“8. Resisting De-extinction: The Uses and Misuses of Wonder” in “Extinction and Religion”
The Uses and Misuses of Wonder
THE ANTHROPOCENE HAS EMERGED AS a staging ground for a variety of interdisciplinary debates and discussions about the past, present, and future of life on Earth. Among these are disagreements between environmentalists who adhere to traditional conservation practices and objectives—notably, protection and restoration of nature for its own sake—and proponents of what is called the new conservationism. New conservationists, who often identify or align with ecomodernists or ecopragmatists, prioritize economic development and human welfare above the preservation of nature, understood (problematically, perhaps) as pristine wilderness untouched by humans. When framed this way, new conservationism may sound like a benign or positive development, particularly in light of critiques that have shadowed the wilderness ideal for years.1 This positive impression may be further strengthened by the new conservationists’ penchant for the confident, buoyant language of humans’ boundless innovation and creativity and of nature’s resilience and almost infinite adaptability. As Eileen Crist observes, Anthropocene boosterism departs from environmentalism’s traditionally “dark idiom” of nature’s “destruction, depredation, rape, loss, devastation, deterioration,” embracing instead the tame, palatable, and even upbeat vocabulary of humans “changing, shaping, transforming or altering the biosphere.”2 Humans, in this view, are now de facto planetary managers, and the sooner we embrace this reality, the more successful we will be at guiding the planet and its people toward a good Anthropocene.3
De-extinction, often referred to as resurrection biology, can be seen as one tool within a suite of strategies proffering an optimistic storyline, an upbeat narrative of humans’ creative remaking of the planet. Here, environmentalism’s traditionally dark idiom of destruction is replaced with language suffused with technotriumphalism and excited awe. The popular media often contributes to the giddiness, of course, blurring the line between science and spectacle.4 The prospect of de-extincting vanished species makes for arresting headlines, perpetuating what Stefan Skrimshire calls the “mythic narrativization of de-extinction.”5 These narratives—the combined rhetoric of scientists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists—draw variously upon Faust and Frankenstein, the biblical story of Lazarus, and tired references to Jurassic Park and “playing God.” Yet, as excitement about the possibilities of de-extinction grows, these narratives serve less as cautionary tales than as inducements to accelerate human manipulation of nature and the redirection of life processes. Metaphors of decoding and editing DNA readily lend themselves to envisioning nature as a book—an original, ancient text—whose sacred contents scientists not only access but boldly rewrite for future generations.
Visions of the Anthropocene are never merely descriptive. They actively engage their narrators and audiences in storytelling and even prophecy. More precisely, I argue, they engage us in an exercise akin to theological anthropology, however secular these narratives may appear on the surface. De-extinction is one chapter in a stubbornly forward-looking, upbeat narrative that positions the human as an innovative world-making species whose distinctiveness lies in our exceptional creativity.6 For this reason, de-extinction is the stuff of excited TED Talks as scientists hold out the promise of atoning for past crimes by bringing back lost species. Favorite candidates for de-extinction include the once-ubiquitous passenger pigeon, charismatic Pleistocene megafauna such as woolly mammoths, and more recently vanished species like the Tasmanian tiger (aka the thylacine) or the humble but fascinating gastric brooding frog, whose ability to convert its stomach into a womb inspires visions of miraculous medical breakthroughs.
Allusions to potential medical benefits for humans point to the instrumental and anthropocentric values that often inflect the rhetoric surrounding de-extinction. Even rationales that initially appear compelling and ethically sound—recovery of ecological values, restoration of habitats and ecosystem function, concerns for species justice—begin to look suspect under closer scrutiny. Proponents also advance vaguely metaphysical arguments for de-extinction that invoke the “new” managerial role of humans vis-à-vis Earth and nonhuman life. Running through these various defenses of de-extinction are frequent claims on behalf of wonder as both a motivation and product of de-extinction technologies. Indeed, wonder often seems to be the overriding impulse. Wonder is not merely one justification among many but rather functions as a compelling attraction in its own right, diverting attention away from the very real risks—practical, moral, cultural, and political—of de-extinction technologies. In this sense, while it often appears as one item in a list of the “pros” of de-extinction, wonder functions in this discourse as an end to all arguments. Though it is often presented as a value that attaches to or inheres in the natural world and nonhuman creatures, the sort of wonder that recurs in arguments for de-extinction is not that of nature’s terrifying sublimity or even delight in nature. It is a surprisingly superficial and unreflective variety of wonder that is evoked primarily by humans’ presumed ability to perform feats of creation or “resurrection.”
DENYING EXTINCTION
The upbeat storyline of de-extinction and its invocation of a problematic form of wonder reveal a great deal about the way in which the current crisis of mass extinction is framed in the first place. For good reason, extinction is generally seen as a declensionist narrative—a story of decline and failure. De-extinction therefore emerges as a strategy for enacting a kind of defiant hope, a rewriting of the tragic story. So averse are leading proponents of de-extinction to a narrative of failure that some, like maverick entrepreneur and ecopragmatist Stewart Brand, have denied the reality of widespread extinction. Brand believes the focus on extinction is wrongheaded, bringing with it an “emotional charge that makes the problem seem cosmic and overwhelming rather than local and solvable.” He argues that nature on the whole remains “exactly as robust as it ever was—maybe more so with humans around to head off ice ages and killer asteroids.” Conservation trends in the current century are “looking bright,” he insists, and de-extinction technologies contribute to the sunny outlook.7
These denials of mass extinction can be seen as the secular (or quasi-secular) counterpart to a phenomenon Willis Jenkins addresses in his contribution to this volume—namely, the puzzling dearth of responses to mass extinction among religion scholars and religious ethicists, including those engaged in environmental ethics. As Jenkins’s reflections on the saltmarsh sparrow suggest, a resistant strain of human exceptionalism in religious (and notably Christian) ethics may be one factor driving this oversight. Even in religious hymns featuring the sparrow as an object of God’s loving care, references to this lowly and “disposable” creature merely serve to reassure humans of God’s far greater concern for our own exceptional species. “His eye is on the sparrow, so I know he watches me,” as the hymn goes. Extinction denial, whatever its root causes, appears to be on the rise at the very moment that exhaustive reports of mass extinction are circulating in the media. Scientists have recently warned of an emerging phenomenon of extinction denial akin to climate change denial in the wake of reports from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services that millions of species are at risk of extinction worldwide. One study urges conservation scientists to use lessons learned from climate denial to “reclaim the narrative” from extinction denialists.8
But what if the narrative to be reclaimed is one that people do not want to hear? Resistance to reports of mass extinction is not simply a rejection of bad news, though it may partly be about that. It is also driven by a refusal to abandon bedrock beliefs regarding human exceptionalism and an overarching narrative of progress. If mass extinction positions humans ignominiously as purveyors of decreation, optimistic narratives of de-extinction reinstate humans as life-giving creators—a species whose capacity for innovation and ingenuity, exercised through cutting-edge technology, casts us once more in a divine light. As such, de-extinction participates in a secular theology of humans as creators, or recreators, of life, a comforting storyline that perpetuates belief in exceptionalism. Note, for example, how Brand’s denial of mass extinction is coupled with a portrait of humans as nature’s saviors, heroically defending the natural world against death-dealing asteroids or dramatic climate ruptures. With humans fully in charge, he suggests, both we and nature are safer than we have ever been.
