Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

IS SOME KNOWLEDGE TOO DANGEROUS?

Learn from me . . . at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge . . .

—MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein

THE WAY WE tell stories about science matters, and though de-extinction sounds cutting-edge, its underpinning narrative is much older than its modern manifestation. At least as far back as the Bible, we find multiple tales devoted to the idea of undoing death.

Consider the resurrection tale about Lazarus of Bethany, a sick man Jesus is asked to try to bring back to health. By the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus is dead and has been lying in a tomb for four days. Jesus then says, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live,” and calls out to Lazarus. Miraculously, a man wrapped in cloths comes forth from his grave in a defiance of death still meaningful to today’s world, as can be seen in our use of his name.

Geologists call a group of organisms that were once thought to be extinct but suddenly reappear later in the fossil record a Lazarus taxon. Michael Archer has named his team’s attempt to de-extinct the gastric-brooding frog the Lazarus Project, and in a media appearance even quotes from the Bible himself: “If we destroyed part of Eden, we are responsible for fixing up that garden. This idea of restoring things that have become extinct has actually a biblical sanction. 1 Corinthians 15 verse 26 says, ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,’” he asserts while standing between dry shrubs and shelves of sandy rock. Looking directly into the camera with his head slightly cocked to the side and an air of excitement about him, he signs off starkly with, “I’m Mike Archer, a paleontologist and species revivalist.”

Scholars have shown that the public sometimes comes to understand emerging science more through its depiction in entertainment than through explanations from actual scientists. In this way, when we analyze the risk of new technologies for society, public beliefs about risk and how to handle it may be shaped by show business. Stories can influence policy decisions that will eventually regulate science itself. So our stories, even the fictional ones, can carry weight in the real world.

Sometimes our stories lead us to imagine those who do high-tech science as lone geniuses who eat, sleep, and breathe their work. In our minds, they live in labs lined with gizmos that look as alien to most of us as the surface of Mars. Just as Dr. Frankenstein hid his monster in secrecy, we sometimes suspect that dubious experiments are happening behind the closed doors of testing chambers the public doesn’t even know exist. But science today is far more social than these stories suggest. In practice, scientists regularly work with scores of other researchers to discover the minutiae of what makes the world around us tick. At times they even work in public . . . quite literally, which can get them into trouble. Let me paint a picture for you of what I mean—a famous one, at that.

In the eighteenth century it was common for scientists to take their work on the road, amusing audiences with their special knowledge. In the painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, made in 1768 by the English artist Joseph Wright of Derby, a scientist performs in public, acting like a vainglorious villain. He is a traveling scientist, and he shows a group of young people how a vacuum works by sucking the air out of a flask that contains a live cockatoo. Surely, if he continues with his experiment, the bird is going to die, which the onlookers seem to understand from the concerned looks on some of their faces. But the way the scientist exhibits the bird makes it clear that he intends to go on. Does the scientist not have empathy with this living creature or the anguish of his audience? Does the fact that he can push further with the experiment mean that he should? Does he even recognize his responsibility here?

This painting sets the scientist apart from society. He does not seem to value human attachment and ignores public interest as if it stands in the way of his work. He seeks to thrill his audience by riding that tension between the unknown outcomes of his actions and his scientific prowess. In other words, he is playing with what the environmental and social historian Sandra Swart calls “dangerous knowledge.” Now that scientists have the tools for de-extinction at their disposal, should they use them? Or are critics too quick to fret about de-extinction, judging it unfairly through the “dangerous knowledge” trope before letting de-extinction speak fairly for itself?

The “dangerous knowledge” theme has been a long-running thread in stories that warn us about our own hubris. Most familiar are the creation stories, leaving little wonder about why the “playing god” critique so often appears in genetic engineering and species resurrection debates. As Swart writes, “Creation stories matter to people. They are stories about power—a power predicated on knowledge . . . You steal fire from the gods, you are chained to a rock and your liver gets pecked by avenging avians for eternity. You fly too near the sun, you fall into the sea and drown. You insist on finding out your parentage, discover inadvertent incest and have to blind your own eyes. You eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, you are evicted from paradise. You make a deal with Mephistopheles to acquire all worldly knowledge and are doomed to everlasting hellfire. You create life and that creature kills your nearest and dearest—or you. Perhaps it is best summarized thus: you screw with the Natural Order—and you are screwed.”

