WHY IS DE-EXTINCTION IMPORTANT?
The Geological Timescale
IMAGINE THAT YOU are bobbing out in space. Before you, the Earth pulses with the energy of all of the births and deaths it has experienced through time. Hallucinatory powers allow you to fast-forward and rewind the events of evolutionary history, as though you were scrubbing through a YouTube video. In the surrounding cosmos, in the flash of an eye, a star is born and dies. Up close on Earth, species lines become syrupy, oozing from one creature into another as natural selection does its work, changing the way the creatures look as they evolve. The dinosaurs that didn’t die out at the end of the Cretaceous Period sprout wings and fly, becoming beautiful birds. Everything is in constant change; there are no static shapes to be seen.
The Mexican American philosopher, artist, and writer Manuel DeLanda, while noting that everything that matters to evolution happens across millennia, says of this exercise, “The observer would see species mutating and flowing. He would probably worship flows—unlike us, who, because of our very, very tiny time-scale of observation, tend to worship rocks.” We like to focus on things in front of us that seem stable in our lifetimes, from buildings to cities and nation-states. Most of us don’t look at the Grand Canyon and see it moving, but it is.
Ironically, we talk about the history of all events on Earth, which occur through dynamic motion, with a standard static image: the geological timescale. This essential tool for geologists, paleontologists, and other earth scientists sometimes appears in grayscale but sometimes, to my preference, comes in more psychedelic colors. Some versions appear in standard chart form, while others morph into mountains, animals, or three-dimensional spirals. But all of these varieties follow a simple method of historical measurement. The geological timescale is a chronological record that connects the layers of rock in the ground to time, chunking events that have happened on Earth together. In other words, geological time is divided into slices according to the age of rocks. It’s a bit odd to think about, really—that something as ephemeral as time should equal rocks.
Big slices of rock-time are called eons, which are subdivided into eras, which in turn are divided into two or three periods, which can be divided into epochs. The system is hierarchical. Specific moments of rapid species evolution and diversification are told through the fossil record, which can be read out from the great rocky timelines that we drill out of the ground. Births, blossoms, renewals, devastations, extinctions—nothing stands still. Yet this beloved hierarchy of stone, in all of its fixed representation, has come to determine how we think about the flows of life through geologic time. The geological timescale allows us to see that extinction is an integral part of evolution, and even to visually map when significant extinction events have taken their toll. And one day, if a certain group of scientists gets its way, we will map the arrival of recreated extinct species on this timescale too.
Extinction—the failure of an entire group of organisms to adapt to changing circumstances and thus their completely dying out—feels intuitive to us today as a concept, but it was not always so. The idea is not inherently obvious and didn’t even exist with any proof until the end of the eighteenth century, when the French anatomist Georges Cuvier discovered that molars he had pulled out of the ground could not have come from any organism known to humans at the time. Scientists had seen the remains of old, disappeared animals before, but they had always thought these were just geographically shifted remains of the animals they already knew. In their eyes, for example, mammoth bones (or mastodon molars, as Cuvier had found) were just the skeletal bits of elephants that had migrated north.
Today, however, we know that the possibility of extinction looms over all species, even our own. The background extinction rate—the standard and unrelenting culling of living things over geological time (often measured in extinctions per million species-years)—makes constant disappearances seem somewhat mundane. It’s estimated that over the last 3.8 billion years, nearly 4 billion species have evolved on Earth; staggeringly, 99 percent of them are already said to be gone. The vast numbers of disappearances are, however, often balanced by the appearances of new species, which slowly fill the cup back up again—which is why that 99 percent feels hardly possible. But it’s not an even teeter-totter effect. If you were to use that same rewind and fast-forward function you scanned the history of life on Earth with earlier, you would notice the bright flashing of five moments of extreme species collapse against the background. These outlying moments are known as mass extinctions, and they have, time and again, in varying circumstances, aggressively downsized life’s inventory.
