Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Is it worse than the cattle industry? Worse than re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone? Worse than engineering mosquitoes to be sterile? They all have their cost.
This cost is measured in African elephant abuse. A sound argument. The ecosystem argument, not so much as they also elaborate competently on.
Let's admit, the single reason to 'bring back' the Mammoth is, it's cool and a tremendous publicity scheme for ecological efforts. That alone, may be reason enough.
And, anything that brings in the dollars is going to happen. Argue all you want, about ecology and seed dispersal and other 'real' effects. The money a Mammoth park would bring, the imaginations stimulated and the youth inspired, could be worth it all on it's own.
(Not an argument for maximalist interpretations)
More fundamentally, what is the goal? What do we want to maximise?
They do have lovely strawberry blonde hair.
Ironically one of the things that's unique to humans is our ability to feel guilty about our impact on the environment.
A comet could wipe out all humans as well, but we don’t use that as an excuse to start wiping out other humans do we? Then why don’t those rules apply to the rest of the life we share this planet with?
Same here, if life has any chance at all to survive long term, that chance is through humans.
Sadly we are not all powerful and some species will go extinct before being restored, but if humans are "removed" these species living a few more years on a doomed planet is not any better.
Moreover, saying that ultimate goal of nature conservation is removal of humans is simply counterproductive, it makes people ignore the nature conservation efforts as suicidal mental illness, while we are mindlessly wasting priceless library of useful genes and proteins that took billion years to develop.
From a purely ecological standpoint, removing us would be just as disruptive as removing any other dominant species. Like any apex predator, or really, any lifeforms, we're acting in ways that prioritize our own survival and propagation. Whether that's through agriculture, technology, or resource extraction, it's arguably just a continuation of what evolution has selected for in every species: survival, reproduction, expansion.
What I mean is that it's easy to moralize human impact as uniquely destructive, but in a systems view, isn’t this just another emergent behavior of a successful species? I wonder if the real issue is less about "humans vs nature" and more about how we can integrate long term thinking into a system that historically rewards short term gains.
I suppose evolution will have the last say, as it always does.
It’s the kind of confidence aliens would have observing humans eating lettuce and assuming we’d be fine with grazing grass if they take all the leafy vegetables away.
You don't want to call the Mammoth effort 'ecological', then compare it to other such animal impacts we've engineered. Like cattle.
> Conservationists often claim that the reason to save charismatic species is that they are necessary for the sound functioning of the ecosystems that support humankind. Perhaps the most well-known of these stories is about the ecological changes wolves drove when they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Through some 25 peer-reviewed papers, two ecologists claimed to demonstrate that the reappearance of wolves in Yellowstone changed the behavior of elk, causing them to spend less time browsing the saplings of trees near rivers. This led to a chain of cause and effect (a trophic cascade) that affected beavers, birds, and even the flow of the river. A YouTube video on the phenomenon called “How Wolves Change Rivers” has been viewed more than 45 million times.
> But other scientists were unable to replicate these findings—they discovered that the original statistics were flawed, and that human hunters likely contributed to elk population declines in Yellowstone.Ultimately, a 2019 review of the evidence by a team of researchers concluded that “the most robust science suggests trophic cascades are not evident in Yellowstone.”
and it it led to less required human hunting of elk or deer without any other effects I think that would still be beneficial in the future.
Ranchers, however, are not the only ones against wolf reintroduction. Hunters want to shoot elk or deer, and see wolves as a threat to game species. Rural land owners don't want the government telling them what they can or cannot do on their own land (ie, shoot wolves). Some think it's a waste of money, for something which isn't that important.
If there were a tropic cascade as described, fewer people would think it's not worth it.
Don't encourage them. Before we know it they will bring back dinosaurs ... some quote about "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
On one hand, despite the best efforts, biodiversity loss is accelerating. We're losing habitats and species faster than earth has seen in 60 million years. Ecosystems are so degraded that they require intervention.
On the other hand, what sort of intervention is appropriate? Are we trying to conserve things as is today, or restore to a vision of the pre-industrial landscale, or the pre-agricultural landscape? Or do we try to build a new ecosystem to handle anticipated climate shifts? Do we introduce new species? Do we focus on all biomass, just flora or fauna, insects, fungi too? Do we bring back extinct keystone species like the mammoth?
There is no ethical compass that can tell us the "right" intervention.
If an alien was looking at the earth they would conclude that humans are actively trying to destroy the eco-systems we live in for just a tiny bit more profit than we would have made otherwise.
The penguin gives a stone to his mate. The human buys an F150 to attract social attention and a mate. To a hypothetical alien species, the gap between the intelligence of these two species is not large.
Collectively, we act in accordance with our biology.
Consider the reindeer on St Matthews Island. 20 of them were introduced in 1944 and left to fend for themselves. With plenty of food and no natural predators, by 1963 there were 6000 reindeer (300x population boom!). By 1966 the population had dropped to 42. By 1980, no reindeer left.
Mammals seem particularly prone to this "eat everything is sight and multiply" strategy. Which works, until it doesn't - the herd migrates, adapts, or the population collapses. The problem with the human enterprise is that we've gotten really darn good at engineering solutions to these negative feedback pressures. There's nothing (yet) that can restrain our growth. Which means we're in a St. Matthew's Reindeer situation - dwindling resource base, exploding population, and nowhere left to go.
Many videos from https://pleistocenepark.org/ explain, that at the start they are removing large trees with bulldozer, something that mammoths could do and other herbivores do not do effectively.
Sadly this kind of inattention to detail and shallow arguments are typical to people who hold views similar to this article.
The authors complains that Colossal doesn't genetically engineer trees, but if someone was to develop trees that could grow floating in open sea, they were going to complain how this unnatural tree are bad and will change the ocean ecosystem.
Mammoth de-extinction is indeed bad conservation, because it is much better than merely conservation, it is restoration, and reengineering of empty lands into something much more useful for us, and for other animals.
Unlike the mammoth, people generally seem to agree that it's a good idea to bring these majestic wonders back to their range, but with multiple options available after decades of work, last I checked stakeholders couldn't agree on the best way to do it.
This hybridization approach seemingly would draw the same sorts of debates, even if the more obvious ethical ramifications weren't there. We're talking about a human-created species that is neither mammoth nor elephant, but something in-between, with trade-offs comprising value judgements and other details that are not fully understood.
Worst case (according to the article's arguments) we get depressed, ill mammoths that actually damage the ecosystem. So exterminate them again, I guess, and try again when the science improves? Nothing was lost.
I'm not sure you can conserve things totally. Even if all humans disappeared, the earth would keep changing as it always has done - 99.9% of species are extinct because they keep dying out and new ones generated.