Some fear that de-extinction will screw us and other creatures, especially if it is just a vanity project, flexing the muscles of our own talents with technology more than doing any real good. The questions that de-extinction raises for conservation, animal welfare, ecological function, ethics, patenting issues, disease, invasive species, other interspecies ecosystem dynamics, effects on human communities, international regulation, and more are still far from being well understood. But what is understood is the cultural foundation that creation stories have built, upon which de-extinction now stands. Although these stories rightly matter to broad societal imagination, the way we use them in our own lives might matter even more.

Frankenstein—the most famous of the “dangerous knowledge” fictions—explores the unintended consequences of our human science when we relinquish responsibility for what we create. The full title of the book is Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus taught humans how to make fire, which he stole from the gods, and was punished for it by Zeus, who sent birds to eat his entrails. The myth underscores the idea that there are some things that only God should know. Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, aptly coined the term “Frankenstein complex,” meaning the fear of encroaching on God’s terrain through technology. As a case in point, when we fear genetically modified foods, we call them “Frankenfoods.”

In 1818, after seeing science demonstrations like the one depicted in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein and thus planted the first seed of this fear. In those days she was particularly drawn to experiments that involved galvanism, in which scientists animated the dead with electricity. Watching from the audience, she’d study how the scientists attached electrodes to a pair of floppy frog legs and was enthralled when they’d twitch with an electric quiver. Back then, such demonstrations created a sense that innovative research was focused on macabre experimentation at the boundaries of human knowledge. It allowed mere mortals to bring life to the dead and come up with plotlines for God-fearing folklore.

Swart argues that, so far, de-extinction has been predominantly understood through the Frankenstein myth. Swart compares dreams of cloning woolly mammoths to the final pages of Shelley’s masterpiece, since scientists are once again hunting their monsters in the far North. The Frankenstein myth even makes its way into the most popular de-extinction story there is: Jurassic Park. That story scared us half to death with the velociraptor’s stare that had the same “yellow, watery, but speculative eyes” as Frankenstein’s monster. By framing de-extinction in this way, we reinforce the sense that scientists not only will make creatures with harrowing consequences for the world but will also fail to heed our concerns.

If you’ve read Jurassic Park or seen the film, you’ll know that the amusement park’s mastermind, John Hammond, was able to fill Jurassic Park with unextinct dinosaurs only by way of his own deep pockets. But the plan was to make his investment back in multiples from the park’s admission prices.

Having knowledge of these stories is dangerous itself, Swart warns, because “mythic narrative strength may obscure a more nuanced popular understanding of a [de-extinction] project.” As a case in point, we don’t usually recognize the real moral of the Frankenstein story. We don’t tend to remember that Frankenstein was the name not of the monster but of the doctor who created him. In the more than thirty film adaptations that have been made of Frankenstein, audiences always see the monster’s malevolence, but in the novel the monster only becomes evil later on. “Remember that I am thy creature,” it moans. “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” The monster transforms into something uncontrollable only after Dr. Frankenstein abandons it, horrified at what he’s created, and refuses to deal with the consequences of his own actions. The monster even protests his misfortune and says, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” So the story does not actually suggest that there are some things only God should know. Rather, it shows us why we have to take responsibility for what we have created.

What does it mean to take responsibility for our creations when they’re capable of sensing their own existence, as Frankenstein’s monster did? And what does it mean to take responsibility for the environment they will eventually interact with? Environmentalism, which takes precaution, and postenvironmentalism, which espouses action, are in a tug-of-war at the center of the de-extinction debate. As soon as the proactive side yanks with extra force, our Frankenstein complex—the fear of unleashing a malevolent monster into the world—kicks in. But again, this misses the point that Frankenstein has to offer us.

The anthropologist and philosopher of science Bruno Latour argues that the real lesson Frankenstein has to offer is that we must love and care for our monsters so that they do not turn mean. But he does not imply that we should avoid creating them altogether. For example, it is not that Ben Novak should not create unextinct passenger pigeons simply because they are “unnatural” creatures made by human hands, but that he should be careful to show them the utmost of care, love, and concern as he responsibly oversees their entry into—and sustainable living in—this world.

In de-extinction, no doubt, love is there for some from the outset. Novak speaks dramatically about his own passion for the passenger pigeon, and even sounds lovey-dovey when he tells me, “I don’t think anyone gets into these projects looking at graphs or looking at data and that’s all you see. I mean for me, I know when I look at DNA sequences I see living animals. I see a pair of birds coming together and breeding to make some new offspring. I see these events in history that shape what this data actually looks like . . . It’s an inspiring topic, and it’s a very beautiful thing to be doing. Art is the only thing that can sum that up.”

