Woolly Mammoth Revival
longnow.org
longnow.org
You get a few simple tropes.
On the one hand, the Jurassic Park "don't ever mess with nature" trope, an extension of Frankenstein stories that fear all science as unnatural, dangerous, even evil.
The ecologist's "museum earth" view, that picks some moment in time and strives to preserve or restore all ecologies as an exact replica of that state (ignoring the red queen effect that probably makes this focus on "sustainability" itself unsustainable).
The "mad scientist" view treats the entire world as a petri dish, and risks ignoring that we're currently sitting in the lifeboat they're rocking.
I don't have a sophisticated answer. I feel like something should be said in defense of the mad scientist view, only because most people today would think that view the most obviously wrong. There's always a question as to whether or not to leave one's mark on this world through an act of creation. Maybe you're thinking of writing a novel or making a film or composing an opera. Any of these things could radically shape the future in unexpected ways. Shakespeare could have sat on his hands, and our language, our selection of idioms would be very different. In general, if you have an amazing vision, you should strive for it. Like the individual, perhaps humanity should dedicate itself to doing radical, strange, and wondrous things, tamper with everything, and through our acts petulantly scream our existence into the oblivion that surrounds us. Germinate distant planets. Create strange species. Set things in motion that will have far reaching consequences as a way to plant our stake for immortality.
That's just for fun, for argument's sake. The close of the video is more stirring. Roughly, "The kid in me would love to see us bring back these majestic creatures, to see them walking across the permafrost. The adult in me wonders whether we should."
I don't have a sophisticated answer. The kid in me likes mad scientists. The adult probably knows better.
Here's a project to bring back the Quagga: http://www.quaggaproject.org/
It's worse than that. If I read the literature correctly, 15,000 years ago, North America had elephants (mammoths, mastodons), giant sloths, llamas, and horses[1], now all gone. And it had a much greater variety of some categories of animals that are not quite all gone: large cats, pronghorns.
When the first European explorers looked at North America, they thought they were seeing a pristine wilderness, looking more or less as it always had. But they were really seeing wildly out of balance ecologies still reeling from the recent loss of most of their large animals.
Basing wildlife management strategies on the idea that what the early explorers found was a sustainable steady state is a very problematic idea.
Also, I would really like to see a living mammoth. :-)
[1] The wild horses in North America today are an old-world species that was imported by Europeans not too many centuries ago.
The humans in North America today were originally imported from Europe/Africa/Asia not too many centuries ago :)
Any sources on this? I'd like to read up on this stuff.
There's also a much shorter version of the book published in the Atlantic.
http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30244...
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802138888/
Link to Google's cache of that page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LrYgQln...