There are other ways in which the framing of mass extinction makes de-extinction appear to be the obvious and inspiring “solution.” Narration of extinction often reaches a poignant climax in tales of “endlings”—that is, organisms who are the last remaining survivors of a vanishing species. A species is usually considered extinct when its last member has perished (though it may be considered functionally extinct when its population has declined to the point that it plays a negligible role in an ecosystem). The sometimes inordinate focus on the death of sole survivors may distort our understanding of what it would mean to actually reverse species extinction once it has occurred—if such a thing were possible at all. The last individuals of extinct, or soon-to-be-extinct, species are often showered with scientific and media attention. As prominent “avatars of loss,” endlings are invested with a kind of collective and concentrated pathos, as evidenced by the creation of commemorative shrines and monuments and the practice of christening endlings with personal names—Martha, the last passenger pigeon, or Lonesome George, the giant Pinta Island tortoise.9 It’s worth noting too that endlings, like favored candidates for de-extinction generally, skew toward charismatic fauna; there are few shrines to plants or insects, despite the vital ecological functions performed by these lowlier brethren.
Endlings may usefully draw attention to mass extinction, giving concreteness to a process of unraveling that generally occurs out of sight and on scales difficult to imagine. “The word recognizes the permanence of group extinction on an individual level.”10 The tangible sense of loss evoked by endlings may inspire efforts to put an end to endlings, to prevent them from occurring in the first place. But does it? It would appear that the very rarity of an endling—its last of its kind status—solidifies its supreme value, even (perhaps especially) when one encounters it as a museum artifact rather than a living being. More to the point, the attention paid to these pathetic icons of human failure may not challenge our imaginations enough, for endlings may make it too easy to ignore all that is truly lost when entire species vanish. This disconnection, in turn, fosters the illusion that “resurrecting” individuals of extinct species—engineered creatures that are at best proxies and at worst a bizarre genetic mishmash—somehow restores justice or redeems the loss.
The prospect of “resurrecting” these fetishized individuals also sets them up as creatures to be wondered at for the human technoprowess enshrined in recreated organisms, above and beyond their value as genuine repositories of evolutionary history. The preoccupation with the death and potential revivification of an individual creature also obscures the nature of extinction. As Thom van Dooren argues, extinction is not an all-or-nothing proposition; it has a dull and ragged edge, “a slow unraveling of intimately entangled ways of life that begins long before the death of the last individual.”11 The focus on the death of an individual “reduces species to specimens—reified representatives of a type in a museum of life, and in doing so ignores the entangled relations that are a particular form of life.”12 The framing of species as individual specimens, I would add, lends itself to the logic and rhetoric of de-extinction, which often treats a species as having been resurrected at the moment that a single individual has been “brought back.” In other words, a focus on endlings may act as a goad, an incitement, to de-extinction. And that matters because, as we will see, de-extinction does not recover much of what is lost through extinction. Instead, it facilitates a redirection of wonder toward human creativity and ingenuity and their end products.
Yet another way in which the framing of de-extinction suggests its detachment from the crisis of extinction and its association instead with innovation is seen in arguments that align de-extinction technologies with tools applied in the realm of bioethics rather than environmental ethics. De-extinction is not a special case, this argument goes, but is continuous with interventions and novelties humans have introduced into crops or livestock or pests. On this view, revived species are “just another kind of genetically modified organism,” no different in kind from hornless cattle, genetically modified soybeans, or mosquitoes genetically engineered not to carry malaria.13 But to maintain this equivalency with GMO-style technologies is to obscure the causes of extinction as well as the affective and moral dimensions that ought to inform discussions of extinction and de-extinction. More specifically, a bioethics/biotech framing encourages excitement at the prospect of creating new forms rather than fostering the kind of reflection on anthropogenic extinctions and human complicity that might inspire species protection or activism to prevent further losses. This rejection of somber reflection on species loss in favor of excitement over the creation of new organisms is summed up in Brand’s well-known injunction: “Don’t mourn, organize.”
The impulse to deny the full reality of extinction or simply scale it down so as to render it (ostensibly) manageable and solvable is intimately connected to the allure, the temptation, of de-extinction technologies and their shallow claims to wonder. The supposed irresistibility of de-extinction technologies is part and parcel of rhetorical appeals to wonder that reduce species to something like curios to be displayed and admired while exalting humans’ life-giving powers. The temptation of wonder—at least, wonder as often invoked in de-extinction discourse—is itself a denial of humans’ finite and fallible nature. Might wonder function more constructively, not as a goad to innovation but as a source of moral reflection on our fundamental relationality with the broader web of life? Can wonder be reclaimed within the narrative of extinction as a creaturely mode of being rather than an expression of excited awe at the creative technosolutions of one dominant species? This is what I intend to argue. What follows is a tour through arguments commonly presented for and against de-extinction, with particular emphasis on a suspect form of wonder that accompanies de-extinction advocacy. We begin with a primer on de-extinction technologies and the variety of concerns they generate, even among some advocates. This overview allows us to see more clearly that excitement about these technologies is excitement at the opportunity they present for humans to act as creators of life.
A PRIMER ON DE-EXTINCTION TECHNOLOGY
De-extinction science builds on developments in genetic engineering and synthetic biology as well as on long-standing breeding techniques. The various methods currently under development for reviving extinct species include selective breeding (or “back breeding”), cloning using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), and genetic engineering. Regardless of the method used, the creation of an identical copy of an extinct species may never be possible. Therefore, de-extincted species are regarded as proxies. Back breeding is a more traditional and lower-tech approach that entails selectively breeding close relatives of an extinct organism for signature traits of the extinct creature. As close relatives of mammoths, for example, elephants could be bred over time to recreate morphological or behavioral traits of their extinct relatives. Some limitations of this technology include the problem that not all extinct organisms have very close living relatives and the fact that back breeding can create inbreeding or concentration of particular traits that reduce the fitness of the de-extincted organisms.
Cloning via SCNT tends to get a lot of press, likely because of the popularity of Jurassic Park and the success of the cloned sheep named Dolly. But cloning is not a good option with many extinct species because DNA is unavailable or has significantly degraded. For species that have recently become extinct, clones can be created from cells collected from the last living organisms. In fact, as I will soon discuss, a recently extinct species of Pyrenean ibex, a type of wild goat, was briefly de-extincted in 2003 using skin cells collected from the last living ibex. In such cases, the cells are implanted into the egg cell of a living relative (a goat, in the case of the de-extincted ibex). The resulting zygote is then gestated and, if all goes well, birthed by a surrogate species. Again, this is only possible when researchers have access to entire cells of extinct species. When these are not available, as is the case with so many extinct species, other methods that combine SCNT and genome editing may be used. Researchers believe that they can reconstruct the full genome of extinct species using gene-sequencing technologies that splice the remaining DNA of the extinct organism with that of a related species. Using SCNT, a zygote is then formed that is gestated and birthed by an extant surrogate. This method is likely to be the most promising as a path to de-extinction, and a lot of attention is currently being paid to resurrecting mammoths whose DNA has been frozen in places like Siberia. Using the DNA of a closely related living relative—in this case, the Asian elephant—scientists can repair parts of degraded mammoth DNA by merging it with genetic material from the elephant.14 Researchers using gene-editing technologies have already reconstructed full genomes for extinct species including mammoths and passenger pigeons.15
Other possible de-extinction techniques involving stem cells are still out of reach at the moment, but if we can preserve these cells now, it may be possible to save animals from extinction when the technology is perfected in the future (i.e., animals now on the brink of extinction whom future generations may choose to de-extinct). Stem cells can become any other sort of cell (they are “pluripotent”), so they could be used to create sperm and egg cells that could then be combined via in vitro fertilization to form an embryo that could be coaxed into existence. This is not achievable at the moment, but the Frozen Zoo in San Diego, which houses some ten thousand cell lines, is working on it. This initiative began in 1972—at the height of environmental legislation in the United States—and now holds the cells of 503 mammals, 170 birds, 70 reptiles, and 12 amphibians and fish. Similar “frozen ark” projects have sprung up around the world.16 The selection of organisms generally skews, problematically, “toward charismatic megafauna and thus against the uncharismatic microfauna that keep the planet alive.”17
Harvard scientist George Church is one of the most prominent researchers working on de-extinction and related technologies. Church is a media magnet who grabs headlines not only for his efforts at resurrecting the woolly mammoth but for such mad-scientist schemes as reversing the aging process—a technique he is currently testing on dogs. Widely circulated images of Church cast him as something like a hybrid of God and Charles Darwin with his trademark bushy white beard and a halolike radiance around his head. Through use of gene sequencing and editing, Church and his team believe that the creation (or revival) of a woolly mammoth is imminent.18
It is important to note that the creature produced by this technology would not truly be a mammoth but something “entirely new,” namely, a mammophant, a hybrid creature with DNA patched together from Asian elephant and mammoth DNA.19 Additionally, the newfangled mammoth would be raised by an elephant mother (in some scenarios), so there may be behavioral differences introduced by the parent. Given that Asian elephants are gravely endangered and thus not readily available as surrogates, Church and other de-extinctionists also envision artificial wombs, in which case, humans, presumably, do the actual raising once the organism successfully emerges from a high-tech gestational contraption. Imagine a mammoth-size artificial womb designed to facilitate a flawless elephantine gestation periods of two years producing an approximately two-hundred-pound baby. You begin to get an idea of the kind of time, effort, expense—and hubris—that often defines these endeavors.