For Novak, de-extinction disrupts a sense of time and permanence while teaching him about how to care for life in the present. He says he’s discovered a politics of care tied up in his de-extinction work, which entangles him in new caring bonds with life forms across a continuum—from the long gone to the potential. At the same time, others have argued that de-extinction forces us to face tragic questions about the ethical conundrums of caring too much. As a society, we care about mass extinctions, the conservation of wildlands, and our duty to intervene appropriately, but an excessive display of concern says something about the distress we feel deep down. In order to care, and to learn how to best act on that desire to care, we’ll have to get our hands dirty. But soiled hands can leave stains that we wish weren’t there.

That reminds me of an idea I once came across in the writing of Donna Haraway, an esteemed interdisciplinary scholar of biology and culture, and theorist of “cyborg politics,” which neither fetishizes nor abhors technology’s ability to change what life is made of but always questions its specific ethical entanglements. She tells us that learning from animals is never an innocent act when humans and other species meet. De-extinction relies on various amalgamations of living species being used as gestational surrogates, gamete donors, rearing parents, and adoptive families for species that don’t yet exist, incurring significant costs to their well-being and freedom to live out their own ways of life. That’s without even counting the direct costs that individual animals being made through de-extinction might suffer, including paying the ultimate price. Then, of course, should things ever go wrong upon reintroducing an unextinct species in the wild, many more animals already living in the release areas might also come under stress. We are not innocent when we decide to take these risks, and we cannot claim that we didn’t know otherwise should things not turn out as planned.

I was curious to know what Donna Haraway thinks about de-extinction, so I asked her for an interview, but she declined because of fatigue from being “chatted out.” However, in the email she sent turning down my invitation, she told me, “De-extinction is not my favorite conservation approach, I have to say! In my opinion, biotechnology has a big role to play in taking care of the earth and its critters, perhaps including, in specific cases, some genetic alterations for adaptations to rapidly changing conditions. But de-extinction seems hopelessly rooted in barely secularized creation and salvation narratives and approaches to science that are wrong-headed and wrong-souled, plus rarely recognized for their cultural specificity by the folks who support and do the projects, even as they speak of Biblical themes and characters (e.g., Noah’s Ark) and treat DNA as a god-equivalent. I want all that talent and energy to go for other sorts of ecological recuperation—much less resurrection mythology and much more mundane care.”

IN OCTOBER 2014, on a stage at London’s Serpentine Galleries, a purple-gray backdrop displayed an oversized hand with its index finger pointing at a stuffed garbage bag surrounded by black lines that made it seem like volcanic energy was about to explode from inside the sack of trash. Soft fabric clouds floated above the black lines with words scrawled on them like “cloudy,” “remainder,” and “turning heavy.” The enlarged index finger was actually poking the garbage bag, creating a little hole in its side. While I was peering at the clouds trying to decipher their meaning, my gaze was suddenly interrupted by a slender brunette sitting on stage who lifted her head and started to speak:

“My talk is going to be quite literal about the extinction of species. I stay up at night worried about this. Maybe to some of you that’s a normal thing to do.” The woman is Jennifer Jacquet, an environmental social scientist and professor at New York University. She is one of several speakers invited by the Serpentine Galleries to deliver a talk at this Extinction Marathon, as it’s called—where artists, writers, scientists, filmmakers, choreographers, theorists, and musicians share their visions for the sixth mass extinction. Jacquet says she is worried about the 870 or so species that have gone extinct since the sixteenth century that we know about, species that fell victim to what she calls “conspicuous extinction”—species that we literally watch fade away. She continues: “One of the species that I stay up worrying about and mostly lamenting—I know I’m not alone on this because a friend of mine is torn up that there are no longer giant sloths around—is the Steller’s sea cow, which went extinct in 1768 after twenty-seven years of having been discovered by the Russians.” She stays up at night from worry, and her friend is in the throes of mourning. This is much more than an intellectual recognition of their absence—they feel the fact that these creatures are no longer here.

“I even spoke to a woman who studied survivor guilt and asked her if she has many patients who complain that the human species is surviving while all these other species go extinct. She said it was not a presenting symptom. Maybe I’m a little strange,” she adds. Survivor’s guilt is a mental condition that people suffer when they feel they have done something wrong by making it to the other side of a traumatic event while others are not so lucky. It is common among those who endure a natural disaster, epidemic, or war, but the extinction of a nonhuman species is a more puzzling case. Although some symptoms of survivor’s guilt don’t seem likely when it comes to extinction—mood swings and social withdrawal—others, like depression and, as Jacquet claims, sleep disturbance are more common. If enough creatures are wiped out and the natural food chain collapses, our own species’ domino will fall with the rest. That might be why she says she boils her feelings down to a misplaced fear about our own human mortality. And yet, it doesn’t really feel like we’re going to die all that soon, does it? Many of us expect to have children who will be able to have their own children, and so on. How crucial is it for our own survival that we care about extinction, for all species, with immediate and blazing urgency? As cold as that sounds, there are things to discover under the rocks that a question like that upturns.

