Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation
54 comments
·April 5, 2025JoeAltmaier
master_crab
Arguably, the only good conservation involves removing all humans forever. Given how that’s not a workable or good idea (from a self-preservation perspective) everything else is open to interpretation.
(Not an argument for maximalist interpretations)
furyofantares
Indeed I would argue that this is the worst possible "conservation", since it eliminates the only thing that values conservation, human brains.
MillironX
Exactly. "Conservation" is the wise use of resources, while "preservation" is the complete rewilding of those resources.
darth_avocado
Humans as a species don’t value conservation. Individual humans. The total removal of human beings is still the best form of conservation.
aziaziazi
This looks like old anthropocentric philosophy. Add the concept of a divine Creator that gives human all of his wise willpower and you’ll have most chances to be published and applause in the XVIII century.
swat535
Wouldn't it also be fair to point out that humans are part of the ecosystem, not outside of it?
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.
graemep
That also implies there is no loss from removing everything uniquely human from the world.
More fundamentally, what is the goal? What do we want to maximise?
theoreticalmal
Maximize crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women.
dullcrisp
Paper clips
dleeftink
Minimise entropy, maximise knowledge, kinship, time.
weard_beard
Beauty.
dyauspitr
Why is the cattle industry in the same vein as reintroducing wolves?
JoeAltmaier
"Things we do with animals"
You don't want to call the Mammoth effort 'ecological', then compare it to other such animal impacts we've engineered. Like cattle.
LinuxBender
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.
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."
tyre
What is bad about engineering mosquitos to be sterile?
mionhe
Lots of things eat them, so we're killing off a link in the food chain, would be the argument.
andrewflnr
It's a silly argument IMO. There are so many mosquito species we don't care about, and so many other small insects that provide similar food, that eliminating the handful of species that literally kill humans would barely cause a blip in the food chain.
sitkack
Mosquitoes bring nutrients back down the food chain, making it a food graph instead of a food tree.
bjelkeman-again
Possibly better than the alternatives. Like use of DDT. But everything seems to have a drawback.
null
nemomarx
wait what's wrong with the wolves? rewilding via wolves seems to be good for everyone except ranchers?
eesmith
From this article:
> 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.”
nemomarx
yeah but that's just the benefits being overstated, not a downside that I can see?
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.
perrygeo
The conservation biology world has some interesting philosophical problems to wrestle with.
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.
tuna74
"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."
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.
moosey
I don't aliens that could come here would recognize profit as something real. They would see us destroying the world to eat meat. To pointlessly travel at high speeds. To drive cars around in pointless errands. To collect pointless knick knacks for social stature.
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.
chr1
> But the study raises lots of questions: is it possible to boost these herbivores’ populations across the whole northern latitudes? If so, why do we need mammoths at all—why not just use species that already exist, which would surely be cheaper?
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.
odyssey7
I'm reminded of the multiple projects to restore the American Chestnut.
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.
wileydragonfly
This has been 2 years away for 40 years. It’s never happening.
snozolli
If we have the opportunity to revive a species that humans exterminated, and said species doesn't present any immediate and obvious danger to humanity, then we absolutely should.
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.
theoreticalmal
I find it hard to agree that the humanity that is currently un-exterminating mammoth is the same humanity that exterminated them in the first place. Genetically, sure, but our culture and values and technology seems so fantastically different that I don’t see the two as being the same.
snozolli
How is that relevant?
spwa4
But it provides the necessary training so humanity can be brought back from extinction at the end of Trump's term.
Sure; but so is pretty much anything we do with animals.
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.