Even supporters of de-extinction recognize a number of risks and downsides. In the first place, there is the likelihood of failed experiments and the suffering this might inflict on the animals involved. Working with very old DNA (in a method termed “deep de-extinction”) can be an especially risky and error-prone process.20 Even using recently harvested cell lines is no guarantee of success, at least at the moment. Consider the case, mentioned earlier, of the Pyrenean ibex that went extinct in 2000 and was briefly de-extincted in 2003. Scientists used a special hybrid goat as a surrogate mother. This surrogacy was the only promising outcome of fifty-seven attempts to implant embryos into surrogates. The “successful” baby ibex was delivered by C-section and lived less than ten minutes. Accounts of the animal’s death often refer vaguely to lung issues or breathing problems. In fact, the baby ibex was born with a third lung. Complications associated with genetic technologies like cloning—shortened life spans, health problems, stillbirths—can be exacerbated by processes that create and gestate extinct animals in “close relatives rather than conspecifics.”21 De-extinction raises unique concerns about animal suffering, yet discussions of animal welfare are often absent in overviews of its pros and cons.
Even if animals whose cells are in deep freeze in places like the San Diego Zoo are successfully brought back in the future, introducing them into natural environments presents additional, potentially enormous technical challenges. The kind of data needed to give any reintroduction program a chance of succeeding—knowledge of habitat requirements and a species’ former range, insight gained through trial and error with previous reintroduction methods, among others—might not be available for many extinct species. Researchers at the Frozen Zoo envision acclimating these newly created animals to their man-made zoo environment for years at a time, possibly without ever introducing them into the wild. It is difficult to see what is “natural” about these laboratory-produced, zoo-raised, or human-managed creatures. And should these organisms be successfully introduced, there are reasons to worry that de-extincted species might pose ecological or health risks. Organisms released into nature might spread out of control or prey on existing species. In short, conservation/ecological rationales are a stretch, and potential harms to animals likely.
In the face of these concerns about invasion or health risks, some scholars maintain that candidate species for de-extinction are not likely to pose these threats because “many revived species will be intended for research or exhibition, not release.”22 Moreover, the fact that these species have already gone extinct once and will have low genetic diversity suggests that they will not be highly adaptive, fecund, and successful at evading attempts to control their numbers “should they escape or be released.” Note how the arguments offered to allay fears about ecological and health risks serve to underscore that de-extinction, especially deep de-extinction, bears little connection to conservation goals. For how can such goals be met with the production of organisms that exhibit nonadaptive characteristics and for whom integration into the wild is at best a secondary objective?
Other objections to de-extinction have to do with moral and existential risks for society at large. These generally fall under the category of the moral hazard argument. The concern is that de-extinction technologies and other nontraditional approaches to conservation create a false sense of security; if we can bring them back, or even think we can, we needn’t worry about preventing extinction. Moreover, positive news stories about de-extincted animals may divert attention and resources away from conservation and species preservation. We may come to rely on these technologies as an insurance policy when subsequent species go extinct or their populations shrink. These arguments are worth taking seriously, especially in light of common references to how cheap and easy current gene-editing applications like CRISPR have become. Referring to a project to de-extinct the heath hen, a type of prairie chicken that went extinct in 1932, Church has remarked that this initiative is “basically a slam dunk. . . . As an engineering project, birds are easy.”23 Sentiments such as these that depict birds as simple technological feats gloss over the difficulties of achieving any meaningful conservation successes. They also hint at the impoverishment of the moral imagination of de-extinction, which reduces living creatures to engineering projects while positioning humans as life’s engineers.
Having considered some of the major risks and downsides, we turn to some of the strongest arguments for de-extinction in order to discern how and where they meet up with invocations of wonder. When we review the full list of justifications commonly offered for de-extinction, it becomes clear that many of these fall apart under closer examination. Meanwhile claims on behalf of wonder and the seductive allure of the technology itself remain a significant, if questionable, motivation for this research.
THE CASE FOR DE-EXTINCTION
Some of the most powerful arguments for de-extinction have to do with restoring justice. Species are repositories of many different kinds of values. Perhaps humans are obligated to revive species that have gone extinct owing to anthropogenic causes, as a way of recovering those losses and compensating for wrongs humans have perpetrated. This argument has been advanced by some of the most outspoken advocates of de-extinction, including Michael Archer at the University of New South Wales, who spearheaded the Lazarus Project, as well as Brand with his Revive & Restore project.
Does the justice argument hold up? Typically, in cases of restorative justice, an individual or group is assumed to owe something to another individual or group who has been harmed or wronged. But de-extinction complicates this framework because extinction is a category that attaches to species. Individuals die, but only a species can “go extinct.” As ethicist Ronald Sandler points out, a species (as opposed to an individual organism) cannot be said to suffer or to elicit welfare concerns. A species, as a category, “lacks psychological, biological, and teleological interests.”24 This is not to deny that groups of animals can have a welfare. It is rather to say that while “gray wolves” can be wronged, “Canis lupus” cannot properly be said to have been wronged. A species qua species “cannot be owed a debt of restorative justice.”25
Whether or not one accepts this argument, it is certainly the case that if researchers successfully brought back individuals of an extinct species, these would not be the same individuals that went extinct. In many cases, particularly where the deep de-extinction of long-lost species is the goal, neither are the human perpetrators still alive—think of our ancestors who killed off the last of the Pleistocene megafauna. As Sandler puts it: “It is not possible for a debt of restorative justice, even if there were one, to be paid by those who owe it to those who are due it.”26
There is a compelling and largely shared sense that it is wrong to drive species to extinction; otherwise, we wouldn’t bother trying to halt it. So perhaps it makes more sense to think in terms of reparative justice rather than restorative. In a reparative framework, amends are made for past wrongs by reforming our current practices and minimizing ongoing effects of extinctions that have occurred. But it is questionable that de-extinction, and (especially) deep de-extinction technologies qua de-extinction technologies, can actually achieve these reparative goals, since the technology itself does not address the myriad underlying causes of extinction, such as habitat loss or climate change, or cultural values and may even divert attention away from extinction prevention, as noted earlier.