Gregory Kaebnick, a scholar who researches how biotechnology puts human values at stake, takes that question seriously in his book Humans in Nature. He asks why we should feel anything at all when a species is lost, and to find an answer, he refers to the work of the microbiologist Lee Silver. Silver once traveled to Peru to see the last remaining sea otters in the region. He wanted to be one of the last humans to see them alive, but he wasn’t quite sure what was pushing him to make the effort. He kept a diary of reflections on the trip. In one of his entries, he wrote about a discussion he had with the group he was traveling with: “I decided to challenge the group with an impertinent question: ‘Why should we care if the giant otter species goes extinct?’ I saw a silent look of horror on everyone’s face. How could I pose such a question, they wondered, to this group of people in this place? Attempts were made at providing rational explanations, but none were truly compelling. Like many other widely shared attitudes toward Mother Nature, the idea that we should care just feels right, although people don’t quite know why.”

Kaebnick offers thoughts about why that might be: We humans carry moral reactions around with us as though they are hardcore truths. The fact that we hold them as self-evident truths is why it is difficult to offer a rationale for them. Our certainty is rooted in feeling, and people just seem to know what is right or wrong. Kaebnick says this is because moral stances are always, in part, emotional phenomena and that we should come to understand them that way. “The attention to this topic in environmental philosophy,” he says, “is due to the fact that moral concern about the environment is widespread; the idea that the environment deserves moral concern has acquired the status of a settled judgment”—hence the silent horror on everyone’s face when Silver questioned it—“and the problem is how to explain it.”

But Kaebnick also says, “A purely emotional approach to morality would also be a contradiction in terms; to engage in moral deliberation is to step back from one’s immediate reaction and think critically about it. If we relied unquestioningly on our initial feelings about a moral problem, much that we count as moral progress would not have occurred.” It is now, more than ever, he suggests, time to consider how we feel about losing species and ask ourselves what moral progress we can make, both personally and collectively, in our time of mass extinction. It’s a question that’s been haunting me for years, especially as it relates to de-extinction.

I turned to Thomas van Dooren, a leading philosopher in the subfield of extinction studies and senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Australia, to help me think it through. I was wondering what extinction can teach us and what lessons are worth taking seriously when de-extinction is no longer the stuff of science fiction. I’ve included an edited excerpt of our conversation below, with slightly rephrased questions for a better flow.

Wray: What does extinction mean to you?

Van Dooren: That’s actually a really big and difficult question. There’s a tendency to mystify extinction, to think about it as the last individual of a kind. There are some really iconic examples, like Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo, or the last thylacine in a Tasmanian zoo. There’s this idea that the last individuals finally die and then we’ve seen the event of extinction, that their passing is the death of a species. On some level that’s accurate, but on another level, and long before that last death, we see that all the relationships that animal was involved with, whether ecological relationships or human relationships with communities they may have provided meaning for, have broken down. So this is what I’ve been thinking about: the dullage of extinction. It is a long, slow unraveling of ways of life that happens long before the death of the last individual.

Wray: So extinction is a durational process rather than an instantaneous one?

Van Dooren: That’s right. I think the focus on the individual does a lot of things and some are relevant to de-extinction. The focus on the individual in de-extinction, bringing the first one back, gives a sense that there’s some ongoing continuity about the species—that it still survives in some way—even though it’s not really the case. This was really drawn out for me by a visit I had to Hawaii, where I visited a snail ark. Tree snails are incredibly endangered. Where I visited, they’re keeping the last of a whole bunch of snail species in a captive environment. Amidst them was this one little snail, the last of its kind. I sat and looked at it for quite a while, which was very depressing. But the idea that this species is ongoing in some way because this single individual exists in captivity—there’s something misleading about thinking that its extinction hasn’t yet taken place when its whole ecological role has disappeared.

Wray: Do we need to feel emotional about extinctions in order to learn from them?

Van Dooren: Personally I think it’s definitely called for and an important part of relating to extinction. I don’t think it’s purely something that can be adequately fleshed out in cold, detached terms. I think extinctions call on us ethically for response, and those calls ought to be felt as well as rationalized. So what is significant about the disappearance of a species? For example, people who experience the disappearance of a species. I’ve worked on the Indian vulture, looking at the role they played in a small Parsi community in Mumbai. [The Parsi] dispose of their dead in Towers of Silence, and the vultures would eat them. But as the vultures have disappeared, the funerary practices have had to be revised, and according to many people in the communities, funerals are no longer functional.