Mass Extinctions
THE FIVE MASS extinctions occurred near the end of the Ordovician Period and the start of the Silurian (approximately 443 million years ago), in the late Devonian (about 373 million years ago), at the end of the Permian (about 250 million years ago), in the late Triassic and at the start of the Jurassic (about 208 million years ago), and at the end of the Cretaceous (about 66 million years ago). Depending on how they are measured, the extent to which they surpass the normal background extinction rate fluctuates; yet each greatly exceeds the norm for species recessions in any other timespan of the past 540 million years. Theories about their main causes vary—glaciation in the Ordovician, chemical weathering and carbon storage in the Devonian, global warming and changing ocean chemistry at the end of the Permian, volcanic eruption in the late Triassic, the asteroid that knocked out the dinosaurs by the end of the Cretaceous. (Many of the causes are still heavily debated.) It is said that these five moments alone have swallowed up over 75 percent of the species that the Earth has ever seen, a number that is itself hard to swallow.
Mass extinctions are massively diverse. There is no single cause for them, and no conclusive evidence for why or how they happen. But in all cases, it is largely believed that they arise from a perfect storm of factors—atmospheric composition, climate fluctuation, abnormally high-intensity ecological stressors, and so on—meeting at just the right time to tip ecosystems toward devastation. This doesn’t account for fluke incidents like a meteor crashing into the Earth, but these factors “prime the pump” of extinction, and any additional disaster may punctuate a collective die-out with extra oomph.
In 1986, a scientist named Jack Sepkoski defined mass extinction as “any substantial increase in the amount of extinction (i.e., lineage termination) suffered by more than one geographically wide-spread higher taxon during a relatively short interval of geologic time, resulting in an at least temporary decline in their. . . diversity.” This definition is now only one among many, but it is a useful way to measure. (Sepkoski also said that to qualify as a mass extinction, an event must go further than the elimination of one group of species.)
According to Sepkoski’s definition, eighteen intervals along the geological timescale can be said to count as mass extinctions, but only three of those extinction events—the end-Ordovician, end-Permian, and end-Cretaceous—stand out using the criterion of magnitude alone. The other two that together with these make up the big five—the Devonian and Triassic extinctions—are technically mass depletions in comparison. But they too precipitated extinction so significantly that they are considered similarly terrible times.
Today, mammals radiate and rule, but many scientists say that we are again faced with a blinding flash of obliteration: the sixth mass extinction. What is special and unique about this time is that it is said to be the first mass extinction to be driven by a single species—us. According to many biologists, the sixth mass extinction has in fact been going on, in one phase or another, for about a hundred thousand years, since humans started to disperse across different parts of the globe. There is no unanimous verdict on this, though, and whether it is a mass extinction event, like the big five, is debated. Researchers do not agree on the quality of the data available or on which parts of it best measure mass extinction. Nevertheless, it is generally believed that pollution, habitat destruction, overhunting, and the introduction of non-native species into various ecosystems over the last two hundred years—since the Industrial Revolution—have been especially brutal. The extinction rates, expectations, and exact numbers of threats and disappearances get muddled across hundreds of research papers, statistical analyses, and reviews. But what’s clear is that we must recognize what is happening and make a plan to address it. If humans are thought to have caused the devastation, do we have an obligation to undo the damage by any means if we can? And if we can, do we dare to try?
Determining whether human beings are responsible for extinction events is no simple affair. If one moment on the Earth’s twenty-four-hour clock equals about 200,000 years, we Homo sapiens did not show up on Earth until the last moment before midnight. The most recent epoch is just a tiny sliver of Earth’s history, spanning roughly the last 12,000 years (or 11,700 years with a maximum counting error of 99 years, if you want to get technical). Known as the Holocene, this epoch began at the end of the Pleistocene—the last glacial period—and is characterized by the development of major human civilizations. It includes our gradual transition to modern urban living, with industrialization, consumerism, and the myriad environmental impacts of contemporary life that are now taking their toll on the planet. Climate change, mass species extinctions, and other misfortunes characterize different time periods in ways people don’t always agree on. But a lot of what has happened in the last 12,000 years simply isn’t debatable. Humans have transformed ecosystems as powerfully as the geophysical forces that used to do the work on their own. It’s even made some people wonder whether we’re still in the Holocene or in a new epoch of our own making altogether.
AFTER THE HOT northern summer of 1988, known as “the greenhouse summer,” the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The purpose of this organization was, and still is, to review and communicate the effects of climate change, with a hope of informing policymaking based on solid science that clarifies anthropogenic effects. We all know the story that the IPCC has to tell us by now, and many of us are overwhelmed by it. The human population has boomed, our industrial practices have flourished, and we’re making the habitats we so desperately rely on, as well as the marginalized communities that live there, pay.