If, as many people likely believe, extinction entails a loss of something valuable, the key question is valuable to whom or what? Since arguments for de-extinction often invoke conservation or restoration rationales, this suggests that part of what makes a species valuable is its ecological or evolutionary context—both its historical trajectory and its embeddedness within a broader network of relationships. Species may appear valuable owing to a quality of wildness or their status as autonomous entities apart from human life and culture. These values are relational and tied to particular contexts, yet the relationships and contexts they depend on are not obviously restored or recreated by de-extinction, particularly in cases of deep de-extinction, where the habitats no longer exist. In other cases, as with more recent (or “shallow”) extinctions, where environments still exist that resemble those of the lost species, de-extinction plus reintroduction might restore some of the lost ecological value because those relationships and contexts are still relatively intact. However, reintroductions are difficult under the best of circumstances, and reintroducing an organism created through genetic technologies and raised by humans in laboratory or zoo environments is an even more complex and precarious undertaking. In short, it is unclear how de-extincted organisms restore lost evolutionary and ecological values. As fellow travelers in the evolutionary journey, they arrive with “suspiciously blank passports.”27
I would argue, then, that most current or emerging genetic technologies envisioned for de-extincting species are not easily justified on restoration or conservation grounds—that is, on virtually any grounds stemming from concerns about the state of the natural world and undoing harms humans have inflicted. Even if de-extinctions meet with technical success, these projects remain “ad hoc, opportunistic attacks on a systemic problem” that is unaddressed by the technology itself.28 As Crist argues, clear conservation goals are necessary to frame efforts to apply biotechnology to endangered and extinct animals. Otherwise, these projects fall prey to “the ambitions of ‘boys with their toys’ and ‘science for the sake of science.’”29 Moreover, de-extinction is not a time-sensitive project; it is not as though organisms slated for de-extinction are in danger of becoming more extinct over time.30 So why the urgency? Writing for popular audiences, one de-extinction enthusiast describes the motivations as follows: “Although [a mammophant] might not be exactly like the woolly mammoths of the past, it will be pretty close, and half a mammoth is better than no mammoth, right?”31 This justification (if one can call it that) merely prompts additional questions that many advocates do not adequately address: Better for what? Better for whom? What is good about bringing back a woolly mammoth in the first place? We will see that these very basic questions often receive less attention than the technology itself. At the same time, the promotion of de-extinction often invokes a kind of helplessness in the face of great temptation; de-extinction is simply too irresistible to pass up.
Perhaps, then, what de-extinction actually does is create rather than restore value. If so, what kind of value does it create, and for whom or what? De-extinction technologies might generate additional scientific knowledge and applications. Indeed, this is one of the arguments presented by researchers at the San Diego Frozen Zoo who hope that these technologies will shed light on ways to prevent future extinctions.32 Deep de-extinction in particular would be a “tremendous scientific and technological achievement” in and of itself.33
But what, exactly, does it achieve? Talk of creating, over and above conserving or restoring, brings us to the theme of wonder, for it is within discussion of values created by de-extinction that wonder of a particularly human-centered variety often makes a showing. References to wonder and awe entailed in de-extinction frequently align wonder, implicitly or explicitly, with largely anthropocentric values, including claims regarding economic or scientific benefits, or the sheer excitement of breaking through technological (and moral) limits. In the context of creating value, some scholars cite values associated with people finding it “wondrous” and “awesome” to see a living representative of an extinct species, “even if only in a zoo or wildlife park.”34 Moreover, this “wonderousness” [sic] might carry with it great economic value because people will pay “to see or own individuals of revived species.”35 Note especially the references to de-extincted creatures as possessions. Wonder’s proximity here to enticements such as owning or selling revived members of a species is unsettling, for it treats these organisms as little more than a resource or means of entertainment. Here, arguments for the wonder of de-extinction shade into an endorsement of disaster capitalism—or biocapitalism—presenting the extinction crisis as an opportunity for “resource hoarding,”36 profit, and increased biopower.37 Sandler, for example, though he remains largely unmoved by key arguments for de-extinction, defends de-extinctionists against the charge that they view life in purely reductive terms, as mere matter that serves human interests and desires, by insisting that these researchers are “motivated at least in part by wonder.”38 The assumption here seems to be that wonder is somehow antithetical to a reductionist, hubristic, or arrogant stance, as if wonder automatically orients us in positive and responsible ways. The question that needs to be asked is, wonder at what, exactly? What kind of wonder is this?
WONDER AS DRIVING DE-EXTINCTION: SPREADING THE GOOD NEWS
If, as it seems, de-extinction is not a coherent conservation strategy, nor does it align with what we might call environmental values, nor is it obviously a means of restoring or repairing justice,39 then why is it being pursued with such excitement? The answer often seems to lie in the excitement itself. Wonder often functions affectively in this discourse as something roughly synonymous with a state of optimistic excitement.
De-extinction enthusiasts often respond to concerns about these technologies (particularly the moral hazard concern) by insisting that stories of successful de-extinction will call greater attention to the extinction crisis. Moreover, they claim, tales of successful de-extinction will inspire the public who are desperate for good news stories to counter the grim headlines of the environmental crisis. I refer to this as the good vibes argument for de-extinction. This approach, which claims that de-extinction makes for a happy story, entails the advancement of an impoverished form of wonder.
Environmental scholar Ursula K. Heise has observed that narrators of the “new conservation,” including some de-extinctionists, pride themselves on being forward-looking rather than backward-looking. To be backward-looking, it is implied, is to be glum and unimaginative, to wallow pointlessly in guilt or regret, rather than getting to work to fix the problem. For optimists who embrace an ecomodernist or new conservationist philosophy, the Anthropocene makes possible the reimagination of a future nature, not “as a return to the past or a realm apart from humans” but as one that is “reshaped by humans.”40 De-extinction projects in particular, as I have already suggested, tend to privilege the act of creation over acts of (backward-looking) restoration. In this sense, they are fundamentally keyed to an irresistible creative impulse. Creating is much more exciting than (merely) restoring something; where the former puts human powers on display, the latter might suggest that humans subordinate or accommodate themselves to a good whose locus of value is, in some sense, external to the human.
Seen in this light, de-extinction is largely about the making of worlds disguised as an “environmental” or “restoration” project.41 As Frédéric Neyrat argues, the aims of synthetic biology stand radically opposed to “any kind of idea of conservation—of the environment or of a species. Why protect what we can improve, or reconstruct?” The exchange of conservation for creative synthesis is particularly apparent, Neyrat notes, “within current projects on ‘de-extinction.’”42 In aligning itself with synthesis, creation, and innovation, or what Neyrat aptly terms “the merchant desire of reformatting life,”43 de-extinction challenges rather than accepts limits—both our own limits and those of the natural world. As such, it becomes a project that is fundamentally about us and our capacity to work wonders.
Indeed, for some in the good vibes camp, a planet remade by humans evokes feelings of “awed celebration.”44 Consider Diane Ackerman’s rallying cry in her book The Human Age, where she triumphantly proclaims that humans are “not passive, we’re not helpless. We’re earth-movers . . . our mistakes are legion but our imagination is immeasurable.” Humans, she argues, are “dreamsmiths and wonder-workers.”45 Warming to her theme of wonder and awe, she exclaims, “What a marvel we’ve become, a species with planetwide powers and breathtaking gifts.”46 Dreamsmiths do not look over their shoulder at the old world. They fabricate new worlds.
