Good insight. (And thoughts following. ; - ) (I’m reminded of the successful and beneficial reintroduction of beavers in several places.)
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That is true, and that needs to go. But why make the problem worse? A significant source of methane comes from food waste that ends up in landfills. Up to 40% of the food we raise is wasted.
Actually we don’t know that for sure.
True, and there are other problems as well. It will take this project forever to ramp up. The gestation period for elephants is very long, and it takes a great while for them to mature and reach reproductive age. This is why elephants needed for work (e.g. in India) were never domesticated and bred like other livestock. It was more feasible to capture them and tame them. (The Africa elephant can’t even be tamed.)
The Indian elephant is definitely the closest living relative of mammoths, so that part is fairly straightforward. With improved technology, we’re getting pretty good genomes for intensively studied extinct taxa such as mammoths and Neanderthals (though one might argue that more attention should be given to analyzing other still-living species for data to better protect them.) But in addition to the technical problems of cloning elephants, elephants have significant components of learned behavior. Cloned mammoths would need to receive a lot of zoo-style care before they could build enough generational knowledge to function in the wild.
John Stott has asserted that human-caused extinction is an act of blasphemy. One could argue about whether eliminating specific disease-causing organisms and viruses fall under that, but certainly wiping out harmless or useful species is not good stewardship of creation. On the other hand, some proposals for de-extinction don’t have a realistic concept of what to do with the human population.
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I guess I just don’t think creating 10-50 elephant creatures for the tundra is going to cause global warming to go up.
If we consider de-extinction of mammoths, should we think of de-extinction of Neanderthals or some other extinct species of the genus Homo?
Elephant creatures in the tundra ecosystem would rather help to fight against global warming than cause it, although the impact would be negligible. Removing bushes and trees would increase albedo and slow down the melting of snow in spring.
Another matter is that a small amount would not be enough to sustain the population. There would be a need to have closer to 500 individuals.
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Just saying, even if it was 3,000 I doubt the impact would be significant enough to change anything with global warming in light of millions and millions , like 90 million cows in USA.
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Of course not, but it’s probably not going to work. Elephants have a long childhood. They have to live in a group. Where are you going to raise this group? The moms (Indian elephants) are adapted to a tropical environment while the babies (woolly mammoth hybrids) are adapted to an extremely cold environment. So where does the group live?
That would be unethical. Besides, can you imagine the hate fundie preachers would unleash on them?
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Yes, racism would be a major problem. Not only by fundie preachers. My interpretation is that racism has genetic roots, it is a side-effect of favoring relatives (similar genes). That would mean there is a tiny racist inside us and we need to learn to control it so that it does not affect our behavior.
Anyhow, the reason why I asked the question is to think the ethical problem from another viewpoint. If de-extinction of Neanderthals is unethical, why would de-extinction of mammoths be acceptable? What is the fundamental difference?
Maybe it’s best to look at what the scientists and people involved in this project have to say.
I’d be quite in favor of de-extinction of the many mollusks that have been wiped out by recent human activity. They don’t take up much space, many help water quality, and there’s no problems with having the proper social environment. The technology doesn’t exist yet but might be feasible in the near future. Attempting de-extinction of the passenger pigeon would be much more difficult environmentally in that they seem to have depended on having vast populations for survival - poorly defended against predation but a predator can’t wipe out a million birds at a time unless he knows how to make guns. Large mammals tend to have the complexity of learned behavior, in addition to large habitat requirements.
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With the current rate of extinctions, local- and global-level biodiversity is reducing with an alarming rate and there is a homogenization of landscapes, the same few successful species are dominating a larger part of the globe.
Ecosystems with few species are less resistant to external pressures, more prone to wide density fluctuations and additional extinctions, and the problem becomes worse if all ecosystems are dominated by the same species.
Humans depend on ecosystem services, such as food, other natural materials, pest control, handling of waste, production of oxygen. In addition, the declining populations (species) may have something we need in the future. For example, new antibiotics, other medicins, crucial information needed in the development of new medical or technological solutions. The vital ecosystem services tend to be more resistant against changes than individual species but the quality and quantity of ecosystem services degrades if too many species go extinct.
From purely selfish reasons there is a need to protect the biodiversity that is needed for ecosystem services. The cheapest option is to prevent extinctions. If species go extinct, sometimes it may be economically profitable to de-extinct the species that may help sustain bodiversity or improve the quality or quantity of ecosystem services.
De-extinction is a possibility that should be kept in the toolbox but it needs to be used in a rational way.
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In some places there are programs to deal with that by collecting waste food, putting it in tanks with the right bacteria to generate methane rapidly, then burn the methane to generate electricity. Where I live that was going to get started but then the idiot government pulled the approval for local electrical generation via “digesters” using dairy barn effluent to make methane . . . so now the local farmers are again stuck with that effluent churning out methane they can’t use.
A local industry group is fighting for permission for farmers to run their own digesters and generate their own electricity but the layers of bureaucracy are ridiculous to navigate, even when the local electric utility is supporting them!
edit: just a note about that operation that got shut down – the water vapor and carbon dioxide from burning the methane were captured and introduced back into the cycle by bubbling it into the digester tanks, which was an awesome innovation.
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Racism is a learned behavior.
Neanderthals are human but mammoths are not.
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True. Our dump/recycling center accepts food waste, which they compost. So does the local whole Foods. I’m trying to get my food waste down to near-zero.
Exactly. And that brings up another point. Where are heat-adapted Indian elephant mamas and their cold-adapted woolly mammoth offspring supposed to live while this program ramps up? Can an Indian elephant teach her baby how to forage in the snow if she’s never even seen snow?
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Ouch – but I think that’s flipping into a different realm, where self-aware sentience is involved.
Though I think people would be more likely to be interested in seeing what DNA Neandertals might have that is superior to our version and splice it into human DNA to get a “superior” human – which has its own ethical questions.
The easy ‘Christian’ answer would be that Neandertals might have souls.