put back in the wild.

Melissa was full of worry, though-- said, when the last bean snails went up to Edinburgh Zoo in a van, it felt like handing off a grenade that the pin had just been taken out of. The situation these people were in with the bean snail, where you know you have the last ones in your hands-- it's very rare. More often, we just don't know if something's going extinct. Usually, scientists suspect something in the wild has disappeared. But there's a long process of searching and surveying to determine, yes, it's really gone. The standard is, when there's no reasonable doubt, the last individual of a species has died.

This year, six new things were officially designated as extinct-- the Chinese paddlefish, three Moroccan freshwater fish, a tree from Asia, and a fly from the UK, last seen in 1907. But they weren't there yet with the bean snail. The nine remaining snails arrived at Edinburgh Zoo. The snails were not put on display but were kept instead in a quiet room-- an old coal shed, actually, where that other single snail had come back from the brink. Ross Poulter, who helped take care of them, told me he thinks the light there is perfectly dim, like it would be in the forest. He said he felt a kind of awe being in there with them.

David Kestenbaum

He wondered, what would it be like if you had the last elephant? Within a year, eight of the snails had died, which meant they were down to one snail-- the last bean snail. Some snails can reproduce without a mate-- basically impregnate themselves. Every time he went in there, Ross would check to see if there was a baby. A month went by-- this one snail just doing its thing-- no baby. Two months, three months, six months.

David Kestenbaum

He thought about how the famous British explorer, Captain James Cook, had been there at the beginning. And now, at the other end, him, Ross Poulter, looking at the last one.

David Kestenbaum

This is Jo Elliott, who was overseeing things.

David Kestenbaum

As far as I can tell, the end of the snail that had been around for a million years-- other than a handful of people, nobody noticed-- no stories in the papers or online. I'd wanted to know what it was like to come face to face with extinction. Ross knew. When the last one died, Ross was the one who put it in the glass jar. It's his neat handwriting on the side that says, P Faba, for partula faba. Last known individual, he wrote. I asked if he'd managed to absorb what had happened.

He said, I don't know how to answer that. Even when you see it up close, it's hard to understand. It's too big. It's not on our time scale at all. You'd have to somehow be able to imagine snails being born one generation after another for, like, a million years and then it stopping-- in Ross' case, on some Sunday at the office before your very eyes. What are you supposed to do after that?

We're so used to stories about people on deadline facing one last chance to save things and figuring out some way at the last moment. But I think the truth is when you get to the point where things are so desperate, they are down to one last chance, it's rarely a good one. I know. That's a terrible way to end a story. But it's a fact.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum is our show's Senior Editor.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced by Sean Cole. The people who put together today's program include Elna Baker, Michael Comite, Valerie Kipnis, Miki Meek, Katherine Rae Mondo, Michelle Navarro, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Charlotte Sleeper, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our Managing Editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our Executive Editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Maria Hollenhorst, Craig Hilton-Taylor, Justine Paradis, Jack Rodolico, Katie Colaneri, Ed Spiker, Dan Barrick, Maureen McMurray, Stephen Andersen, Susan Solomon, Robert Watson, Joseph Steed, and Jim Baker. Our website is thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there are videos. There are lists of favorite shows if you're looking for something to listen to and tons of other stuff there. Again, thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, we were at the car rental place the other day. We waited in line forever. The rental people were so rude. Finally, Torey just lost it. He said, we're going somewhere else-- Avis, Enterprise, Hertz-- anyplace but this place.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.