ADVANCING THE STORY
It may seem odd at first glance to think of de-extinction, of all things, and especially deep de-extinction, as primarily future-rather than past-oriented. But for many de-extinctionists, the prospect of reviving vanished species is valuable not for what it recovers or restores but for its intimations of humans actively shaping what comes next in a wide-open playing field. Ben Novak, the lead scientist at Brand’s Revive & Restore project who often speaks passionately of his long-standing “secret and idle love of passenger pigeons,” is surprisingly explicit about this future orientation.47 “Contrary to the poetic nature of ‘righting past wrongs’ that some attribute to de-extinction,” he says, “I view [it] as a project seeded in our present and future. . . . We are the drivers of change on this planet. . . . We ultimately write the story.”48 Similar sentiments are expressed in correspondence between Brand and Church in which Brand admonishes conservationists for having “mired themselves in a tragic view of life.” He recommends the resurrection of the passenger pigeon as the cure for our malaise: “Wild scheme,” he writes. “Could be fun. Could improve things. It could, as they say, advance the story.”49
Advancing an exciting story—spreading good vibes—also appears to be a central preoccupation of Ben Mezrich, who has written an aggressively optimistic book called Woolly about the efforts of Church and others to revive the woolly mammoth. Mezrich is drawn to innovative thinkers—he gained fame for writing the book on which the film The Social Network (about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg) was based. He worries that “there’s this fear and dislike of scientists . . . So I think [de-extinction] is one way of getting people to be more interested and optimistic.” He continues: “If anybody’s going to save the world it’s going to be scientists coming up with big answers to these questions. . . . The future really lies in the hands of the scientists.”50 Mezrich’s storyline here resonates with what some scholars have identified as the dominant narrative of the Anthropocene in which science and technology provide the arena for humans—or, specifically, scientists—to participate in the continuation of godlike creation and salvation. Scientists, as those who will shepherd the planet through the Anthropocene, “must take the lead and conjure up new green technologies.”51
Often, as we see here, the good vibes rationale becomes indistinguishable from the promotion of science itself as a source of wonder, excitement, and good news. Beth Shapiro, a researcher of ancient DNA and author of How to Clone a Mammoth—a deceptively titled book, given that its contents are largely taken up with the obstacles to de-extinction—echoes these rationales in explaining why the mammoth is her favorite candidate for de-extinction (though the dodo, she concedes, would be more “fun”). In addition to what she believes could be positive environmental impacts, Shapiro praises the mammoth’s potential “to inspire people to be interested in science and technology.”52 Note that the objective here is not necessarily to inspire people to act on extinction prevention. Nor is it even about spreading science literacy, which might be a worthy enough cause. It is rather about getting people excited and optimistic—about science. This is science evangelism, plain and simple. As one journalist aptly observes, “de-extinction can inspire a lot of hope—not necessarily about the species themselves, but for demonstrating how relatively fast an area of science can develop.”53
Perhaps the best (or worst) illustration of the shallowness of so much de-extinction wonder rhetoric can be seen in the arguments advanced for de-extinction in a short, punchy essay titled “What if Extinction Is Not Forever?” The authors, Jacob Sherkow and Henry T. Greely, affiliated with Stanford University, make a case for what they call the coolness of de-extinction.54 They rehearse the standard list of concerns regarding de-extinction: animal welfare and the ecological and health risks of the escape or release of de-extincted organisms. They gesture vaguely but predictably toward concerns about “playing God.” Among what they consider the “pros” or “benefits” of de-extinction, they list increases in scientific knowledge, technological advancement, environmental benefits, claims for justice, and, finally, “wonder.” Scientific and technological advantages include the possibility that “some revived species may be translated into useful products,” such as new drugs.55 In a culminating argument, they explain the “attraction” of wonder: “The last benefit might be called ‘wonder,’ or more colloquially, ‘coolness.’ This may be the biggest attraction, and possibly the biggest benefit, of de-extinction. It would surely be very cool to see a living wooly mammoth. And while this is rarely viewed as a substantial benefit, much of what we do as individuals—even many aspects of science—we do because it’s ‘cool.’”56
This defense of coolness and wonder (or coolness as wonder) aligns with what Crist calls science for its own sake and boys with their toys. The authors conclude by noting that “de-extinction is a particularly intriguing application of our increasing control over life. We think it will happen.”57 But the critical issue is not can or will de-extinction happen, but should it happen? And if so, why should it happen? Is the claim here that we should pursue what is cool because we, and especially scientists, have always done cool things? These arguments about the coolness of de-extinction reach their nadir in commentary about de-extinction as sheer titillation. The irresistibility of de-extinction as a seductive taboo translates into its inevitability—de-extinction is “a topic so hot it sizzles.”58 It is simply “too sexy to ignore.”59
In Resurrecting Extinct Species, philosophers Douglas Ian Campbell and Patrick Michael Whittle give some sustained and apparently serious consideration to what they term “the argument from coolness.” Coolness, they note, has two dimensions: the (supposed) restoration of the original coolness (awe, wonder) of an organism like a woolly mammoth and the coolness of the act itself of resurrecting such a creature. They argue that if a sufficiently large percentage of the public agree, on whatever grounds, that de-extinction is cool, these projects could have conservation value as a way of “getting the public excited about conservation.”60
And yet, as we have seen (and as even many advocates of de-extinction attest), the conservation rationales remain weak, particularly for paradigmatically “cool” deep de-extinction projects like the mammoth. Moreover, as suggested by Novak, Mezrich, and Shapiro, the coolness and excitement factor attaches largely to the science and technology itself and the flattering portrait of humans as “drivers” of planetary change and “writers” of future life stories. Of course, the public may well experience coolness as a conservation value, an inspiration to care for nature and nonhuman life, regardless of whether scientists embrace de-extinction for the illicit thrill it affords. But the coolness of de-extinction as a pathway to conservation seems plausible only to the extent that researchers and journalists overstate the viability (as indeed many do) of de-extinction as a robust conservation tool and strategy. It is equally plausible that the wonder generated by this technology will undercut conservation efforts and concerns and engender overconfidence in our ability to bring back extinct species (as the moral hazard argument suggests).
At best, then, the forward-looking wonder narrative positions resurrected creatures as mascots of human achievement, reducing wonder to a species of the technological sublime, though without the gravitas that has traditionally defined conceptions of the sublime.61At its worst, the wonder of de-extinction functions as a diversion from serious moral deliberation about the causes of extinction, the dangers of these technologies, and their potential to reshape not just the world but the place of humans within it.
One of the most thoughtful inquiries into the wonder of de-extinction is voiced by environmental philosopher Ben Minteer. Minteer asks us to consider what de-extinction projects reveal about the values and moral character of those endorsing it. He notes that aspiring de-extinctionists view potentially resurrected creatures as objects of awe and wonder, but he worries that these advocates have misdirected their sense of wonder by substituting “aesthetic regard for the sublime qualities of wild nature for a celebration of our own technological ingenuity, power, and control.”62 The sublime, once associated with experiences of wonder that shade into reverence and even fear—“a reaction to power, mystery, and beauty of a world beyond human making, understanding, and control”—has now come to signal Promethean ambitions to bring that world within our control. “Wonder and respect once directed at nature has become instead a regard for our own technological prowess.” Our foundational mistake was not that we caused extinction, Minteer argues. Extinction is a symptom of a more general disease—namely, a human-centered worldview in which “we see ourselves as masters of a world thought to be increasingly of our own making . . . as all-powerful creators and presumptive governors of planetary life.”63 The Promethean expression of awe resides in, and is a response to, “our own mind,” Minteer astutely observes. As a case in point, he cites Church’s blithe assessment that “birds are easy.” He also notes the way that would-be resurrectionists like Brand view traditional conservation and restoration as a depressing narrative, where de-extinction “promises a much cheerier story, a more uplifting narrative driven by sunny acts of biological creation and ecological recovery.”64 The backward-looking goal of recovery simply cannot compete with de-extinction’s good cheer.
