How Do We Revive Species Responsibly?
The question is no longer whether we should do it.
The New York Times ran a fascinating story today called The Mammoth Cometh. The story describes a plan to bring passenger pigeons—and eventually other extinct animal species—back to life through genomic technologies.
This isn’t some crackpot with no funding or knowledge, this is serious.
A recent conference sponsored by The National Geographic Society brought together many of the world’s leading genetic engineers and biologists, who articulated a variety of reasons to support the endeavor.
The story sheds light on the plan by Revive and Restore (the project’s name) based at the University of California Santa Cruz. The people doing it appear realistic; they know it will probably take decades to make it happen, and they’ve spent a lot of time working out all the ramifications—such as, how do you raise a species of animal who has no parents so it behaves like the original species—with the same instincts? But they (and many other very smart people) are sure it can be done. All it’ll take is time.
It comes as no surprise that this is controversial. Ethicists, environmentalists, and religious thinkers are probably grinding their teeth over the prospect of bringing extinct animals back to life.
The frame that surrounds the dialogue, though, is unrealistic—because it assumes that humanity can still choose not to mess around with Mother Nature. That genie is long out of the bottle. Not only have we already starting tinkering with genes, but we will continue to do so. Just as we continued to tinker with powered flight, internal combustion, the transistor, the atom, and connected computers.
Something as gigantic as engineering life itself cannot and will not be ignored. So the frame for the debate should no longer be whether we should be doing it at all. Instead, the fundamental debate should be: how will we do it responsibly?
Setting aside ethical and religious concerns, perhaps the greatest practical objection to bringing back extinct species is that the publicity surrounding it will engender a sort of mass sense of relief over our current destruction of existing animal species. People will simply shrug when they hear about, say, the extinction of the rhinoceros, and say “No problem, we’ll bring them back again.”
This argument is laughable, first because nobody will assume that the process of re-creating animal species is quick, easy, or cheap (it isn’t), and more importantly, humanity hasn’t completely lost its connection with the natural world. The potential extinction of a species is still galvanizing in its power to unite people for species protection.
In the New york Times story, David Haussler, cofounder of the Genome 10k Project says “There’s always this fear that somehow, if we do it, we’re going to accidentally make something horrible, because only nature can really do it right. But nature is totally random. Nature makes monsters. Nature makes threats. Many of the things that are most threatening to us are a product of nature. Revive & Restore is not going to tip the balance in any way.”
If you have a dim view of humanity’s stewardship of our planet, then the revival of species sounds not only like a good thing, but vital to our long-term survival as a species. Because on our current trajectory, we will wipe out the majority of life on the planet besides ourselves. It might take several hundred years, but it’ll happen.
Some suggest that if we destroy the natural ecosystem that supports us, then we should, in fact, disappear from the planet as well—because only without us will the planet stand a chance of recovering over the next several eons.
I believe it’s preferable for us to figure out how to fix what we’ve broken. We’ve already proven this can happen with habitat restoration. So it’s time for us to learn how to do it with species restoration as well.