The global human population was around 300 million in AD 1000, 500 million in 1500, and 790 million by 1750—a steady increase. It began to skyrocket at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in the late eighteenth century. Now that we have surpassed 7 billion, we’ve changed the physical sedimentation of the planet, making it impossible for some species to live in habitats where we’ve eroded the land through agricultural and urban development and have dammed riverbeds with construction sites, to just scratch the surface of what we’ve been doing. The global temperature is expected to rise around 0.2 degrees Celsius (about a third of a degree Fahrenheit) per decade as a result of human-caused carbon emissions, and many habitats will become unlivable for species that have adapted to inhabit them in cooler temperatures. Although various species might be able to cope with the changes, it’s not likely that all will adapt quickly enough to survive. Meanwhile, land developments are obliterating former escape routes, trapping animals in areas where they might not evolve in time to make it.
As the IPCC reports, the oceans have changed too. Increased ice melt has caused sea levels to rise, and as a result of increased carbon release, the Earth’s surface waters now have a significantly more acidic pH than in preindustrial times. Increased acidification could prevent several important biological processes from being carried out for a wide variety of marine creatures. What was once a mundane part of sea life—growing shells and skeletons—could become a strenuous, if not impossible, affair. In acidifying waters, huge numbers of mollusks’ larvae are expected to fail or develop abnormally along with—and I feel a stinging just thinking about it—the acidification of the mollusks’ blood. That type of sanguine suffering will take a toll on how well mollusks can respire and excrete. Scientists have said that the ocean floor will start to dissolve in response as chemical reactions attempt to neutralize the acidifying waters. Although this is not an exhaustive list of possible effects, scientists are exhausting themselves trying to come to a consensus about when this degree of devastation really began and what that means for how we should understand it.
In 2000, Paul Crutzen, a Dutch Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist who had made major discoveries about the depletion of the ozone layer, and Eugene Stoermer, a biologist with expertise in freshwater species, proposed a term to describe the outsized influence of humans on the planet that defines our current time: Anthropocene. They declared that the planet had entered an altogether new geological epoch, distinctly different from the Holocene. This hypothetical epoch, demarcated by human expansion on and domination of the planet, marks the moment when our species started affecting the Earth’s systems to the same degree as did geological factors like plate tectonics and the rise of mountain ranges. Its time of origin is hotly contested, with suggestions ranging from the beginning of the Holocene approximately 12,000 years ago, to the Industrial Revolution, to just after World War II, when the fallout from the first nuclear weapons created a worldwide radionuclide signature in the Earth’s sediment. The jury is still out on when it started and on whether or not it will become an official term in scientific stories about the history of life on Earth.
The Anthropocene may have become an environmental and intellectual buzzword, but some critics point out that the concept misplaces the blame for how we’ve changed the world. The problem is that it treats humans like one big category—as though it were all of us who have created the damaging impacts of the Anthropocene. Of course, that’s not the case. It’s the wealthiest of us who have done that. And as with climate change, it’s the least wealthy among us who first feel its effects.
EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Today’s sixth mass extinction is similar to the other five in that it represents a giant loss of biodiversity in an incredibly short amount of geological time. According to a 2014 publication in the academic journal Science, of the 5 million to 9 million animal species that we know about, which is a conservative guess, anywhere from 11,000 to 58,000 are vanishing per year. Those estimates do not take into account local extinctions, called extirpations, in which the species still exists elsewhere. A study published in 2015 claims to show “without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event.” The researchers looked at vertebrates, the most extensively studied group of animals, which includes mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, and provided conservative estimates of the number of species that had gone extinct since 1900. Despite their cautiousness, they could still show that 468 more extinctions had occurred than would be expected under normal geological circumstances—a number believed to be around 9. For the invertebrates—land-crawling critters without spines—the data is much less complete. But research suggests that invertebrates are in even more trouble than their bony-backed counterparts. It is estimated that 26 percent of mammals will be wiped out if the current extinction rate continues, and some have said that the extinction rate will increase from 1,000 times as high as the natural background rate—the current situation—to 10,000 times as high in the future.