Minteer doesn’t put it in quite these terms, but his analysis suggests an important distinction, about which I have written extensively elsewhere, between wonder turned inward, toward ourselves and our aspirations and creations, and wonder oriented to something beyond the self, something expressive of being in relation to other centers of value.65 Internalized wonder reaches toward self-deification; “by comprehending the source of the wondrous, the thinking self in effect becomes the source of the wondrous.”66 Indeed, some advocates of de-extinction make it all too easy for critics to level charges of self-deification against them, given their express wish to deploy unlimited power, as reflected in Brand’s oft-repeated claim, “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.”67 With de-extinction, we might say that the human becomes the source of the wondrous not only in comprehending life’s awesome power (“decoding” the book of nature) but in rewriting life’s story. Nature no longer operates independently of humans as something that exceeds us; the biosphere is now subsumed under the human technosphere.68 This denial of nature’s exteriority and autonomy turns organisms into an extension of ourselves and our will—mere “bio-objects” created by humans for human interests and purposes, including our own redemption.69 De-extinction as an instrument of internalized wonder is morally corrupting. It presents us with “no foil against which to evaluate our choices, no resistance that might set boundaries or limits, and no honest acknowledgement of an exteriority upon which we might gaze in awe,” Christopher Preston states.70 There is too much focus on us, as Preston argues, in the sense that de-extinction encourages a preoccupation both with our own ingenuity and with our own possibility of redemption through technology.
What is troubling about de-extinction goes beyond the various technical risks and costs or the confused and incoherent “ethics” of restoring versus creating nature, as worrisome as these are. De-extinction—and the excitement surrounding it—is troubling for what it reveals about its devotees. In a sense, then, it is both too much about humans and not enough about us, for it draws our energies away from genuine and sober reflection on the kinds of creatures we are and ought to be. Meditation upon loss and contrition confronts us with our own finitude and may encourage self-restraint. Attention to inwardness of this sort, we should note, is not the same as a preoccupation with our own redemption or atonement for human-caused extinction. A turn inward that prompts the desire to atone or be redeemed is or ought to be an expression of creatureliness. It is this recognition of our finitude and our sometimes powerlessness that atonement must acknowledge—and that the impulse to create and control too easily sidesteps. It is this finite and fallible human that the image of human as creator or world maker rejects. There is a sense, then, in which de-extinction really is far too easy. As a ritual of atonement, de-extinction wrongly assumes that loss is something that can simply be fixed, like a solution to a mathematical problem.71
RELIGION IN DISGUISE
The religion-resembling lexicon of de-extinction is often a mishmash of motifs of resurrection, salvation, redemption, sin, temptation, and atonement all tossed together in a prophetic, future-oriented narrative that ultimately advances a religion of limitless innovation. Aspirants of this religion stake out various roles in the narrative—often incoherently—as they present de-extinction researchers, or “humanity” generally, as both redeemer and redeemed, sinner and savior. Archer, the researcher who brazenly christens his work “the Lazarus Project,” also draws freely on allusions to Eden and scriptural imperatives to defeat death. “If we destroyed part of Eden, we are responsible for fixing up that garden,” Archer insists. “This idea of restoring things that have become extinct has actually a biblical sanction,” he continues. To wit: “1 Corinthians, 15 verse 26 says that the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”72 Archer’s case for de-extinction proceeds seamlessly from a “we killed these animals” lament to excited speculation about how we might “help ourselves” with medical breakthroughs, such as those to be wrested from a resurrected frog’s uncanny gestational apparatus.73
It is also common for these narratives to track, albeit loosely, a Christian storyline of the seductive appeal of divine knowledge and power, suggestive of a fall into sin or punishment for dangerous and forbidden knowledge. As Sandra Swart argues, framing de-extinction technologies as some version of the Frankenstein myth—a story whose elements draw from much older myths like that of Prometheus, Icarus, and the biblical fall in paradise—is a widespread and perennial practice dating back to the 1980s, when a spoof news story reported the resurrection of the woolly mammoth by a Soviet scientist.74 Invocations of the Frankenstein myth may be more accurate than some de-extinctionists would care to admit. Frankenstein, after all, is a story not of resurrection per se but of the creation of a wholly new entity from assembled lifeless parts. In any case, having gestured vaguely in the direction of forbidden knowledge, narratives of de-extinction then tend to veer off, vertiginously, into a framing of scientists as divine figures who have mastered the design of life. That is, rather than chasten would-be transgressors, the narrative urges them on with the promise of complete creative control and even apotheosis. Science writer Ed Regis and Church, in a book-length treatment of the promise of synthetic biology, describe the unprecedented “power and allure of redesigning life” on an ever-expanding canvas.75 “We are already remaking ourselves and our world,” they confidently write, “retracing the steps of the original synthesis—redesigning, recoding, and reinventing nature itself in the process.”76 Nature itself has ordained for us precisely this role, Church suggests. “We seem to be ‘designed’ by nature to be good designers.”77 Our innate propensity to engineer is what distinguishes us from most other animals.78 Brand’s diagnosis is even more bullish: “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.”79
As I have argued, the excited rhetoric surrounding remaking, designing, and especially creating testifies to motives that have little connection to recovering or restoring lost or threatened values or to concerns about the inherent worth of nonhuman life. As Britt Wray, author of Rise of the Necrofauna observes, many de-extinction projects are born of excitement about innovative possibilities and only later acquire environmental rationales to justify the technology. “Advocates of the project find a way to fit them into the ecological narrative.”80 For all their unclarity and imprecision, these narratives plainly position their protagonist—the de-extinction scientist who often stands in for humanity writ large—as a supreme world-making being. The wonder of the story ultimately redounds to the glory of this intrepid entity (and secondarily, to its manufactured curios)—an entity whose denial of finitude, frailty, or doubt and whose rejection of dependence on forces exterior to itself are proffered as grounds for a secular faith of excited optimism. The human-as-creator forms the center of value and wonder, and reclaiming wonder from these problematic interpretations has the power to reveal this religion for what it is: a religion by, about, and, ultimately, for the human.
In conclusion, then, I want to outline how wonder might more appropriately be understood in the context of humans’ relationship to the natural world, with particular emphasis on conceptions of creatureliness. The condition of creatureliness is a fact of human existence, whether or not one subscribes to a religious interpretation or doctrine. Humans are mortal beings who share numerous behaviors, preferences, and evolutionary ties with other organisms. We exist within certain parameters over which we have limited control. To embrace creatureliness is to acknowledge our shared embodied nature, vulnerability, and biological fate. To present creatureliness as a natural fact is not to deny the belief that humans are the product of a Creator; but, as I see it, it is not necessary to affirm that doctrine in order to grasp the ethical import of our creaturely status. However, because de-extinction’s rhetoric often mimics, albeit in a confused way, certain plot devices and discursive turns of the Genesis narrative and other biblical allusions to scientists as modern-day resurrectionists or Noah figures, it is useful to consider some perspectives on the human offered by Christian theologians, alongside insights from secular ethicists who “think with” recognizable elements of that tradition and its legacy.
Properly understood, wonder is a questing and questioning mode. Upbeat stories of the wonder of de-extinction seem designed, by contrast, to dodge all inquiries. Instead they tell us, dogmatically, authoritatively, who we are—we are wonder workers, earth movers, and creators. But de-extinction confronts us with questions: What does it mean to be human? What kinds of creatures do we want to be? These are questions about how humans and their knowledge fit into a larger context of a living world that humans did not bring into being. These questions often produce anxiety when they are asked and received in a genuine spirit of searching, rather than as a prelude to proclaiming all that we know, soon will know, or are capable of doing. They engage us in a difficult process of discernment that is never ending in a dynamic and changing world. We need to sit with these questions, uneasily.
