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Comment by coenhyde | Hacker News Reader

If we have the ability, IMO we should bring back any species that humanity has made extinct in recent times, say 150 years without any hesitation (assuming we can do it safely). And I think it is our moral obligation to do so. We have been the the arbiter of whether these species lived or died, and we chose death. We have an opportunity to choose again, and we'd be royal a-holes if we choose death again.

Then I think we should consider bringing back species we wiped out eons ago (eg mammoth), if their ecosystem still exists.

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I think generally the problem is going to come down to "if their ecosystem still exists". We're wiping out the places these creatures lived. Not just the big-name places, but the unremarkable ones. Same goes with the animals. For every name-species gone, there'd be dozens to which the public is oblivious.

The reverse of that is that there are ecosystems that can only exist as a result of some large fauna's action on the environment:

There are theories that permafrost is a result of woolly mammoths, for instance:

https://theconversation.com/could-resurrecting-mammoths-help...

Horses / donkeys digging wells in deserts: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/wild-donkeys-and-h...

(edited to add horses)

That's interesting. If something wants to live up in Siberia and Canada, more power to it. I think the climate will unlock little more than mosquitoes up there to start with! Just not instinctively loving the idea of rebirthing name-species for a bit of glory rather than working against what we're generally doing to the environment. Makes for a public excuse for our actions.

My MIL has been working the last few years to remove cows from their property and reforest the hillside. The transformation is amazing - it's gone from just beaten grass and cow crap, to loads of native trees. Eventually the trees will be home to mammals and birdlife, dropped logs for lizards, etc. Long way off regrowing the century-old gum trees that really make this area special though.

Let's not bring back the passenger pigeon. I like having reliable grain crops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

> Hunting of passenger pigeons was documented and depicted in contemporaneous newspapers, wherein various trapping methods and uses were featured. The most often reproduced of these illustrations was captioned "Winter sports in northern Louisiana: shooting wild pigeons", and published in 1875. Passenger pigeons were also seen as agricultural pests, since entire crops could be destroyed by feeding flocks. The bird was described as a "perfect scourge" by some farming communities, and hunters were employed to "wage warfare" on the birds to save grain, as shown in another newspaper illustration from 1867 captioned as "Shooting wild pigeons in Iowa".[124] When comparing these "pests" to the bison of the Great Plains, the valuable resource needed was not the species of animals but the agriculture which was consumed by said animal. The crops that were eaten were seen as marketable calories, proteins, and nutrients all grown for the wrong species.

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