The impact of the Anthropocene on species extinctions is unclear. On the one hand, some scientists say humans have ushered in the sixth mass extinction by expanding our societies across the globe in the truest Anthropocene fashion. On the other hand, the pressure that the Anthropocene puts on ecosystems also forces new species into existence. Chris D. Thomas, a professor of conservation biology at the University of York in the UK, argues that hybridization and the blurring of species lines, as accelerated by the Anthropocene, need not be maladaptive. Throughout human history we’ve translocated species on purpose, spread invasive species by accident, and brought formerly separated species into contact with each other by remodeling their habitats. Hybridization flourishes where humans shape the land, affecting the dispersal of animal populations. The Arctic Spring now arrives roughly one week earlier than it used to, and the winter freeze sets in one week later than it once did, but animals compensate for the temperature change by moving into new ranges. Along the way, they might meet other species on the run from melting sea ice and mate with them, creating a generation of new hybrid species. According to Thomas, “Speciation by hybridization is likely to be a signature of the Anthropocene . . . Populations and species have begun to evolve, diverge, hybridize and even speciate in new man-made surroundings.” Climates change, habitats morph, and new creatures come into view.
Stewart Brand recognizes the Anthropocene’s creative potential for speciation: “Any creature or plant facing a shifting environment has three choices: move, adapt or die. Evolution is far more rapid and pervasive than most people realise.” He points out that evolutionary change does not always mean evolutionary disaster—and climate change doesn’t mean that all species will die in its wake. Some might move into new areas beyond their historical distribution, expanding their native range. In this sense, the Anthropocene might devastate some species, but it might also accelerate the evolution of others.
If hybridization in the wild can allow creatures to survive anthropogenic change, what might that mean for hybrid species that are intentionally created? When genes from extinct species are inserted into the genomes of their living relatives, will de-extinction become an asset for the Anthropocene? As other human-discovered technologies like CRISPR and cloning allow the threat of extinction to be alleviated from inside a petri dish, what types of environmental change will the creatures they produce be able to cope with when they’re reintroduced in the wild?
The Anthropocene is creative, an idea Brand pushes to its edge. He has argued that mass species extinction is not the problem—the real issue is the way we use its narratives to stir panic in the minds of the public. Our hearts ache for species as they disappear one by one, but, Brand says, the decline of many nonextinct wild animal populations is a much greater threat to conservation than the obliteration of single species. Ecosystems are affected not just by how many species exist in them but also by how many individual animals are there to play out their ecological roles. This is what’s known as bioabundance, without which a substantial number of important ecological processes—like grazing, planting seeds, and enriching the soil—might happen too infrequently to maintain an ecosystem’s productivity. In this sense, the more individual creatures there are, the more ecosystem richness there will be. “Viewing every conservation issue through the lens of extinction threat,” Brand says, “is simplistic and usually irrelevant. Worse, it introduces an emotional charge that makes the problem seem cosmic and overwhelming rather than local and solvable.”
The philosopher Timothy Morton speaks of hyperobjects—entities spread so vastly across space and time that we can’t see their edges. Climate change is a pertinent example. Mass extinction also aptly fits the bill. When you can’t see where a hyperobject stops or starts, you might not know where or how to intervene. Hyperobjects make us feel small and helpless. In light of extinction, Brand states, “The core of tragedy is that it cannot be fixed, and that is a formula for hopelessness and inaction. Lazy romanticism about impending doom becomes the default view.”
As a champion of de-extinction, Brand understandably wants us to feel that it can help us do something proactive about species loss instead of give into environmental pessimism. And by steering us away from the hyperobject at hand and focusing us squarely on pragmatic goals—such as increasing the number of animals out there—he presents the quest for bioabundance as convincingly worthwhile. But do we really want to obliterate all distinction between the kinds of species loss we are concerned about and the degree of that loss? When a species goes extinct, a particular way of life is lost forever. Creating new transgenic animals in the name of conservation may be fine in cases that have been thoroughly thought out. But it does not account for the fact that when a certain species disappears, its unique flavor of existence, which had intrinsic meaning and value to other life forms, fades away as well. What would we miss if bioabundance were all that mattered? Perhaps if bioabundance was our foremost concern, we’d risk undercutting the moral value of living species and all that their existence has brought into the world so far. Call me old-fashioned, but why shouldn’t that matter more?