Inquiries into the kind of creature we are and ought to be provoke anxiety, because when thinking about “the human” is framed as a question rather than an assertion, “one can begin to see the harm previous answers have caused.”81 These harms are apparent in the many ways in which the category of the human functions to exclude certain others from moral consideration, dignity, or worth, both within our own species and beyond it. Uneasiness in the face of this inquiry tempts us to banish the ambiguity in favor of closure. The desire for closure, I would argue, contributes to the framing of de-extinction as a solution to a tractable problem, a technology capable of engineering new marvels while also righting wrongs. In thinking about what it means to be human, theologians and scientists alike (though the latter might not realize or admit it) frequently gravitate toward an idiom of imaging God. In particular, as I have suggested throughout, the godlike dimension that humans are often assumed to mirror is the capacity to create and innovate.
But this move to define humans as creators often ignores what theologian W. Dow Edgerton heralds as the “wonderfully ambiguous language” of the Genesis story, which does not specify what about the human shows us to be in the divine image. This ambiguity is the ambiguity of wonder, and it can be highly generative, offering both a “source and limit” of what it means to be human and a “limit and a warning not to speculate upon the specifics but to receive and honor the mystery.”82 Wonder, as an interrogative impulse that resists closure, can help to hold the question open, to dwell in mystery, to engage in discernment. At the same time, however, what it means to be human is not a completely wide-open question. There are parameters. How might we recognize them? What we know with certainty is that we are creatures who exist among innumerable other living entities. A moral imagination grounded in creatureliness puts emphasis not on Ackerman’s “immeasurable” scope of imagination and innovation but on conditions of what bioethicist Bruce Jennings calls “dynamic finitude and constrained becoming” developed within and through “relationships of accommodation with the limits and the gifts of evolved nature.”83 Contra Ackerman’s dazzling portrait of us, the human imagination cannot function well on an unlimited canvas and immeasurable scale. This limitless imagination is not a moral imagination but at best an amoral one, for it does not recognize connection, interdependence, or relationality among humans and nonhumans or the profound debts we owe these myriad others.
Against the voices of technologists and Anthropocene boosters who urge us to embrace our unbounded creativity and its immeasurable scope, others point us back to our condition of creaturely finitude. For humans qua creatures, Wendell Berry argues, limitlessness is hell. He invokes a scene from Christopher Marlowe’s telling of Faust in which Mephistopheles instructs Doctor Faustus on the basic characteristics of hell:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we [the damned] are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.
Limitlessness is the purview of gods alone. By normalizing a culture of limitlessness, we become convinced that all of our ills can be cured through more technology. “We are now, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world,” Berry writes.84 In a similar vein Rowan Williams argues that to be human is to be engaged in a constant battle against “all those instincts in us that make us want to be God or make us want to be what we think God is.”85 The rejection of creatureliness is a refusal of limits and perhaps especially a refusal of death itself—and what is de-extinction but the refusal of an especially overwhelming and incomprehensible form of death?
Framed as a condition of being limited, creatureliness can sound too much like condemnation or confinement. But it is worth considering that a creaturely status frees humans from trying to be god, whether godlikeness is understood in explicitly religious terms or as a placeholder for aspirations toward omnipotence and control. Turning to the narrative of the Genesis “fall” in particular, Williams observes that Adam’s resentment at not being God is what gives Satan power to tempt him to overstep his creaturely boundaries. The same resentment fuels our culture’s widespread denial of death and aging, its aversion to risk, and its longing for security and technological control. “And when I read . . . in discussions of our environmental crisis, that we can be confident our technology will find a way, my blood runs cold,” Williams confesses, “because I hear in that the refusal of real creatureliness.”86 I would argue that the rhetoric of wonder in de-extinction discourse functions in much the same way, as a temptation to deny limits and seize powers of technodivinity through the creation and resurrection of life rather than to confront the extinction crisis, and our role in it, with honesty. If this diagnosis is correct, then grappling with extinction does require an inward turn of sorts—not in the sense of cultivating new technologies as a path to redemption but in the recognition that something in us must change, in accordance with dramatic and destructive changes we have wrought. Otherwise, these tools are merely an extension of our self-regard.
Wonder, defined against the self-regarding, instrumentalizing impulse, may play an important role in recovering the lost art of being a creature.87 Not only does wonder resist the closure of solutionist ideology; it also stands in opposition to exploitative and utilitarian valuing and the acquisitive impulse that characterizes much of the excitement surrounding de-extinction, notably in expressions of “coolness” at the thought of creating, owning, or displaying de-extincted creatures. Wonder involves a turning of the self toward the other in ways that refuse arrogant appropriation or mastery of another. The essence of wonder is its other-acknowledging quality. For this reason, as philosopher R. W. Hepburn argues, wonder is closely aligned with states of humility, empathy, and compassion and a general “concern not to blunder into damaging manipulation of another.”88 Wonder’s refusal of mastery and its orientation toward the other bespeaks the wonderer’s state of vulnerability and receptivity. Wonder shatters the illusion of, and desire for, total control.
CONCLUSION
Many features of wonder align it with the condition of creatureliness, which is similarly premised on an abiding and humble awareness of otherness and a shared sense of embodied vulnerability with other living beings. More broadly, to understand ourselves as creatures is to allow that the world confronts us as a mystery that cannot be resolved into its component parts and thereby solved like a mathematical problem. Perhaps, then, the primary challenge we face as human beings in an era of mass extinction is to understand how to honor our creaturely nature alongside a capacity for creativity and innovation. Humans’ creative capacities must go hand in hand with, and be restrained by, responsibility and care. There is no formula for this balancing act. But wonder as an expression of creatureliness might counter the default to anthropocentricism that characterizes so many applications of biotechnology.89
Creaturely wonder as an antidote to de-extinction’s defiant cheeriness might also complicate the storyline of mass extinction that reduces its incomprehensibility to a manageable engineering problem, as with Church’s assessment of bird de-extinction as an “easy” fix. Put differently, if the denial of mass extinction is partly a function of human exceptionalism, then restoring humans to creaturely status might begin to chip away at this denial. We might start to look beyond competing narratives of salvation through innovation on the one hand and inevitable decline and failure on the other. Both narratives, in their own way, convey an excess of certainty—the certainty of optimism versus that of despair—that is not available to us as creatures. Hope (distinct from techno-optimism) and the ability to act locate themselves within the premise that the future is not already written. “We pretend that life like art has plots and we know how the story ends, whether it’s an election or a cultural shift or the outcome of any major event,” Rebecca Solnit writes, “and we often err not on the side of caution but on the side of conventionality: the future will look like the present.”90 Rejecting the closure of these narratives, we must then face the task of discerning how our agency aligns with other complex values with which we are embedded. Where the creator controls and perfects, the creature searches for an ethical mode of accommodation, of fitting into a world replete with wonders it did not make and cannot fully comprehend. This is not a science project. Berry refers to this mode as “propriety,” a sense of fittingness that recognizes ourselves as part of a larger, irreducible whole.91 Propriety presents us with a set of overarching questions in keeping with wonder’s interrogative mode: Where are we? Who are we? What is our condition? To raise questions of propriety is to recognize an exteriority to which we are called to relate, rather than subsuming it within our ever-expanding technosphere. It might mean resisting the temptation to engineer the world around us and to remake it in our own image in favor of determining how we fit in and directing or restricting our creative powers accordingly. Propriety helps us to see de-extinction technology for what it is: a tantalizing impulse to make and remake worlds in search of an ecological rationale and ethical context. Creatures are beings who necessarily live, act, and create in context. The alternative, for us and the planet, is hell.
