268 The Environmental Debate
But Brand argues that de-extinction offers
something vital to conservationists today: an
alternative narrative unburdened by the hand-
wringing over extinction and ecological loss.... I respect Brand’s long and impressive career
as a tech-friendly enviro-maverick, but I think
he’s wrong about this. De-extinction isn’t really
a conservation strategy, and it doesn’t reflect a
sound conservation ethic. In fact, I believe pur-
suing it will seriously undercut an important
source of the value we attach to wild species.
Even worse, it could undermine the moral les-
sons of extinction at a critical time in our envi-
ronmental history.
Although a revived passenger pigeon, heath
hen, or mammoth (setting aside the question of
whether an engineered genome does an extinct
species make) may have aesthetic, scientific,
and even economic value to society, it obviously
won’t share the natural history of the lost spe-
cies. The evolutionary toil and historical rich-
ness of the forerunner species, including their
co-evolution with other species over time, has
been lost, replaced by a tale of technological
manipulations in a 21st-century genetics lab.
In other words, the backstory is wrong, at
least from a conservation perspective. A living
species’ natural history is only one reason why
we value them, but it’s a profoundly important
one to conservationists (or at least it should be).
In part, this is because our understanding of an
unengineered species’ natural history encour-
ages the adoption of an attitude of humility
toward them. As the conservationist-philoso-
pher Aldo Leopold reminds us, “Men are only
fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odys-
sey of evolution.”
...
An even deeper cause for concern about species
revival, though, is the well-meaning but still mis-
guided attempt to erase the moral narrative of
extinction. As Brand puts it in his defense of the
resurrection of the passenger pigeon, “How finebrought back; for that would be a grave error.
... The heath hen could not be brought back,
neither could the passenger pigeon.”
What a difference a century makes.
It’s doubtful that even in his wildest dreams
Hornaday would’ve envisioned that someday
scientists and their allies would seriously be
contemplating bringing long-extinct species—
including the passenger pigeon and the heath
hen—back from the dead.
Called “de-extinction,” the proposal taps
into a range of established and still emerging
techniques in cloning and genetic engineering,
including the ability to rapidly sequence ancient
DNA from preserved tissues of extinct animals
to allow scientists to create approximations of
lost species by “editing” the genomes of closely
related (living) species. So, for example, the
genome of a contemporary band-tailed pigeon
could be altered to more closely resemble that of
a passenger pigeon, and a population of the new
birds could theoretically be bred and released
into the wild.
The techno-environmentalist Stewart Brand
is one of the driving forces behind the idea, which
over the past 18 months has drawn considerable
media attention and scrutiny. Brand’s Long Now
Foundation is supporting scientific efforts to re-
create the passenger pigeon—and exploring pos-
sibilities for the heath hen—within its “Revive &
Restore” project, which has its sights on a range
of candidates for resurrection, from the Tasma-
nian tiger to the woolly mammoth.
The de-extinction proposal has been met
with no shortage of criticism, ranging from con-
cerns about the misallocation of limited conser-
vation dollars to a “vanity project,” to worries
that the newly engineered species will wreak
havoc when released into the environment, espe-
cially since we may no longer have the space to
accommodate them. Fears have been raised that
de-extinction will also lead to the relaxation
of public commitment to conservation and to
averting future species extinctions.