REVERSING EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE:
“THE MORAL HAZARD”
“I am terribly sad that you are writing a book on de-extinction,” Stuart Pimm, a prominent conservation biologist with ruffled gray hair and a direct way of speaking, tells me barely one question into our interview. That’s because he smells a strong whiff of human-centered egotism in de-extinction, which, he says, “sounds very sexy, but also sounds very white-men-wearing-lab-coats-who-are-going-to-save-the-planet.” His disapproval is rooted in a worry that we, as a public, have become overly attuned to stories of environmental doom and gloom. He fears that the extent to which we mire ourselves in dire narratives about the end of biodiversity leaves us without any room for stories of hope—or real hope, as he puts it, since he doesn’t think de-extinction fits into that category. “What I would love for you to write a book about instead is how enormously successful conservation has become at saving species,” he tells me. Yet Pimm was one of the first scientists to show that species are disappearing one thousand times faster today than they normally would otherwise. How is that hopeful? He knows the facts and knows they’re grave. What gets him out of bed in the morning, he says, is that he gets to work with brilliant people all over the world to come up with practical solutions for saving species. However, he will never count de-extinction among them.
His voice tenses as he scoldingly says, “I think it is a real shame you are not writing about real solutions. Is de-extinction a solution? It’s a tiny, microscopic marginal solution with a lot of problems. There’s a lot of fantastic people out there doing incredible things to save biodiversity, save species, but this is not anywhere near the top of the list.” And he’s right: there are a lot of conservation success stories to tell that we don’t seem to celebrate in society nearly enough. For example, Pimm’s NGO, Saving Species, has helped take the golden lion tamarin—a tiny fire-orange monkey from coastal Brazil with a crotchety face—off the endangered species list. With the help of local conservation groups, the NGO purchased 270 acres of cattle pasture that separated two dislocated areas where the golden lion tamarins live. The populations were choked on either side of the divide, unable to meet and procreate. But when the cattle pasture was turned into a monkey thoroughfare, the separated tamarins—which were nearing perilous isolation on both sides—could breed and flourish across the land.
Before that, Pimm was involved in the rescue of the Florida panther, a species that had become so badly inbred that the males were suffering all manner of reproductive nightmares—they had low sperm count and low sperm motility, and in many cases their testicles wouldn’t drop. At one point in the 1990s, no more than thirty panthers lurked in the Florida Everglades, so conservationists introduced eight female Texan panthers into South Florida to see if they would create hybrid kittens with the floundering males. It was a controversial step, and even Pimm was skeptical at first. But the new blood made for a breathtaking turnaround. The males, despite their limitations, eventually managed to do what was expected of them, and hybrid kittens were born. Those kittens grew up three times more likely to make it to adulthood than purebred kittens and as adults expanded the Florida panther’s range. Those are the kinds of stories that Pimm wants us to take hope from in these times of mass extinction, not some “crock aspiration” to restore ecosystems with unextinct animals that are not even authentic replicas of the species they seek to replace.
Another problem, in Pimm’s eyes, is the moral hazard of assuming that we can pull de-extinction off without a hitch. “The issue is the moral hazard of saying, frankly, we can drive species to extinction because we can always bring them back.” In his work, Pimm encounters a lot of people who, he says, would like to drive species to extinction, at least at the local level, for their own financial gain—people who want to develop valuable animal habitats and remove the populations within them, by promising to return the species (the ones that their own commercial projects would displace) at a more opportune time. For example, he has testified before U.S. congressional committees in cases where the multi-billion-dollar logging industry wants to chop down vast amounts of old-growth cedar, fir, hemlock, and spruce forests in the Pacific Northwest but are held back from logging legally because of a pretty, white-spotted brown bird that lives there.
In 1990, the spotted owl was declared a threatened species, and conservationists restricted how close loggers could get to its nesting grounds. But Pimm has since witnessed a number of proposals that suggest protecting the bird in puzzling ways—for example, by cutting down significant amounts of its habitat and ushering the owls into remaining parts of the forest. If the birds don’t fare well with the changes, it’s been suggested, they could be put in captivity and returned to the wild when the forests have regrown. But they could also just be left where they are in the first place. Pimm believes, based on evidence like this, that before any ecologically beneficial new animals are created, de-extinction will introduce a moral hazard by suggesting that it doesn’t really matter if we drive a species to extinction because we can always bring it back at a better time.
