I recently read an article in National Geographic about De-extinction, a move by genetic scientists to rebuild extinct species (species over-hunted or made extinct by human actions). Initially I was excited about this despite being a little cautious about cloning. To think; Tasmanian Devils raised from the grave, sky’s full of Passenger Pigeons, the Arctic tundra dotted once again with statuesque Wooly Mammoths. All these beautiful beings breathing once again. Surely this is any ecologists or humans dream. Then it came, a moment of doubt and with it clarity…a reason why I don’t think it should happen (yet…if ever). And it is because of our very relationship to life….something that was suggested in the subsequent juxtaposed article about big game hunting. We live in an era where the value of life has already been stripped of is phenomenological richness and is qualified (if we let them) on purely in economic terms…..this includes modern day corporate environmentalism with its valuing of ecosystems. It is against a backdrop of this dysfunctional fucked up thinking that we propose reintroducing these magnificent beings, species that were sent to their grave because of our complete lack of awareness of how our environment actually works…..its very limits. Of course some were lost because we just wanted them out of our hair. But on the whole it was our ignorance (lack of awareness, connection to place etc) that killed them. So in the midst of mass extinction (approximately 25000 species over the last 150 years), a point where life seems to have little value beyond economic, a point where we still act in the most strangest of fashions…..we discuss reintroducing a load of extinct species into the delicate web of life….not only disrupting it but also revaluing everything we should and need to learn, which is the very value of being alive…..Where does learning lie if not in the loss of things…in the realization that in a moment we messed up irreversibly, and that our actions carry with them responsibility. Lets love the things we have and live with what we have, yesterday happened and because of it we are learning. Perhaps if we can get this right we can start to look at this again, but maybe from a different perspective.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lost-species-revived-from-dna-and-restored-to-nature

Source: Uncivilized