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De-Extinction Rebellion

Will science bring back the dodo? Detail from Alice in Wonderlandplaying cards by E. Gertrude Thomson, based on the original drawings by Sir John Tenniel. | Museum of New Zealand

When the world is finally saved from ecological catastrophe, we’ll celebrate by feasting on dodo. Or at least that’s the plan if you’re crypto booster Charles Hoskinson, who’s always “wanted to eat a dodo egg” and thinks that he’ll soon “have the chance” thanks to his investment in Colossal Biosciences. Over the past few years, the buzzy company is one of several that’s made the news for their bold plans to “de-extinct” species like the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, and of course the flightless bird of at least one financial backer’s culinary fantasies. And despite sounding like a scheme conjured up in the uninspired writers’ rooms responsible for the next entry in the Jurassic World franchise,it appears their promise to “make humanity more human” and “reawaken the lost wilds of Earth” with its research is paying off. So far, Colossal has raised $435 million from everyone including tech bros to Paris Hilton and the CIA. And earlier this month, the company announced it had successfully brought dire wolves, made famous by Game of Thrones, back from extinction.

The popular appeal of this technology isn’t hard to understand. While scientists have been sounding the alarm about biodiversity loss since at least the 1990s, the past decade saw the chorus of researchers warning of a “sixth mass extinction” hit a fever pitch. As books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-Prize winning The Sixth Extinctionbrought this idea into the mainstream, we confronted the unsettling revelation that we were in the midst of a die-off the likes of which hadn’t been seen in eons. Further research only revealed the true severity of the situation. Scientists now estimate that our current extinction rate is somewhere on the order of one to ten thousand times greater than the rate that species have historically gone extinct due to normal environmental pressures—and it’s not only species but entire genera that are disappearing from the planet.

The causes include all the usual suspects: carbon emissions, relentless greed, infrastructural inertia, the United States’ will-they-won’t-they relationship with the wholly inadequate standards set by international climate accords. It’s a dense meshwork of actors and accelerants, yet rather than engage in the necessary work of dismantling these sources of immiseration, the technoscientific vanguard is hoping to cut to the heart of the matter itself. For these wannabe Prometheuses, the future of conservation lies not in tackling the complex causes of extinction but in wresting the power of extinction for themselves.

Though it might be hard to imagine from our current vantage point, the idea that a species might outright disappear was unthinkable until just a few centuries ago. Instead, natural philosophers long assumed that species existed as a sort of independent essence. For Aristotle, the “father of Western science,” this was an immutable soul that directed the development of organic matter. Augustine adopted a similar view when he wrote about species as preexistent “seeds” that could generate animals if the right conditions were met. Even as recently as the nineteenth century, spontaneous generation was fairly accepted in scientific circles. The universe was thought to be unchanging, populated by species as old as time, immaterial forms designed by divine intent capable of reemerging even if every last member died.

It would take a radical upheaval to make extinction conceptually possible. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French zoologist Georges Cuvier—confronted with fossil records that defied any form of known life—published work hypothesizing that the Earth periodically went through periods of catastrophic change during which some forms of life simply vanished. In doing so, he introduced the idea that the world we live in now looks radically different from the world of the past. Not too long after, Darwin disseminated his theory of natural selection to explain how new species emerged, and critically, argue that once a species disappears, the evolutionary chain is broken and the “same identical form never reappears.” Species thus became a product of history—something produced rather than merely given, able to come into and out of being.

Yet even then, extinction wasn’t necessarily considered a bad thing. If a species disappeared, it was because of their inferiority; they were simply unfit to survive or were formed with an innate trajectory arced toward decay. It wasn’t until the 1980s that new findings would again reshape our relationship to extinction. This time, the discovery came in the form of an iridium-laced layer of soil—a material common in asteroids but rare on Earth—nestled between the strata that marked the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary period, precisely the time that the dinosaurs disappeared. The signs pointed to the fact that the mysterious extinction event wasn’t spurred by some fundamental defect in our distant reptilian cousins, as some had previously thought but an unavoidable cataclysm. If this was the case, it meant that extinction was, as Thomas Moynihan writes for Noema, not always the “pruning of ‘aged’ or ‘unfit’ lineages; even the most ‘successful’ can succumb.” A frightening proposition for a culture that believed themselves to be the rightful inheritors of the Earth.

Today, the issue of extinction is still far from settled. As old fears and inherited worldviews collide with new technologies, the boundaries of the concept are continuing to evolve and change. The past decade has been dedicated to finding avenues by which we might regain command over the natural world and restore ourselves atop the pyramid of life. Nowhere is this clearer than in the arsenal of biotechnologies being bankrolled and R&D’d to secure mastery over extinction. This includes, of course, the various “de-extinction” techniques being developed by companies like Colossal Biosciences, Revive & Restore, as well as research labs in institutions like the University of Melbourne. The most sophisticated of these resurrection processes involves reassembling fragments of a species’ preserved genetic material and filling in the missing gaps by referencing genetically similar surviving relatives. Once the genome is more or less sufficiently reconstructed, this DNA can theoretically then be incubated in the egg of a closely related animal to bring these genes to life—granting us the power to reinstate the very species that we’ve helped eradicate.

