A recent issue of the New York Times Magazine suggests that the technology for recreating species that have gone extinct in the last few thousand years will soon be available if it is not already. Scientists have already attempted to clone an extinct European wild goat known as a bucardo, and while the results were not successful they were clearly moving in the right direction.
Passenger pigeons in their native habitat, an Iowa woodland, from a diorama in the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. The background to this diorama was painted by Charles Waldo Love. The Flickr photo is by Jessica Lamirand; click image for a larger view.
Species that have been extinct for millions of years, such as dinosaurs, are beyond our reach. But the Times argues that recovery of such species as the passenger pigeon, which once numbered in the billions, and the woolly mammoth should both be possible in the very near future.
The problem, as a slightly older article article from National Geographic points out, is once you have a population of passenger pigeons or mammoths, where do you put them? One answer is that we have plenty of land for such species. The vast majority of people living in developed nations live in urban areas covering only a small percent of the land in those nations. While lots of other land is used for growing crops, even more land is used for timber or not used for much at all. It wouldn’t be hard to modify the management of non-crop-growing rural lands to favor endangered or recovered species.
Even in developing nations, in many of which a majority of people still live in rural areas, rural life can be compatible with rare and endangered species. It is striking that the one continent in the world that still has a broad complement of charismatic megafauna–Africa–is also the continent with the smallest percentage of people living in urban areas. Africans have lived with lions and hippos and elephants for thousands of years even as their migrating descendants wiped out the ecological equivalents of those species everywhere else.
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What we don’t have are institutions that could create incentives for landowners and land managers to provide habitat for recovered species. Woolly mammoths were almost certainly hunted to extinction and they disappeared because they reproduced slower than people could hunt them. But passenger pigeons, which once were so numerous that ornithologists estimated they outnumbered all other species of birds on earth, disappeared in a few short decades mainly because the eastern hardwood forests they depended on for habitat were cut and replaced with pines. To truly recover the species, someone needs to have an incentive to promote hardwoods again.
The main reason these incentives don’t exist, at least in the United States, is that our common law takes a wrong-headed view toward wildlife ownership, holding that wildlife are owned by everyone and not by the owners of the land that the wildlife use. At the extreme, at least one state requires that anyone who hunts on their own private land must allow any other licensed hunter to trespass on their land at no charge to hunt as well.
In the nineteenth century, this view meant that no one could own a passenger pigeon, or bison or elk or pronghorn, until they killed it. Anyone who tried to preserve a mating pair of any of these animals had no legal way to prevent anyone else from simply shooting the animals.
In the slightly more enlightened twentieth century, the states started exercising their ownership in wildlife, regulating hunting and charging fees to hunt. The profits from those fees gave the states incentives to restore herds of huntable wildlife, and species that were nearly extinct such as elk, pronghorn, and some deer managed to recover. However, this did little for non-huntable wildlife.
Two decades ago, the Antiplanner urged Congress to begin privatizing wildlife so that people who cared about non-huntable endangered species could take steps to recover them. Nothing has been done in that direction, but perhaps the successful recovery of once-extinct species can lead to moves in that direction.
We have the technology. We have the land. What we don’t have are the institutions, but if we can create the technology to recover extinct species, we can create the institutions to allow them to thrive.
Well, that is a well-articulated view. Well done Randal.
The fundamental issue IMHO is that our economic and social systems were set up in an era of far less complexity, and valuing nature in such a simplistic system is exceedingly difficult as nature is complex, multi-scalar, cross-boundary, and not linear in energy flow or time.
That is: antiquated institutions set up to privilege only use value and exploitation have difficulty with existence value, especially in a scheme where the number of competing interests is made many times higher – fragmentation almost guaranteed as the number of owners (multi-scalar in time and space) increases. I don’t think we have the technology to coordinate so many interests and to track incentive payments to preserve energy flow, nor will we develop such a technology. Nor will our systems and institutions change to allow such complexity and interaction.
DS /fatalism
Who is the owner of a migratory bird?
Bringing back extinct species will be a cool development in the future, though each species will have many problems to work through. Environmentalists will have to get over their fear/guilt of the unknown and uncontrollable consequences.
The Antiplanner’s evaluation of wildlife law is just terrible. Societies where the property owner can do what they wish with the fish and wildlife on their property don’t keep that rule very long, because it is disastrous for fish and wildlife. Sure you could design a 21st century law that carved out some incentives for prevention of extirpation, but common law almost certainly allowed that anyway.
“Woolly mammoths were almost certainly hunted to extinction and they disappeared because they reproduced slower than people could hunt them.”
Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
Here is the latest:
Climate change killed the woolly mammoth, researchers claim
The woolly mammoth was not hunted out of existence but driven to extinction by climate change as world got too warm for them, researchers have suggested.
And here’s the text of the study referenced, Holarctic genetic structure and range dynamics in the woolly mammoth.
Replication of extinct flora and fauna………..Sure no one’s gonna clone a dinosaur but there are some species recently extinct. Dodo, carrier pigeon, the Thylacine (Tazmanian Tiger).
Still species propagation requires genetic diversity, how do you rebuild a population with just a few species. Second cloning is still a second rate science, the animals, even the most successful ones like Dolly the Sheep suffered problems later on in life, genome stability is really, really, really, really difficult; cloned pets live shorter than the original recipe. And that’s just the practical limitations what about the moral arguments, which animal gets cloned, the adorable ones.
The Conservation movement today has thrived on it’s ability to sell sob stories of species extinction. but it thrives on animals that have attracted the qualities of being cute. Save the panda’s awwwwww. Save the eel’s………ewwwwwww. And it’s done well to earn them money….money of which they spend on animals??? Hardly, more like headquarters like the World Wildlife Funds new headquarters in DC. Anyone who lives or works in DC knows that DC has some of the most expensive office rents in the country. Of course there’s no rare occurrence of charitable organizations spending exorbitant sums of money…..on themselves. Look no further than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who spent a whopping half a billion dollars on a headquarters for themselves. You can smell the public-relations excrement hitting the proverbial fan. Shouldn’t that money have gone to the foundation’s work? Wouldn’t that $500 million have been better spent on malaria research or schools in Africa? And with so much empty commercial space around Seattle area, they could have just rented space elsewhere. Virtually every charitable organization has a prominent address.
90% of all life on Earth is microscopic. You may cause a mass extinction every time you wash your hands. Now of that 10% remaining, get rid of plants and fungi, after all we’re focusing on animals. Now of the remaining animals, separate vertebrates from invertebrates (jellyfish, worms and other ugly, slimy things). Only 3% of animal’s are vertebrates. Now separate from vertebrates, the fish, the lizards, amphibians that are slimy, scaly and smelly. And what you have left are mammals and birds and that’ is what gets most of the money.
There are 1,800+ species currently on the American endangered species list. Out of those 1,800, only 41 have been removed from the list that in and of itself gives you a clue as to how effective the legislation works. Now of those 41, Nine are extinct……oops. Sixteen were put on the list by mistake. So that leaves 16 that were on the list as success stories. Really? Of those 16, three are kangaroos……that live in Australia. Three are birds in Palau that were miscounted. Three are birds that recovered solely due to the Federal government’s ban on DDT (Bald Eagle, etc.), that accomplishment was the EPA, not the Endangered Species Act. One is the American Alligator, scientists overestimated the threat they faced, combined with the fact that they’re bred commercially for food, leather and tourism by the tens of thousands means they’ll probably never go extinct even if Disney bulldozed the Everglades to build an Everglades themed attraction. Louisiana has far less legislation put into place for the protection of alligators, despite this they enjoy a higher population of gators. One is the Robbins Cinquefoil, a species of New Hampshire plant that was saved by simply planting some and redirecting a few hiking trails so backpackers didn’t step on them. One is the Columbian white tailed Deer and sub-species of Canadian Goose, all of which were handled with local hunting restrictions, something easily done without super duper federal bureaucracy. One is the Tinian Monarch, a bird whose habitat had been literally blown away by B-29 but was fine by the time the government bothered to count them decades later. One is the Gray Whale, we can thank the petroleum industry for saving Whales in general, by producing oil without having to gut thousands of whales annually. And the Hoover’s Wooly Star, a California plant thought under threat from land use for petroleum drilling and invasive species. Put on the list in 1990 but removed from the list in 2003 when the discovered other populations across California yet still listed as a success story even though they didn’t do anything.
The problem I have with this idea, technological determinism has more drastic unintended consequences than top down big brother policies. These species went extinct for a reason. Unless those reasons are addressed in full what is the point in bringing them back? Isn’t it likely that the will suffer the same fate all over again?
bennett,
I agree except for in the cases, like the Passenger Pigeon, where humans are undoubtedly the primary cause of extinction. In the case of the other animals, like the mammoth, whose extinction as noted above was quite possibly not primarily caused by humans, it’s a risky thing to resurrect them and, as you’ve noted, comes with possible drastic unintended consequences.