I’ve talked to people who have gone through incredible suffering, who have left their dead to rot in Towers of Silence where the vultures should have come but didn’t. These are incredibly emotional situations, and I think we can’t fully engage with the significance of extinction if we try to give a cold and detached calculus of it. It’s now thought that the absence of vultures in the environment may lead to an increase in street dogs, which will lead to increases in rabies. Part of mourning is coming to recognize those entanglements and how they matter.

Wray: How do you define mourning?

Van Dooren: I guess there’s a lot of ways to answer that. On one level mourning is an evolved capacity that we most likely share with a whole range of intelligent social animals and consequently have become emotionally entangled in one another’s lives. It is when a loved one disappears and we feel that loss. As Colin Murray Parkes famously put it, grief is “the cost of commitment.” So to be at stake in others’ lives emotionally exposes us to mourning when those relationships disappear. On an important level, mourning is part of our inheritance, our biogenetic inheritance, something we are lucky enough to share with other animals on the planet and a capacity we are failing to exercise. In the face of mass extinction, I think we are called on to learn how we are at stake in species of all sorts and to learn to become attuned to how these species matter and constitute the world for us. That should ultimately call for an emotional response—for grief and mourning, I would say.

I’m particularly interested in the capacity for mourning to change the world. There’s a philosopher and grief counselor, Thomas Attig, who talks about mourning as a process of relearning the world. For him, it’s a confrontation with a changed world. Through mourning we come to understand that something about the world we inhabited is gone, and that if we are going to go on, we must ourselves change; we must relearn the world. So mourning requires that we must reconsider how we fit in, and change might be demanded of us to go on. In the absence of mourning, we miss those opportunities for deep reflective work as individuals and as a culture about how we might go on differently.

Mourning introduces us to a relational conception of the world. It reminds us of all the ways we are connected to others for nourishment, meaning, cultural practices . . . all of the ways we are bound up in others. When we are mindful of those relationships, then the event of extinction or event of death unmakes us in some ways. It reminds us how we are vulnerable and have a stake in others. It calls for an awareness of our ecological embeddedness in broader environments. So responding in that way is about making sense of how we are relationally constituted and undone by the death of a species.

Wray: One could argue that if we caused the extinction of a species, and have the technology to recreate it, that we then have a moral duty to do so. What do you think about that?

Van Dooren: The idea that we have an obligation to bring them back because we caused their extinction is something that ought to be responded to because it is far too simple an idea. I think we’ll continue to debate for decades about this question of duty, but at the end of the day ethics isn’t just about identifying duties—it is also about how we inhabit a world of always conflicting duties. We need to think about case studies and the pros and cons of bringing back this extinct species. For example, no one would say we should bring smallpox back to the environment because we caused it to go extinct. So we will have to think about how a potential duty to bring back one species lines up with duties to humans and other animals and ecosystems wrapped up with that. It is too simple to say there’s a duty because we caused them to go extinct, and I do also think there’s a conflicting duty to respect the dead and let them rest in peace.

I’ve done some thinking about keeping faith with death. What that opens up for us is whether resurrection constitutes a restitution for some past harm done or whether that would be a desecration, in some sense, of the dead. That’s especially the case in the world of ongoing loss and mass extinction. So bringing them back to violence and another extinction event is not, I think, the ethical thing to do. I think we are not yet ready for de-extinction, if we ever will be. I think we’ve shown ourselves to lack that cultural and political capacity to deal ethically with endangered species, and bringing more back, to me, is not the ethical response. The duty should be, at least for now, to leave these species to rest and instead to learn something from their extinction. I think we owe the dead to genuinely learn from them and change our ways so we don’t send more over the edge into extinction.

Wray: What exactly do you mean by saying that we can keep “faith with death”?

Van Dooren: Keeping faith with an extinct animal is about not resurrecting them; it’s about making the difficult choice to learn from their extinction, to mourn . . . and as a result change the way that we live. It is the attempt to not rush to overcome death and instead prevent it from happening again. Given the current context, as we’re letting endangered species go extinct, resurrecting them doesn’t represent the beginning of a new ethical relationship with them. It could just begin another phase of extinction for them.

Wray: What does it mean to have an ethics of extinction?