Not to say that we’ll simply give up our prerogative over species eradication either. After all, true mastery requires us to not only have the ability to reverse extinction, but dole it out at will. While this isn’t something we’ve historically had too much trouble with, sleek technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 are opening up avenues by which we might engineer extinctions with laser precision. Incipient “gene drive” techniques being developed for malaria mosquitoes, for instance, are exploring the possibility of using genetically altered males of the target species to spread a broken gene that renders female offspring that inherit two copies of the gene infertile; as the gene spreads over generations, the number of fertile females would plummet, collapsing the population, and bringing an end to the spread of malaria, which kills nearly six hundred thousand people every year. By tying extinction to a manipulation in the species’ genes—rather than some blunt chemical intervention that would inevitably affect other creatures—the hope is that we’d essentially be able to program a self-destruct and let it run its course.

Because of how radically opposed these extinction and de-extinction technologies appear on the surface, they’re rarely spoken about in the same breath; yet it’s important to recognize them as two sides of the same coin. Western civilization’s relationship with the environment can be seen as a long history of trying to harness and instrumentalize natural processes in order to bend the world to our convenience. Though it previously took millennia for these techniques to pan out—just look at the vast stretches of time that were involved in animal domestication—recent technoscience has accelerated the speed and scale of these interventions. Genetic cultivations which once happened gradually over centuries can be done in decades; phenomena like rain that were once considered acts of God can now be seeded.

These superficially diverse technologies of extinction are merely the latest entrants in this sustained campaign of domestication. Both the desire to reverse and generate extinction events represent the broader aspiration of breaking in this wild and untamed phenomenon—of transforming extinction into a tool that we might use to further carve the world in our image.

There are plenty of reasons to be wary of this instrumentalization of extinction. Not least because our past is littered with the ruins of our hubristic attempts to model, control, or else optimize natural phenomena. Take, for instance, the spectacular failures wrought by early experiments to impose order upon our forests. In Germany during the eighteenth century, large tracts of chaotic old growth forests were rearranged into geometric grids. By applying the “neatly arranged constructs of science” to “disorderly nature,” as Henry Lowood puts it in his essay “The Calculating Forester,” the new discipline of scientific forestry promised to streamline forest management while optimizing timber yields, transforming the forest into an efficient tool for the production of raw materials. Sounds familiar.

At first, all appeared to be going well. The first generation of trees were felled successfully and produced a tremendous output. However, upon the second round of planting, the latent consequences of this planned approach became all too clear. The new growth turned out spindly and frail—making it vulnerable to a combination of storms, disease, and insects. It turned out that top-down control and planning pruned the forest of the complexity that gave the natural system its dynamic resilience. The resulting collapse was so monumental that a new term Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was coined to describe it. This led to a revitalized interest in “the forest as a multi-faceted biological ecosystem” as Lowood tells us, a sentiment that has since gone on to motivate a range of non-interventional growing practices like permaculture and “do nothing” farming.

Early signs indicate that experiments in de-extinction will suffer the same fate. The only case of de-extinction to have actually been brought into the world—a Pyrenean ibex—died within minutes of its birth. An autopsy discovered an extra lobe in its lung, which caused it to suffocate, bringing the species to an end for a second miserable time. Studies are also beginning to reveal the resilience species like mosquitoes might have against interventions like gene drives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that extinction isn’t something that can be manipulated at will but a dynamic phenomenon interlinked with other systems and processes that we can’t easily anticipate.

You’d think we would have learned our lesson by now. Yet we continue to run headfirst into the same dead ends over and over again. After two hundred some years of attempting to save or improve the environment by controlling it, it’s surprising that we haven’t bothered to revisit fundamental assumptions to see where we might have gone wrong. Looking closer, it becomes clear that the cardinal sin behind all these misguided ventures lies in an unassuming concept at the heart of all our modern approaches to conservation: nature itself.

The philosopher Timothy Morton once called nature “the slowest and perhaps most effective weapon of mass destruction yet devised.” Morton wasn’t talking about the trees and streams and bugs and grassy plains per se—but the idea of “nature” as a discrete, separate entity. Nature as something “‘over there,’ underneath, just round the corner . . . definitively outside the human.” By cleaving off the realm of human affairs from nature, they argue that we created a relationship to the green world defined by implicit antagonisms: if humans create order, then nature is chaotic; if nature is pure and transcendent, then humans are invasive and destructive.

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We Broke the World

It quickly becomes clear how these easy binaries have misguided our conservation efforts from the start. On the one hand, the Romantic idea of nature as an Edenesque space helped justify policies like the forced displacement of indigenous communities to create “protected areas” devoid of human life. This simplistic view that human activity was necessarily antithetical to natural flourishing, however, neglected all the ways in which these inhabitants had been maintaining the ecosystem for generations through practices like controlled burning. Unlike so many Western ideas of “conservation” predicated on combative interventions, wholesale appropriations, or misanthropic expulsions, concepts of stewardship found across indigenous cultures have long been sensitive to the braided reality we live in. On the other hand, the Enlightenment view of nature as a disorderly system—some unformed clay best served by heavy-handed control—lies behind not only past disasters like Germany’s planned forests but the ongoing drive to domesticate extinction alongside just about every other natural phenomena.

Without first recognizing the delicate entanglements we have with the world around us, these conservation strategies are part of the antagonistic approach to ecology that got us into this mess. Even if you expel all the people and reintroduce woolly mammoths to the steppes, it won’t restore the environment to some lost prelapsarian state. No amount of ostensibly good intention will transform extinction into a tool under the strict command of man because it’s a shared process we are always already wrapped up in, not some inert object up for grabs. Truly radical reform will be much less flashy, and much harder. It’ll require us to shed the conceptual borders that have historically organized our thinking around ecology and reconsider our place in the more-than-human world we inhabit. If there is one thing worth driving to extinction to save nature, it’s our misguided idea of nature itself.