The typical contemporary teddy bear looks approximately like the 1902 ones did—brown body, dark eyes, a round face, a cute little nose. When I was a kid, a talking teddy bear named Teddy Ruxpin became popular, but what I loved about teddy bears was their silence. They didn’t ask anything of me, or judge me for my emotional outbursts. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my tenth birthday. I retreated to my room after an exhausting party and cuddled up with a teddy bear, but I found that it didn’t really work anymore, that whatever had once soothed me about this soft and silent creature no longer did. I remember thinking that I would never be a kid again, not really, which was the first time I can recall feeling that intense longing for the you to whom you can never return. Sarah Dessen once wrote that home is “not a place, but a moment.” Home is a teddy bear, but only a certain teddy bear at a certain time.

The bears of our imagination have become increasingly sweet and cuddly since the debut of the teddy bear. Winnie-the-Pooh first arrived in 1926; Paddington Bear in 1958. The Care Bears showed up in 1981 as the ultimate unthreatening ursine friends. Characters like Funshine Bear and Love-A-Lot Bear starred in aggressively saccharine picture books with titles like Caring Is What Counts and Your Best Wishes Can Come True.

In the broader world, at least those of us living in cities began to see bears as we thought Roosevelt had seen them—creatures to be pitied and preserved. If I forget to turn off the lights when leaving a room, my daughter will often shout, “Dad, the polar bears!” because she has been taught that minimizing our electricity usage can shrink our carbon footprint and thereby preserve the habitat of polar bears. She’s not afraid of polar bears; she’s afraid of their extinction. The animals that once terrorized us, and that we long terrorized, are now often viewed as weak and vulnerable. The mighty bear has become, like so many creatures on Earth, dependent upon us. Their survival is contingent upon our wisdom and compassion—just as that bear in Mississippi needed Roosevelt to be kind.

In that sense, the teddy bear is a reminder of the astonishing power of contemporary humanity. It’s hard to understand how dominant our species has become, but I sometimes find it helpful to consider it purely in terms of mass: The total combined weight of all living humans currently on Earth is around three hundred and eighty-five million tons. That is the so-called biomass of our species. The biomass of our livestock—sheep, chickens, cows, and so on—is around eight hundred million tons. And the combined biomass of every other mammal and bird on Earth is less than one hundred million tons. All the whales and tigers and monkeys and deer and bears and, yes, even Canada geese—together, they weigh less than a third of what we weigh.*