Van Dooren: De-extinction undermines our moral and imaginative capacity to engage with the current extinction crisis by allowing us the illusion that there is some techno-fix to our current situation and sidestep the vitally necessary cultural and political work that is needed to deal with this current extinction event. It spreads the idea that we can deal with it another day, that we don’t need to worry urgently about the disappearance of every species—that we can bank them and set the world right at a later date. The capacity for that kind of technology to be captured by economic and political interests is, I think, a real threat to ongoing efforts to deal with conservation issues and the current mass extinction event in a concrete way.

All those anthropogenic causes are driven by economic and cultural incentives that need to be challenged and changed. It all calls for deep reflection on our values, ways of life, and priorities of all types. If we can avoid doing that kind of work and engineer our way around the solution with a techno-fix, we are likely to take that easy option. The idea that we shouldn’t mourn but should do something is really worrying. Technical intervention is offered as an alternative instead of mourning. I think it gives us too much of an easy way out.

IN ONE OF his TED talks, Stewart Brand speaks about the tragedy we perceive when a species vanishes, and offers some advice: “Don’t mourn, organize!” he bellows with a smile. When I later ask him what he meant by that, he says, “All you can do with extinction is just grieve. The animal’s gone—it’s gone. But if the technology is at a particular point where that kind of species can be brought back, then you want to bear down and make it happen.”

Indeed, that pragmatic approach has become the name of the game in de-extinction, which values action over mourning or dwelling on our own survivor’s guilt. Long before de-extinction was even a term, Brand subscribed to a particular form of pragmatism—eco-pragmatism—for which he laid out his own vision in his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Eco-pragmatism embraces technological interventions as solutions to environmental problems. From genetic engineering to geoengineering, an eco-pragmatist sees the benefits of technology for nature and does not shy away from applying it just because potential risks exist. But critics have said that eco-pragmatism is more interested in humanity’s own abilities than anything else and that it will only march us dangerously toward an imaginary techno-utopia.

Environmental ethicist Ben Minteer identifies an acute problem with the eco-pragmatist approach as it applies to de-extinction—mainly that it flies in the face of old cultural values about ecosystem integrity. Historically, the integrity of an ecosystem depended on the interactions of species within the ranges those species were adapted to. The less touched by humans those areas were, the more pristine an ecosystem was. The dilemma here, according to Minteer, is that the era in which we now live—of increasing environmental intervention—creates thorny issues we must face when we contemplate our moral responsibility to species. The increasing artificiality, control, and manipulation of the landscape we engage in leads us to intensify the relocation of species in habitats outside of the areas they evolved in. It is in this assisted species colonization of new areas outside their home range where things start to get dicey, including the introduction of unextinct species. In this sense, an eco-pragmatist approach that promotes de-extinction and a rewilded world of translocated species unravels the values that once honored the integrity of ecosystems.

In a talk entitled “Extinction and the Price of Pragmatism,” which he gave at the 2014 Forum on Ethics and Nature at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, Minteer opened with a quotation he pulled from a piece of hundred-year-old writing penned by William T. Hornaday—the first director of the Bronx Zoo. Hornaday was a crusader for wildlife protection in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1914 he wrote that “nature was a million years, or more, in developing the picturesque moose, the odd mountain goat, and the unique antelope. Shall we destroy and exterminate those species in one brief century? The young Americans of the year 2014 will read of those wonderful creatures, and if they find none of them alive how will they characterize the men of 1914? I, for one, do not wish in 2014 to be classed with the swine of Mauritius that exterminated the dodo.”

So here’s Minteer, exactly one century later, in the very year that Hornaday was envisioning, talking to a group of people about how we have failed to learn from the past. At least Hornaday’s premonitions about some of those species did not come to fruition, but 1914 did go on to become the year that the passenger pigeon became extinct. Hornaday’s visions of the future have an eerie quality about them. Elsewhere he wrote, “Let no one think for a moment that any vanishing species can at any time be brought back; for that would be a grave error . . . The heath hen could not be brought back, neither could the passenger pigeon [emphasis added].” Little did he know what would come of that far-fetched idea in just one hundred years.

Today, Minteer says, as we take a more action-oriented and progressive approach toward conserving species and perhaps even recreating them, we are forced to make tough trade-offs. Traditional preservationist values focus on maintaining the historical integrity of ecosystems and are challenged by ideas of translocation, reintroduction, and unextinct species, which make us increasingly dependent on novel landscapes that we have curated and arranged. And as this happens, our conservation ethics will increasingly hinge on a “nature by design.” Minteer urges us to think carefully about that. And when I do, I do not discover a moral belief deep within me that says ecosystems should not change at the hands of humans; they do that all the time. After all, that’s the essence of living in these times, although it’s clear that we have to get a lot better at how we go about it.

