THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 39
awfully cute—a bit like miniature bad-
gers. But when I asked around I learned
that quoll-spotting required a lot more
expertise and time than I had. It would
be much easier to find some of the am-
phibians that were killing them. So one
evening I set out with a biologist named
Lin Schwarzkopf to go toad hunting.
Schwarzkopf, who’s from Canada,
was one of the inventors of the Toadi-
nator trap, and the first thing we did
was stop by her office, at James Cook
University, so that I could take a look
at the device. It was a cage about the
size of a toaster oven, with a plastic flap
door. When Schwarzkopf turned on the
trap’s little speaker, the office reverber-
ated with the toad’s thrumming call.
“Male toads are attracted to any-
thing that sounds even remotely like a
cane toad,” she told me. “If they hear a
generator, they’ll go to it.” James Cook
University is in northern Queensland,
the region where the toads were first
introduced. Schwarzkopf figured we
should be able to locate some toads
right on the university grounds. We
strapped on headlamps and went out-
side. It was about 9 P.M., and the place
was deserted, except for the two of us
and a family of wallabies hopping nearby.
We wandered around for a while, look-
ing for the glint of a malevolent eye.
Just as I was beginning to lose heart,
Schwarzkopf spotted a toad in the leaf
litter. Picking it up, she immediately
identified it as female.
“They won’t hurt you unless you
give them a really hard time,” she said,
pointing out the toad’s venom glands,
which looked like two baggy pouches.
“That’s why you shouldn’t hit them
with a golf club. Because if you hit the
glands the poison can spray out. And
if it gets in your eyes it will blind you
for a few days.”
We wandered around some more. It
had been very dry, Schwarzkopf ob-
served, and the toads were probably
short on moisture: “They love air-con-
ditioning units—anything that’s drip-
ping.” Near an old greenhouse, where
someone had recently run a hose, we
found two more toads. Schwarzkopf
flipped over a rotting crate the size and
shape of a coffin. “The mother lode!”
she announced. In about a quarter inch
of scummy water were more cane toads
than I could count. Some were sitting
on top of one another. I thought they
might try to get away; instead, they just
sat there, unperturbed.T
he strongest argument for gene edit-
ing cane toads, house mice, and ship
rats is also the simplest: what’s the alter-
native? The choice at this point is not be-
tween what was and what is but between
what is and what will be, which often
enough is nothing. This is the situation of
the northern quolls, the Campbell Island
teal, the Antiguan racer, and the Tristan
albatross. Stick to a strict interpretation
of the natural and these—along with
thousands of other species—are goners.
Rejecting gene editing as unnatural isn’t,
at this point, going to bring nature back.
“We are as gods and might as well
get good at it,” Stewart Brand, the edi-
tor of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” wrote
in its mission statement, in 1969. Re-
cently, in response to the whole-earth
transformation that’s under way, Brand
has sharpened his statement: “We are as
gods and have to get good at it.” Brand
has co-founded a group, Revive & Re-
store, whose stated mission is “to enhance
biodiversity through new techniques of
genetic rescue.” Among the more fan-
tastic projects the group has backed is
an effort to resurrect the passenger pi-
geon. The idea is to reverse history by
rejiggering the genes of the bird’s closest
living relative, the band-tailed pigeon.
Much closer to realization is an effort
to bring back the American chestnut tree.
The tree, once common in the eastern
U.S., was all but wiped out by chestnutblight. (The blight, a fungal pathogen
introduced to North America around
1900, killed off nearly every chestnut on
the continent—an estimated four billion
trees.) Researchers at the SUNY College
of Environmental Science and Forestry,
in Syracuse, New York, have created a
genetically modified chestnut that’s im-
mune to blight. The key to its resistance
is a gene imported from wheat. Owingto this single borrowed gene, the tree
is considered transgenic and cannot be
released into the world without federal
permits. As a consequence, the blight-re-
sistant saplings are, for now, confined to
greenhouses and fenced-in plots.
As Tizard points out, we’re constantly
moving genes around the world, usually in
the form of entire genomes. This is how
chestnut blight arrived in North America
in the first place: it was carried in on Asian
chestnut trees, imported from Japan. If we
can correct for our earlier tragic mistake
by shifting just one more gene around,
don’t we owe it to the American chest-
nut to do so? The ability to “rewrite the
very molecules of life” places us, it could
be argued, under an obligation.
Of course, the argument against such
intervention is also compelling. The rea-
soning behind genetic “rescue” is the sort
responsible for many a world-altering
screwup. (See, for example, cane toads.)
The history of biological interventions
designed to correct for previous biolog-
ical interventions reads like Dr. Seuss’s
“The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.” The
Cat, after eating cake in the bathtub, is
asked to clean up after himself:Do you know how he did it?
WITH MOTHER’S WHITE DRESS!
Now the tub was all clean,
But her dress was a mess!In the nineteen-fifties, Hawaii’s De-
partment of Agriculture decided to con-
trol giant African snails, which had been
introduced two decades earlier as garden
ornaments, by importing rosy wolfsnails,
which are also known as cannibal snails.
The cannibal snails mostly left the giant
snails alone. Instead, they ate their way
through dozens of species of Hawaii’s
small endemic land snails, producing
what E. O. Wilson has called “an ex-
tinction avalanche.”
Responding to Brand, Wilson has
observed, “We are not as gods. We’re
not yet sentient or intelligent enough
to be much of anything.”
Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and
activist, has put it this way: “We are as
gods, but we have failed to get good at
it....We are Loki, killing the beautiful
for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our
children.” Kingsnorth has also observed,
“Sometimes doing nothing is better than
doing something. Sometimes it is the
other way around.”