Frank, for our daughter’s homework one day I had her write a report on that mammoth story you reference. Nonetheless. we know from fossil finds that there was hunting pressure on mammoth and mastodon – most likely several factors interacting drove them to extinction. Their last stand was in a place where few humans went so hunting pressure there was likely light.
DS
One problem with bringing the passenger pigeon back is that the bird stopped successfully breeding when colonies fell to just a few thousand individuals. The passenger pigeon was extremely social and nested in huge colonies. One colony was estimated to be over 100 million individuals. The population of passenger pigeons at the time of Columbus was about 3-5 billion, accounting for 25-40% of the land birds in North America at the time.
Frank states correctly that: “it’s a risky thing to resurrect them and, as you’ve noted, comes with possible drastic unintended consequences.”
Re-read Jurassic Park. The issue wasn’t so much that they were dinosaurs, but that the scientists (or politicians controlling scientists) make mistakes (the male/female frog genes) and that the new species will adapt to the new environment in ways that we cannot predict.
The enviro-exremists are against many things that have risen our standard living and for so much nature-things.
Example: the CA central valley would be in much better shape if the water system was free to operate as planned & built. The Delta Smelt are insignificant & not even really threatened.
Example: the lumber industry has been decimated for the spotted owl, and the premise behind that is false.
The US has been importing many more raw materials & ag products due to regulation.
What benefit is there for every species to continue to exist? Does it matter that 10 or 100 or 1,000 species cease to exist? It has been an ongoing thing, before humans.
Protecting species has been an incredible drain on our economy & freedom. Nixon is about the 5th worst President — for passing ESA & NEPA & for imposing price controls.
(top 3 worse (conunter-Constitutional) are WW, FDR & LBJ)
Woops. Didn’t proofread enough — a few letters are missing or off.
C’mon Randal, why is an editing feature not here?
First, the comment above seems to go far off topic, but I’ll bite.
“The enviro-exremists are against many things that have risen our standard living and for so much nature-things.”
Huh?
“The Delta Smelt are insignificant & not even really threatened.”
Evidence please. It’s my understanding that they’re an indicator species.
“Example: the lumber industry has been decimated for the spotted owl”
Evidence please. The Spotted Owl’s range does not encompass all areas where timber is harvested.
“and the premise behind that is false.”
What does that even mean?
(And as an aside, do you support selling publicly owned timber to private timber companies for below market value?)
“The US has been importing many more raw materials & ag products due to regulation.”
Evidence please.
“What benefit is there for every species to continue to exist? Does it matter that 10 or 100 or 1,000 species cease to exist?”
What good are rhetorical questions?
“It [extinction] has been an ongoing thing, before humans.”
But it has been accelerated by humans, often needlessly and in a wasteful manner, as in the case of the Passenger Pigeon.
“Protecting species has been an incredible drain on our economy & freedom.”
Can you please quantify the “incredible drain”?
This is a magnificent example of shotgun argumentation, btw. Bravo, sir!
The Antiplanner wrote:
But passenger pigeons, which once were so numerous that ornithologists estimated they outnumbered all other species of birds on earth, disappeared in a few short decades mainly because the eastern hardwood forests they depended on for habitat were cut and replaced with pines. To truly recover the species, someone needs to have an incentive to promote hardwoods again.
I don’t know if the times match up precisely, but the East lost millions of hardwood trees thanks to the chestnut blight that was accidentally introduced from Asia about 1900.
For an interesting alternative view, see today’s XKCD.
Scott,
The comment editing feature stopped working when I changed themes. I’m sorry I haven’t had time (or motivation) to debug it.
Modern US law, especially when enforcement and interpretation is driven by environmentalist lawsuits, has exactly the opposite impact. It penalizes owners for having endangered species on their land, by reducing their property rights substantially. The result of this has been a strong opposition, especially here in the West, to the introduction of endangered species. “Shoot, scoop and bury” has been one response to this.
The same negative incentives would apply to newly re-created species, as they will no doubt be “endangered” for quite some time.
especially when enforcement and interpretation is driven by environmentalist lawsuits,
I’d wager the vast majority of virnmintlist lawsuits are for agencies to enforce the existing law.
DS
For an interesting alternative view, see today’s XKCD.
Exactly Randal. Human impacts on the earth are far beyond sustainable today. No more room for mammoths.
DS
Autoplanner: The main reason these incentives don’t exist, at least in the United States, is that our common law takes a wrong-headed view toward wildlife ownership, holding that wildlife are owned by everyone and not by the owners of the land that the wildlife use. At the extreme, at least one state requires that anyone who hunts on their own private land must allow any other licensed hunter to trespass on their land at no charge to hunt as well.
THWM: So whom owns you?