Instead, thinking about this forces me to acknowledge that designed natural areas put an extra burden on us to understand exactly how we need to meticulously plan, organize, and manage those areas rather than let them evolve in a more haphazard way. This places demands on us to know how to best care for our “monsters” that we create through de-extinction, as well as the valued habitats we put them into. We’re liable for whatever could go wrong, at the same time as we are aware that things could always be done otherwise, or not be done at all. That’s partly why de-extinction is such a fascinating site for understanding how science and society collide. What moves are scientists personally willing to make? About what does society disagree? And how will we deal with the fallout?

From writing this book, I’ve learned that I want to develop a fuller account in my mind of what happens to life when a particular form of it disappears. When a singular species goes extinct, a whole way of being in the world vanishes along with it, and a flame of existence is forever extinguished. No amount of my mourning, misplaced or not, can erase that fact. Necrofauna will not rise from the dead—their proxies will be created anew—and extinction cannot be reversed. What we’re left with instead, in every case of extinction and de-extinction, will be an ultimately different and changed world. If we skate over the meaning of extinction or what it means to undo extinction, we could miss out on the opportunity to realize our own entanglements with species and their unique condition for being in the world. Jennifer Jacquet’s emotional distress about the sea cow’s disappearance might be worth all those sleepless nights after all. It gives her time in the middle of the night to ponder how its extinction transforms the world.

AN AMERICAN ARTIST—and friend to Revive & Restore—named Isabella Kirkland paints endangered and extinct animals in large Dutch-master-style oil paintings. She begins each painting with a catalog that marks out which species she’s working with are extinct, which are invasive, and which are newly discovered taxa. She uses real specimens to capture their likeness, and has held the bones of the laughing owl, the horns of the bluebuck, and even the eggs of the Syrian ostrich for her visual research. Her painting Gone has sixty-three animals in it, every one of which has disappeared since the colonization of the so-called New World. And as de-extinction advances, her painting serves as a time capsule to be viewed in a future when some of these animals may reappear in recreated forms. In Gone, a bright yellow and green Carolina parakeet—a species that died out in 1918—is perched on a twig. Below it sits the tiny golden toad, the last of which was seen in the Costa Rican rainforests in 1989. Front and center up high sits the most striking creature: Martha—the last passenger pigeon.

If Ben Novak eventually succeeds in his mission to recreate Martha’s species, I wonder, will Kirkland go back to the painting and update it, taking Martha out? If so, she’d have to find some new animal to put in the center, though that shouldn’t pose much of a problem. There are, after all—and will continue to be—lots of extinct species that could fit. Even though we may have discovered how to resurrect the traits of extinct creatures, we haven’t figured out how to stop the human-caused ecological destruction that keeps sending more species over the edge of extinction. But if the passenger pigeon will still be extinct in Kirkland’s eyes no matter the degree of Novak’s success in making a band-tailed pigeon full of passenger pigeon genes, perhaps she wouldn’t bother. Art is subjective, and it would seem that sometimes science can be too.

Kirkland painted Gone as a reminder of what’s been lost, but the painting has been repurposed as part of de-extinction’s public face. It welcomes every visitor to Revive & Restore’s website, bold and beautiful, filling its landing page. At the same time, Gone also graces the cover of an extinction studies compendium coedited by Thomas van Dooren, who impressed upon me the importance of “keeping faith with the dead” as the basis for opposing de-extinction. The painting means different things to different people, just like de-extinction itself.

And when people see Gone, Kirkland wants the artwork to make them stop and think, “What really matters here?” When she first heard about de-extinction, she tells me, she thought, “Well, that’s quixotic! It’s a very odd thing to consider. . . (a) It’s impossible, (b) It will cost too much money, and (c) You know, people are going to get upset about GMOs and whatnot.” But the more she considered it, the more excited she became. What initially seemed impossible ripened into hopes for something real. Reflecting on it later, she says, “We are animals that rely on a certain amount of hope, and I find this whole idea of de-extinction very, very hopeful.”

I agree that we are animals that rely on a certain amount of hope. But if Kirkland were ever to repaint this menagerie of extinct species as it lives inside my mind, I do not think that my own sense of hope would be restored by taking Martha out of it. I firmly believe that we need to remember and honor the differences between species that we have made disappear in the past and species that we are now forcing into existence in the name of ecological justice, without their even knowing it.

