So, every year we loose a big number of species. And now one wants to reintroduce a single new one ? Shouldn't it be better to deflect all the energy, money put into that project to actually protecting earth as it is ?
* The project is using a non-negligible percentage of all resources available to the problem space
* Everyone agrees on what the problems are
* Everyone agrees on the priority ordering of problems that need to be tackled
* There isn't greater waste or opportunity for resource allocation from other projects first (e.g. video game dev or plastic surgery research)
* it's the responsibility of everyone to always be focused on working on the highest priority problem on some global list of problems.
It's very flawed logic IMO.
the flawed assumption that we can't work on more than one problem at a time.
that throwing all of our resources at a problem will speed up the solution to that problem without reaching a point of diminishing returns of investment.
that all scientist, engineers, researchers, doctors, etc are interchangeable and are equally motivated and capable to productively research problems in unrelated fields and that if their chosen research were de-funded and were to be moved to another field they wouldn't just quit and do something they are more interested in.
ignoring that knowledge gained in one field might also advance progress in another.
Reviving mammoths is dramatic, exciting, and overtly new and creative. It's like landing on the moon. I think it could excite people who groan at traditional environmental initiatives.
I know it's a failure of vision to see environmental protection as an essentially negative aspiration, just like it's a failure of vision to see healthy eating as essentially negative. But a lot of people see it that way, and they aren't going to willingly put their money behind reducing CO2 emissions or protecting habitat for endangered voles. Maybe for them this can be a gateway drug to giving a shit.
Alors, regarding the negativity, and you can call me a totalitarian, I think much of the way we see things come from our education. So I think we can actually teach children to recognize the obviousness of healthy eating. That education of course is balanced by what you learn from society and also from the dreams projected by that society. For me reviving dead animals is a useless dream.
As for environment protection, the question of being exciting is not there. It won't be exciting at all for the masses. But in the end, if nothing is done, it won't be exciting either. My idealist brain doesn't accept that but my pragmatic brain understands that we'd need some political/philsophical/sociological super powers to change that. One of those super power is propganda. We know it works (even if the examples from history are unfortunate). But then again, propaganda doesn't mean dictatorship, just look the level of communication we receive about covid.
We'd need an Elon Musk that would build a project around crowd hacking instead of sending cars to space. That's what we usually get into the form of charismatic leaders. Maybe that's what we need (or maybe I'm biased by my own personality who ikes charismatic leaders :-))