Ryan Phelan doesn’t think so. “The moral hazard thing just doesn’t resonate for me,” she says. She tells me that the same idea came up over thirty years ago when the first frozen zoos were established to bank cells and tissue samples from endangered species. At the time, people thought that frozen zoos—large repositories of species-specific DNA archived in sub-zero temperatures—would cause people to assume that nature will be protected against all odds. But the fact that vials of endangered species’ DNA are maintained in frozen zoos has never been an excuse not to protect the living version in the wild.
Another concern is that money for conservation programs could be diverted to biotechnological solutions like de-extinction. An attempt to remove support for species protection was observed when people started cloning endangered animals, like Noah, the gaur, in the early 2000s. In fact, shortly after Noah’s arrival was announced, critics of the Endangered Species Act suggested that species will no longer go extinct, argued for an overhaul, and, in some cases, called for complete removal of protective legislation for endangered species. Then again, de-extinction and conservation programs aren’t likely to reach into the same purse for funds. In many cases, de-extinction efforts are looking for donations from benefactors who would like to see specific species return. The idea that a wealthy donor dying to see a mammoth-like elephant come to life would otherwise care about helping the endangered birds of Hawaii with his or her own private money is a bit of a stretch. In other words, a donor’s money for de-extinction may end up in the pot for a particular species or in no pot at all. Yet, for every species that is brought back, there are going to be thousands that there will not be the money, time, or interest to reanimate. So if de-extinction ever becomes largely driven by deep pockets and species favoritism, what will that new biotechnologically mediated wilderness look like? And, importantly, how much will it cost?
Conservationist Joseph Bennett of Carleton University is the lead author on a 2017 paper in Nature that caused a flurry of debate about the economics and possible related damages of de-extinction. In “Spending Limited Resources on De-extinction Could Lead to Net Biodiversity Loss,” Bennett and his colleagues set out to determine how the relative costs of establishing and maintaining populations of resurrected species would pan out in terms of their impact on conservation programs for endangered extant species, without factoring in the direct costs of the experiments needed to make the unextinct animals in the first place. They concluded that if government-funded conservation programs were left to pick up the costs in order to ensure that unextinct species have a shot at making it in the wild, even after private donors may have paid for the creation of the animals, there would likely be considerable costs to currently endangered species. Based on realistic baseline conservation budgets in New Zealand and the Australian state of New South Wales, they argue that conservation programs would receive less support, and thus, as a direct result of de-extinction, net biodiversity would decrease. Considering New Zealand’s conservation budget, they calculated that if 11 unextinct species were to receive conservation funds for maintaining their resurrected populations there, that nearly three times as many living endangered species could be maintained on the same amount. “If taking care of these resurrected species becomes the purview of governments, then something’s got to give unless somehow the budgets go up a lot and the governments can afford both the resurrection of species and the extant endangered species they should be working on as well,” Bennett told me.
But Revive & Restore has stated many times that they are looking for private funds, not government funds, to back their projects. And this raises the convincing point already mentioned that those private funders might only care about seeing their money resurrect an extinct species, or nothing at all. In their paper, Bennett and colleagues also consider a scenario in which private funders pay for the whole shot of setting unextinct populations up in the wild and managing them there. Their numbers show that private funding for five unextinct species in New South Wales could instead be used to conserve over eight times as many endangered species (42) there. They warn that even when programs are privately supported, there are critical missed opportunities since the funds could have always gone to endangered species conservation instead—costs that outweigh the benefits of de-extinction.
“If an agency wants to see a mammoth and wants to look one in the eye, then that agency is not necessarily going to spend the money on conservation,” Bennett said, in agreement with what Revive & Restore have proposed. “But my problem is when de-extinction gets couched as conservation. The people who say, ‘Oh, we’ll bring back the mammoth, but certain agencies aren’t interested in spending money on other endangered things,’ are the same people you will also see couching mammoth resurrection in terms of being conservation. If it is conservation, then they can do a better job with those resources, so couching it in terms of conservation is disingenuous. But if some agency is like, ‘Look, we want to make a mammoth and look one in the eye,’ I’ll say okay, fine. I mean, I’d love to look one in the eye. It would be really cool. But I think you can make one point or the other point. You can’t make both.”
