CHAPTER 12

‘Most People Would Call This Totally Insane’

Nikita Zimov guides the boat more cautiously as the water becomes shallower. We’ve been travelling by motorboat for several hours through the maze of broad, shallow stretches of water around the research station in Chersky, Siberia. Suddenly the boat stops, and Nikita leaps out and starts towing it. I imagine we’ve run into a sandbank and he’s pulling us clear, which has already happened a few times. But he carries on wading, towing the boat in his wake. After a while, he tells me to get out, too.

Nikita gives me the once-over, appraising the boots I’m wearing and my short stature, and says, ‘I’d better take the camera and your rucksack now.’ This turns out to be a smart move. I ease myself gradually over the gunwales, boots first. ‘Don’t jump,’ Nikita says. I’m expecting to feel some kind of sand or gravel underfoot, but there’s only mud that yields beneath my boots, giving me little purchase. The river water runs straight in over the tops of my boots. Nikita, who has trainers on, is oblivious of his wet feet. He supports me as we wade towards the shore through what feels like bottomless sludge under a shallow layer of river water.

From a distance, the shore looks enticing, covered in light-green wavy grass like a summery meadow inviting you to go for a gentle run. In reality, it’s composed of tussocks nearly a metre high, crowned by bright-green grass sprouting on top of a layer of dead grass and grass roots. Each tussock is about 30 centimetres across. It’s impossible to walk over these tussocks, which are unstable and wobbly, and thicker at the top, like chicken legs. They are spaced just far enough apart to ensure that they provide no collective support; instead, they bend towards each other as soon as you attempt to put your weight on one. In between them lies mud, sometimes just ten centimetres deep, though generally my whole boot sinks in so far that dark-brown ooze seeps all the way down to my toes. The clumps of bright-green grass are like an unruly lock of hair, making it hard to see where I’m going. I keep treading on the edges of the tufts, which bend and slip underfoot. I must look like a drunkard as I make my way across, constantly putting my feet in the wrong place and wobbling from side to side.

My boots are full of water, and I fall over again and again, putting my hands on the wobbly tussocks to steady myself. Nikita is striding forth, far ahead of me; he isn’t even making any visible effort. I, on the other hand, am sweating and panting and swaying as I stumble onwards. I can’t even be bothered to try to bat off the aggressive mosquitoes.

Gradually, the land rises among the tufts, and the mud thickens from a syrupy consistency to something more like thick porridge. Walking becomes marginally easier. Some of the tussocks have been grazed here, and we spot a dark silhouette in the distance, clearly the one and only bison. Thanks to him, the musk ox, and the small herd of horses, the land here is beginning to resemble a meadow, making it possible for me to stand up and look around rather than keeping my gaze constantly fixed on the ground.

All the shores we passed on our way here were covered in virtually impenetrable thickets of sallow and other bushes. In the slightly drier areas, the bushes are replaced by dense larch forests. This is the only patch of open grassland I’ve seen that isn’t a marsh. It’s a result of the great experiment that Sergey and Nikita are carrying out in this remote area. They call it ‘Pleistocene Park’ — a nod to another park with natural phenomena brought back to life.

The Pleistocene was a geological epoch that began about two-and-a-half million years ago, giving way just over 11,000 years ago to the Holocene, the age we live in now. Essentially, the park’s name refers to the end of the Pleistocene. At that time, Siberia was a thriving steppe landscape, home to mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, bison, asses, horses, wolves, and more. It was dry, windy, and dusty, but the grass was sufficiently abundant to support almost as many animals as the African savannah.

When people arrived, both the open landscape and much of the fauna disappeared. It is still unclear what exactly happened. The climate changed and the Ice Age came to an end, but the steppe landscape here had already coped with major climate change in the past without losing all its mammoths and other fauna. Scientists are engaged in a vigorous debate over whether early humans are the reason why Siberia is now covered in species-poor forests, not steppes teeming with life. Nikita and Sergey are convinced that this is the explanation.

Their hypothesis is that there were enough hunters to tip the ecosystem out of kilter. Grassland needs herbivores to graze it, or it becomes overgrown with underbrush and scrub. So when numbers of herbivores fell as a result of hunting, this had a knock-on effect, with the land becoming overgrown. That meant there was less grass available for the remaining animals. This vicious circle was perpetuated by humans, who may also have found it easier to spot their quarry in the few remaining areas of steppe. The result was the forests and thickets that cover today’s landscape. At all events, that is Sergey’s interpretation of what happened. Today, the forests are home to a few elk, but not many other animals apart from the big, plump ground squirrels that are to be seen everywhere.