Today, the world I inhabit after spending so much time with de-extinction is populated with creatures of a curious kind, and if feelings were organisms, ambivalence would be the keystone species I interact with most often. What I’ve learned from the species I’ve encountered during this journey—as the ones we’ve known disappear and new ones are prepared to come to life—is that the more we try to let them off their leashes, the more tightly tethered to them we actually become. There’s a deep irony here: the wild animals we’re creating won’t be able to make it in the wild without our help. For if these creatures are ever to flourish in the great outdoors as they’re imagined to, we must plan, design, monitor, manage, and maintain their ways of life. This creates novel conditions for their wildness that the extinct species they’re meant to mimic never needed.

Learning about de-extinction has sent me into the heart of an ecosystem that’s colonized with even more mixed feelings than there are mixed genes. And while some say that de-extinction is being developed for the well-being of ecosystems we’ve impoverished—or ones about to slip away—there’s only one species in any of them that gets to ask the most interesting question: Who gets to live and who gets to die in the environments that de-extinction is devising?

So, how should we think about the future of this human-mediated nature? As Dolly Jørgensen taught me, the narratives that we use to do this thinking matter. The idea that we might see fauna from the Pleistocene walk the Earth again lays the ground for a fantastic, mind-boggling, and awe-inspiring story. I’m sure that’s why two production companies have expressed interest in transforming this book into a film, and other people’s species resurrection films are on the way. The mere possibility of de-extinction is entertaining, and it effortlessly captures our hearts and minds. But the thing is, framing the story of de-extinction from any one particular perspective masks other stories that could have been told instead. What about the stories from the species themselves? I wonder what the passenger pigeon, woolly mammoth, gastric-brooding frog, thylacine, and aurochs would say about all of this if they could talk. Would they feel genuinely loved, missed, and cared for by our efforts to de-extinct them? Or would they think that our motivations are somehow perversely misplaced? When we tell stories about de-extinction, should we speak of salvation, resurrection, and atonement for our past sins? Should we talk about environmental justice and ecological repair? Is it better to focus on love and mourning, to learn how to care better for the future? Or centralize the narrative on a straightforward quest to push the technology and research further?

Whatever we choose, we need to step up to the plate of responsibility and reevaluate the possibilities for what comes next. De-extinction will give birth to much more than unextinct creatures in a lab. It will give birth to new social and scientific practices, cultures, laws, attitudes, values, and beliefs. We must seriously ask ourselves what de-extinction will do to species, but we should not forget to also ask, what will de-extinction do to us? What does it teach us about who we are and how we want to live in this world?

At the beginning of my research, I was a bit skeptical about de-extinction and what it might do. I felt that there was a lot of hubris surrounding the mere suggestion that we should be recreating extinct species when there are so many unknowns involved and creatures’ lives at stake. I presumed the movement would play favorites about which species to revive and, in doing so, would risk being more about our own legacy than that of the species we have made disappear. I was unconvinced that the promises de-extinction was making were anything more than wishful techno-fixes, and I was curious about the possibility that unspoken motivations may be behind some of it.

However, as I spent more and more time with the people who have spent years developing de-extinction—and remember, although a handful of very talented people are actively doing this, it’s a relatively fringe scientific activity—I realized how earnestly they believe that de-extinction will make a beneficial difference in the world, have complete faith that it will help the ecosystems and species that they adore, and swear by its ability to restore people’s sense of hope for life on this planet in times of environmental decay. I am now a lot more trusting of their motives and admiring of their efforts. But I see de-extinction—understood as the re-creation of extinct species—as a fascinating technological feat more than an environmental necessity. Genetic engineering will become a vital tool for conservation in many important respects, but I don’t regard the re-creation of extinct species as a priority among them. In this sense I’m more excited about the technology’s application to endangered species than I am about its use for those already gone. But as we’ve seen with cases like the Woolly Mammoth Revival project, de-extinction may serve dual purposes depending on how it is applied: resurrecting extinct mammoth genes while simultaneously boosting populations of endangered elephants by giving them beneficial traits. What remains to be understood is how much environmental benefit this will create in relation to how much it will cost (in all senses of the word).

Some have said that de-extinction will happen whether we like it or not, and have written things such as “inevitable technological development means that extinct species will be resurrected at some future point.” But I would like to point out that de-extinction is still just an option, as there will always be a human at the helm who decides whether it will go forward or not. I think our biggest challenge, if we are to pursue it fully and with increasing fervor, is to somehow couple de-extinction with improved strategies to overcome the larger structural issues that endanger species in the wild. Without expanding on the hard work that conservationists, environmentalists, and some politicians have been doing for decades, de-extinction risks being done in vain. We must be alert to how de-extinction is developing in practice and expect that things will not always go as planned. But if we choose to use it, it is our responsibility to ensure that it will create a truly better world and not merely a more ecologically complex one.