Undoing extinction

For years, scientists and environmentalists have talked about ways to resurrect animals that have vanished from the world's ecosystems. Humanity's impact has been devastating for the natural world, bringing about the end of animals like the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, the passenger pigeon, and countless others. As science has advanced, it's opened the door to new possibilities, such as cloning or gene editing as techniques that could them back to life.

In fiction, de-extinction has been popularized by works like Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, which imagined the return of the dinosaurs for a theme park, only to have devasting consequences. In his latest book, The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler lays out a story in which the woolly mammoth is brought back to life and muses on not only the complicated relationship that humanity has on the natural world, but on some of the complications and compromises that we undertake to preserve endangered species.

Sometime in the near future, a company in Moscow figures out how to resurrect the woolly mammoth and begins a breeding program to try and repopulate its northern regions. The program runs into problems: the mammoths they do manage to breed are aimless and seem to lack some "natural" instincts, so they turn to an unconventional tactic: they upload the mind of an elephant scientist named Dr. Damira Khismatullina, in the hopes that she might be able to teach the new creatures how to act like elephants.

That work is vital to the survival of the program: with their return, so too does the black market demand for hunting the elephants, and poachers have already been assembling to try and take the beasts.

Nayler's impressed me with his debut The Mountain in the Sea in which he balanced big ideas such as the nature of intelligence and consciousness, environmentalism, and the destructive nature of a society built on hyper-capitalism. With The Tusks of Extinction, he slims down most of those ideas, but holds back none of the punch: it's a powerful novella that explores our relationship with the natural world, and how we need to solve some serious underlying conditions before we go about trying to undo the damage we've wrought – otherwise, we'll be trapped in repeating loop.

This story plays out from a couple of angles. There's Damira's perspective, in which she's abruptly "awoken" from her digital stasis, and informed that she's the last hope of this herd of resurrected mammoths. Then there's Svyatoslav, a Russian poacher who experiences a disaster when the hunting party he's part of encounters a herd of mammoths, and Vladimir and his husband Anthony, who've arrived at the preserve to legally hunt the mammoths as part of a special program that keeps their upkeep funded.

Poaching is a vocation that relies on scarcity. As animal populations decline, the demand for their parts or bodies increases, fueling an ever-present black market that pits poachers and conservationists against one another. Countries have resorted to a range of measures to counter the practice, such as banning ivory or the sale of various parts from endangered creatures, to injecting rhinos with a radioactive isotope to detect poached parts, to issuing permits to hunt endangered animals to raise funds for local communities.

With the reintroduction of mammoths to the world, Nayler anticipates that they too would become targets for those big-game hunters who're drawn to being one of the few to take down a rare animal. Reintroduced to Siberia, he details the various methods steps taken to keep the animals safe from poachers: they're reintroduced to a remote steppe, where the vast Russian wilderness acts as a natural buffer. Misinformation about advanced drones and counter-poacher teams, horse-bound rangers, and human intelligence provide additional layers of protection, all while they let in small numbers of authorized hunters who're willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to take down one of the animals. That money is put back into their care and protection, and those who embark on hunts aren't permitted to ever talk about their experiences, let alone keep the animals they take.

In detailing these three interlocking stories, Nayler deftly critiques our place in the natural world and the problems that we face when it comes to conservation. These natural populations do not exist just for the pleasure of humans, be it hunting or appreciation from afar; they're part of the natural world and ecosystem, and our desire to hunt these animals for sport is a destructive one.

We're living through a period of unprecedented destruction of the natural world, an extinction event that will ultimately be on par with the ones that took place during the Late Ordovician, Late Devonian, the Permian/Triassic, the Triassic/Jurassic, and the Cretaceous/Paleogene periods. These were world-altering events, largely driven by everything from natural geologic processes to asteroid impacts. While these events are the result of a complicated knot of factors, humanity's footprint has disrupted ecosystems and left a lasting mark on the natural world, one that will likely have consequences for millennia to come.

Through this book, it seems as though Nayler is realistic about the way forward: we're facing a massive problem, and it's difficult to adjust our innate tendencies. There's no one solution to this issue, but we can work to anticipate and build systems that can deflect some of our habits and proclivities. Even if we can't undo all of the damage, maybe we can learn to adapt in a changing world.