Yesterday evening, I asked the elder Zimov why the big animals never returned. Siberia is sparsely populated, and even without mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, large populations of grazing reindeer and horses should have been able to transform the landscape into grassy steppes again. Sergey says that even though there are so few people in Siberia, there have always been enough hunters to prevent the fauna from recovering. Periods of recovery have been followed by spells with more intensive hunting. One example, he says, is what happened to the reindeer after the fall of the Soviet Union. There was no longer enough funding available for commercial reindeer herding, so the sector went into a decline. Instead, wild reindeer began to appear, animals that would once been hunted by reindeer herders, but which now spread rapidly, even reaching Chersky. According to Sergey, there had been no wild reindeer here for a century, but suddenly there were several thousand of them.

‘But a few people got their hands on some cash and invested in two high-quality snow scooters so they could go hunting in winter. Within one year, about 30 people managed to kill all the wild reindeer — maybe as many as 15,000.’

This has recurred time and again throughout history, he says: a few hunters have managed to wipe out, or at least to decimate, whole populations of wild animals. It has been that way ever since humans first arrived here, says Sergey; that’s why the steppe has never recovered.

‘There’s always been sallow and grass along the riverbanks, enough grazing for as many as several million animals. But there’ve also been a few thousand people — enough to prevent those animals from ever multiplying.’

Out in the meadow, Nikita and I stand watching the small herd of horses grazing not far away. The aim of Pleistocene Park is to try to recreate the Siberian steppe landscape with the help of grazing herbivores. The enclosure contains about 40 horses, a few musk oxen, a lone bison, a small herd of reindeer, and a few elk. They have been grazing here for almost 20 years, and the difference in the landscape within and outside the enclosure is striking, with abundant grass and open areas inside, and thickets outside. The enclosed land may possibly be beginning to resemble the landscape that once existed. The park opened officially in 1996, and Nikita took over the reins in 2004, at the age of 20.

‘The thing is, my dad can’t be doing with all the paperwork, so he’s handed it all over to me. In other words, I’m not really the one in charge — but if anyone were to land in jail, I’d be the one,’ he laughs.

One of the Zimovs’ aims is to bring more animals here and expand the area of enclosed land, to make the animals’ impact more visible. The problem is transporting the animals to this area, particularly musk oxen and bison, neither of which live anywhere nearby. Nikita tells breathtaking stories about driving lorry-loads of animals over the frozen tundra for weeks on end, during the short period in spring when the weather is not cold enough to kill them, but the ground is still frozen, and the bogs and rivers covered in ice. There are no roads to this area; the only way to get here is by driving across country.

‘I forced myself to drive for 17 or 18 hours a day. I’d sleep for something like four hours, and spend the rest of the time taking care of the animals and eating. The lorry was brand new when I bought it at the start of the journey, but everything was broken by the time I arrived. I had no brakes and no lights left. I drove over ice as it was cracking. I really had to step on it to reach ice that was still bearing. It was incredibly frightening and exhausting.’

He goes on to tell me how the shaggy musk ox got here. Nikita and Sergey took their boat out into the northern Arctic Ocean without any decent navigation equipment. After a week or so, they managed to reach Wrangel Island. This island, once home to the very last mammoths, is now a nature reserve full of musk oxen. Nikita and Sergey had been promised that they could take a herd of young animals back to the park, and the individuals set aside for them had been placed in an enclosure. But when they arrived, it turned out that a polar bear had broken in and killed some of the musk oxen, while the rest had run off.

‘So we had to spend ten days trying to find the herds, anaesthetising the young animals, and transporting them to the boat. When we’d managed to catch six of them, they all turned out to be males. But by that time, we had to go home.’

It was a stormy homeward voyage, and Nikita stood at the helm for two nights in a row.

‘I had a chart, and there was GPS, but I had absolutely no idea what we had in front of us, and I had to navigate among icebergs in the pitch dark. You really don’t want to run into an iceberg and re-enact the Titanic.’

Only one of the six male musk oxen is still alive, and, without any females, there won’t be any more. Maybe they should set out on a new expedition soon to collect more animals, but Nikita is rather hesitant, given all the difficulties and dangers it would involve.

There are enough animals in the park to keep the bushes down and allow the grass to grow, but they can’t do anything about the trees in the forest. Nikita and I hoist ourselves into a small six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle and start driving along something that one might — with a considerable stretch of the imagination — call a forest track. I have to hold on tight with both hands to stay on board as the vehicle rumbles over the bumpy ground. Finally, we drive off the track, straight into a group of larches with trunks ten centimetres in diameter. The trees snap like matchsticks around the vehicle, and Nikita switches the engine off.

‘Most people would call what I’ve just done totally insane.’

There is a pungent scent of resin from the broken trunks. I’m dizzy after the drive through the forest and the abrupt end. The silence is overwhelming after the roaring of the engine, and the mosquitoes find us within a few seconds. It occurs to me that ‘most people’ might conceivably have a point.

