“One of Crutzen’s fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife, ‘The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.’”
– Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction
To make sense of our lives and the life of our species, we humans construct narratives that are continually revised. They are like strings of pearls found among the dross that we deem to have no meaning. Like such strings, narratives are easily broken, at which point the pearls scatter in all directions.
One such narrative supports the concept of Pleistocene Park, located in Siberia, where the alarming thawing of the permafrost below the ground is too obvious to be denied. A local theory has it that returning the forest to savanna and populating it with mastodons—or genetically modified elephants—will cool the tundra and reverse the thaw. Already they are populating the park with key species of the kind recommended by Staffan Widstrand for rewilding: wild horses, bison, musk oxen. For this we destructive late moderns should be grateful, and should visit the Park—hopefully without doing it harm—and hope that the bold venture makes it more likely that the body of life will survive.
As to the theory behind the Park, I hope it evolves. Let’s take a look at some of the weak points that could disperse its string of pearls:
#1: Fixating on greenhouse gases
The physical scientists who studied the ozone hole and rising carbon dioxide levels have, it seems, bought us time to rescue the body of life. They were, however, biology-blind. Those indigenous and other researchers who are going back to the records of early modern explorers, later colonizers, and early conservationists are noting that deforestation reduced cloud formation, interrupted the hydrologic cycle, and upset the oxygen-CO2 cycle. (See the diaries of Von Humboldt, Columbus, Major Mitchell, and Thoreau, and the non-fiction of Gene Stratton Porter.)
#2: Human beings left Africa’s woodlands
While one of the rationales for “restoring” systems is that humans evolved in that habitat and are “hard-wired” to return to it, the archaeological dig at Ukraine’s Mezhirich suggests the opposite: Humans may have torched forests to make grasslands for livestock.
According to Michael Wood’s Story of India, after the chromosomal translocation that led to the naked ape and the bottleneck from which Lucy emerged, one of the first places the species went was the forests of south India. Those of Australia were modified and well-kept by Aboriginals (see Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe); similarly, the Amazon rainforest, into which habitat humans were fully integrated, was fine until “modernized.”
#3 Focus on nutrient flows
Another rationale for bulldozing trees at risk of dying due to permafrost disruption is that savanna habitats circulate nutrients quickly. Bulldozing doubles the risk of climate confusion by removing biomass comprised of oxygen-producing trees and eliminating a shady microclimate that could help to stabilize the climate. It would be better to enhance biomass, the hydrologic cycle, and oxygen production/CO2 utilization to focus on large herbivores, especially if they do not replace cattle, sheep, and other habitat-decimating species.
#4 Mad-scientist genetic engineering
The harm done by herbicide-tolerating and pesticide-producing GMO foods is beginning to surface, and Monsanto to swim in lawsuits. GMO salmon threaten the wild salmon runs in the Pacific that humans had not managed to ruin. Enough already. The impetus for bringing back an extinct mammoth while the extinction rates of existing species are skyrocketing escapes me.
These are just a few key points. The return of key species is a plus, but the mad scientist move turns this pro-species point into an anti-species one, as does the desire to create more savanna when the Amazon is already headed that way. The climate is global, and solutions have to be global as well as local.