Ben Novak, Revive & Restore’s lead scientist on their passenger pigeon de-extinction project, criticized the paper for conducting its analyses based on unrealistic candidate species that no one is currently planning on “de-extincting.” He also pointed out that Bennett et al. assessed the costs of existing conservation programs in a small and very particular part of the world (New Zealand and New South Wales) that is not representative of the settings most de-extinction projects will occur in.
When discussing costs through another lens, the official guiding principles of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Creating Proxies of Extinct Species for Conservation Benefit point out that ensuring successful translocation of unextinct animals to release sites and properly caring for them once they’re introduced into their selected habitat will require considerable costs in the form of “not just money but scarce human resources.” As a field, conservation isn’t exactly teeming with professionals who are qualified to do this type of work, so allocating those people to work on de-extinction projects rather than more traditional conservation translocations or management projects could cost endangered species in material ways that reach beyond just the bottom line of conservation budgets.
To this end, some critics wish that de-extinction advocates would simply call a spade a spade and get on with their future-forward show. Rather than argue for the conservation merits of de-extinction or our moral responsibility to pursue it, they urge us to celebrate how neat de-extinction is in a whiz-bang kind of way. “I think it is a very cool project technologically, but most of the environmental reasons people use to justify why we should do it are silly or wrong,” says Tom Gilbert, a professor of paleogenomics at the University of Copenhagen and director of a large laboratory for ancient DNA research at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Forest elephants in Africa are in grave danger from heavily armed poachers with tremendous firepower who gladly kill conservationists and wardens standing in their way. Why are we sitting around talking about woolly mammoths if we don’t even know whether we can keep the forest elephants alive?
The western black rhino was declared extinct in 2011 as a result of poaching. Two of the remaining five species of rhino—Javan and Sumatran—are critically endangered in Asia, and the northern white rhino, a subspecies of white rhino, is extinct in the wild, with only three living individuals remaining at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. In South Africa, the number of rhinos killed has risen exponentially—while only 13 were poached in 2007, a record-breaking 1,215 rhinos were maimed in 2014. What if paying more soldiers to protect rhinos in the wild turned out to be cheaper and more effective than remaking other beloved extinct species and returning them to the wild? “If we really care about animals going extinct,” Gilbert says, “let’s stop trying to bring the damn things back and let’s try to spend the money on things that are actually going extinct.”
Putting a price tag on de-extinction is tricky. Even well-worn conservation programs often keep their books far from view. Pimm’s group spends a great deal of time trying to find out how much money is being spent on conservation overall around the world, but his two words for anyone trying to track down the numbers are “Good luck.” Conservation programs are staggeringly expensive and can be remarkably complex. They take a lot of time and effort, and they’re not a one-time investment. At a certain point, you’re going to have creatures roaming around in the wild that need to be managed, and someone is going to have to pay for that work.
In 2015, when I asked Phelan how much Revive & Restore spends on de-extinction, I was happily surprised by how openly she responded. “I’m getting tired of it looking like we have raised all this money and have zillionaires backing this,” she said. “You know, over the three years that we have been working in this area, we’ve raised and spent about a million bucks.” Most of that money had been spent on public education, private workshops, the TEDxDeExtinction program, outreach, and some of the science. Revive & Restore pays for the sequencing costs and lab materials that some of their researchers require, but that doesn’t add up to very much. For de-extinction and genetic rescue projects to really move forward at a faster rate, since 2016 Phelan has been engaging commercial labs (Crystal Biosciences and Dovetail Genomics) and biotech companies (Intrexon). Her goal is to raise $1 million to $10 million each year, through either donations or in-kind services. After that, lifelong monitoring of each species, for several generations of lives, needs to be factored in.
It seems that they’re off to a good start with their fundraising, with over twenty-five donors listed on their website as founding funders who have given $10,000 or more to their cause. I thought it quite fitting to see the name of one of the most famous living fantasy writers on that list—George R. R. Martin, author of the novels that form the basis of HBO’s hugely successful television series Game of Thrones. De-extinction attracts creative minds with imaginative ways of seeing the world, but it remains to be seen how its stories will come to life off the page.