Nikita begins to talk about how the forest is an intruder here; this area should hardly have any trees at all. He talks about how modern people’s view of nature is misconceived. People think the forest is nature at its best. Yet it is actually the least favourable form of nature, he says. It isn’t natural at all, merely what happens when grazing herbivores are eliminated. And this is where the mammoths come in; they once played a decisive role in maintaining the steppe landscape. The mammoth was the only animal in the ecosystem large enough to break and kill trees, thus enabling grassland to spread. Nikita and Sergey can release horses, bison, musk oxen, and other animals here, but at the moment there is nothing to replace the mammoth.

‘This is our mammoth calf,’ Nikita jokes, patting the bonnet of the six-wheeled vehicle. Sergey has also got hold of a superannuated Soviet armoured personnel carrier, which, in the absence of any adult mammoths, he drives around the park to knock over trees. Both men think that knocking over trees is the biggest contribution a resurrected mammoth could make.

So I ask Sergey whether he thinks it’s necessary for George Church, or someone else, to recreate mammoths so they can re-establish a steppe ecosystem in Siberia. It happens to be Sergey’s 60th birthday today, and he responds with an apt analogy for the occasion.

‘You know, this morning my wife asked whether she should bake me a cake. I said it’d be nice, but not absolutely necessary. You can always celebrate your birthday without having a cake. It’s the same with mammoths. Of course, it would be good to have them again, but this is going to work, either with or without them. It’ll take longer for the forests to disappear, but it’ll happen in the end.’

Sergey is a little sceptical about the various projects working to recreate animals through genetic engineering. He regards them more as PR stunts than as serious research. The only project he’s really keen on is the plan to bring back the European aurochs. He thinks it very likely to succeed and sees it as essential for Europe’s natural environment. Nikita is more positive about the possibility of recreating mammoths.

‘Yes, there’s definitely a need for mammoths. The problem is just that it’s going to take a while. George is a very smart person, and he’s doing a good job. They’re probably going to be able to produce a mammoth lookalike some time very soon. But it’s not one mammoth we need — what we want is a herd. Establishing a large group of mammoths will take a long time. Creating a herd that’s big enough for them to start developing social and behavioural patterns is a process that may well take a hundred years.’

George’s ultimate aim is to release a group of mammoths in Pleistocene Park, as he told me when I met him in Boston.

‘My long-term goal — though it’s not something I’m obsessed by like Captain Ahab by the white whale — is for there to be 100,000 cold-resistant elephants in Siberia, Canada, and Alaska. It would be the same process as when we went from nearly zero bison in the United States to the half-million we have today.’

He hopes that if that happens the mammoths — together with horses, reindeer, and other animals — will change the landscape here, recreating the Siberian steppe. That is just what the Zimovs are trying to achieve.

‘I always look for a project that’s cool in philosophical terms, one that’ll drive technological development, and that has benefits for society,’ George says. He’s convinced that modified Asian elephants in Siberia would benefit all those involved, from the natural environment to the local people, who would be able to earn money from mammoth tourism.

Even the ever-present mosquitoes would be less troublesome if the forest were replaced by grass, Nikita thinks. Rain and snowfall are quite low up here, but as water is prevented from draining away by the permafrost, it accumulates in shallow pools and sluggish rivers, which make ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The theory is that fast-growing grass absorbs more water than slow-growing trees, so the ground here would dry out if the forest were replaced by grassland.

Nikita hopes the ecosystem they create will have the same wealth of animal life that flourished during the Ice Age, and that they can develop the same complex interaction between groups of different species.

‘After 10,000 years of farming, we humans still haven’t learned how to manage grazing land as effectively as animals within ecosystems have done on their own. So what we’re trying to show is how we might be able to look after our planet in a way that’s far more effective and productive than today — and show how productive such ecosystems can be even without fossil fuels. Productive in terms of food for us humans, too.’

It would be quite possible to hunt in a system like this, he thinks, provided that hunting was restricted to a low level. The major problem at the moment, according to Nikita, is how to introduce predators when the herbivores grow in numbers. There are bears, wolverines, and wolves here, but, of those three, only wolves can attack big animals. Predators or hunters are necessary to prevent the herbivores from over-grazing, ruining the ground, and dying of starvation in spring, as has happened in Oostvaardersplassen. How exactly they are going to solve that problem remains unclear at the moment.

‘The commonest misapprehension about us and our research is that we’re crazy,’ says Nikita. ‘But I don’t think I’m crazy in the least. I’m very pragmatic: I look after the park, I’m trying to save the ecosystem here, but I’m not doing it out of pure idealism. I want to create a good product that will generate profit — maybe not money, but other forms of profit that will benefit people and humanity in centuries to come.’