LISA H. SIDERIS is Professor of Environmental Ethics in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 2005 to 2021, she taught in the Religious Studies Department at Indiana University. Sideris is author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection and Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World and editor, with Kathleen Dean Moore, of a collection of essays on the life and legacy of Rachel Carson, Rachel Carson Legacy and Challenge.
NOTES
1. See William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (January 1996): 7–28; Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71–89.
2. Eileen Crist, “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature,” Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 133.
3. George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist, and Tom Butler, eds., Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014).
4. Amy Fletcher, “Genuine Fakes: Cloning Extinct Species as Science and Spectacle,” Politics and the Life Sciences 29, no. 1 (March 2010): 48–60.
5. Stefan Skrimshire, “Rewriting Mortality: A Theological Critique of Geoengineering and De-Extinction,” in Calming the Storm: Theological and Ethical Perspectives on Climate Engineering, ed. Forrest Clingerman and Kevin J. O’Brien (London: Lexington, 2016), 103–126, 113.
6. Lisa H. Sideris, “The Human as World-Maker: An Anthropocene Dogma,” in Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, T&T Clark Companion Series, ed. John Slattery (London: T&T Clark, 2020).
7. Stewart Brand, “Rethinking Extinction,” Aeon Magazine, accessed August 6, 2022, https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-not-edging-up-to-a-mass-extinction.
8. Alexander C. Lees et al., “Biodiversity Scientists Must Fight the Creeping Rise of Extinction Denial,” Nature: Ecology and Evolution, August 18, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-01285-z.pdf.
9. Ed Yong, “The Last of Its Kind,” The Atlantic, July 2019.
10. Dolly Jørgensen, “Endling: The Power of the Last in an Extinction-Prone World,” Environmental Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2017): 119–138.
11. Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 12.
12. Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 58.
13. Henry T. Greely, “Is De-extinction Special?,” Hastings Center Report (July/August 2017): 30.
14. Note that SCNT is not an option for egg-laying animals like birds and reptiles because their reproductive process makes it very difficult to access eggs in their earliest stages of development. However, other techniques involving the germ cells are available. See Beth Shapiro, “Pathways to De-extinction: How Close Can We Get to Resurrection of an Extinct Species?,” Functional Ecology 31, no. 5 (2016): 996–1002.
15. Shapiro, “Pathways to De-extinction,” 999.
16. Jenny Graves, “Saving DNA: The Frozen Ark Project,” Australian Academy of Science, accessed August 6, 2022, https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/frozen-ark-project.
17. See David Bielo, “Will We Kill Off Today’s Animals if We Revive Extinct Ones?,” Scientific American, March 19, 2013, https://www.scientific-american.com/article/de-extinction-to-bring-back-extinct-species-but-challenges-conservation/.
18. George Church’s lab claimed in 2017 the mammoth would be de-extincted within two years, but this has not occurred.
19. Mary Beth Griggs, “No, the Woolly Mammoth Won’t Actually Be Resurrected by 2019,” Popular Science, February 17, 2017, https://www.popsci.com/wooly-mammoth-will-not-be-resurrected-in-two-years/.
20. Deep de-extinction is a term used by Ronald Sandler to describe the effort to bring back species that have not existed for anywhere from several decades to millennia. Deep de-extinction cannot qualify as reintroduction, since environments may have changed dramatically in a species’ absence.
21. Heather Browning, “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Mammoths? De-Extinction and Animal Welfare,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (2018): 785–803.
22. Sandler, “The Ethics of Reviving Long Extinct Species,” Conservation Biology 28, no. 2 (2013): 358. Sandler does go on to say that it is possible that there could be “unintended negative consequences” of deep de-extinction, but these risks are also present, he notes, with other kinds of conservation programs that involve, for example, breeding programs and relocations; moreover, some de-extincted organisms might even bring ecological benefits to their environments. Yet the frequent hypothetical phrase “if they are released” and reminders that these organisms will have low genetic diversity cast doubt on de-extinction as a conservation practice. This impression is reinforced by the example of the Frozen Zoo, where there is little likelihood that a successfully produced organism would ever live beyond the confines of the zoo.
23. Nathaniel Horwitz, “Heath Hen’s Boom Could Echo Again on Martha’s Vineyard,” MV Times, July 16, 2014, http://www.mvtimes.com/2014/07/16/heath-hens-boom-echo-marthas-vineyard/.
24. Sandler, “The Ethics,” 355.
25. Sandler, “The Ethics,” 355.
26. Sandler, “The Ethics,” 355.
27. Ben Minteer, The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction, and the Ethics of Conservation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 112.
28. Bruce Jennings, “The Moral Imagination of De-extinction,” Hastings Center Report (July/August 2017): 58.
29. Crist, “Cloning in Restorative Perspective,” in Restoration and History: The Search for a Usable Environmental Past, ed. Marcus Hall (New York: Routledge, 2009), 284–292, 288.
30. Browning, “Won’t Somebody.”
31. Stephen Fleischfresser, “What Is De-extinction and How Do You Do It?,” Cosmos Magazine, March 7, 2017, https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/woolly-mammoth-what-is-de-extinction-and-how-do-you-do-it/.
32. Creation of value might occur ethically alongside restoration of value. For example, the overriding goal might be to restore a species, with a side effect of creating knowledge to better enable us to prevent extinction.
33. Sandler, “The Ethics,” 356.
34. Sandler, “The Ethics,” 356.
35. Sandler, “The Ethics,” 356.
36. Sandler, “The Ethics,” 359.
37. Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History (New York: OR Books, 2016).
38. Sandler, “The Ethics,” 359.
39. One exception might be the Zimov project of Pleistocene Park, where efforts to resurrect mammoths are motivated by the possibility of creating favorable impacts in terms of climate control—recreating a “mammoth steppe” ecosystem that might keep permafrost from melting further and releasing potent greenhouse gases. Here the goals are ecological—climate change mitigation—and de-extinction is a means to that (still somewhat anthropocentric) end. “I’m doing this for humans,” Nikita Zimov says. “I’ve got three daughters. I’m doing it for them.” Ross Andersen, “Welcome to Pleistocene Park,” The Atlantic, April 2017.
40. Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 203.
41. Frédéric Neyrat refers to this project of world making or remaking as “geo-constructivism,” dubbing its biological counterpart, as with de-extinction, “bio-constructivism.” Neyrat, The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).
42. Neyrat, The Unconstructable Earth, 53.
43. Neyrat, The Unconstructable Earth, 53.
44. Heise, Imagining Extinction, 206.
45. Diane Ackerman, The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us (London: W. W. Norton, 2014), 309.
46. Ackerman, The Human Age, 308
47. Ben J. Novak, “Flights of Fancy,” Project Passenger Pigeon, accessed August 6, 2022, http://passengerpigeon.org/Flights-Stories/Novak.html.
48. Quoted in Skrimshire, “Rewriting Mortality,” 112.
49. Quoted in Nathaniel Rich, “The Mammoth Cometh,” New York Times Magazine, February 27, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/magazine/the-mammoth-cometh.html.
50. Angela Chen, “Will Bringing Back the Woolly Mammoth Save Humanity from Itself? A Chat with Author Ben Mezrich about Bringing Back Long-Extinct Animals,” The Verge, July 27, 2017.
51. Christophe Bonneuil, “The Geological Turn: The Anthropocene and Its Narratives,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemmene (New York: Routledge, 2015), 17–31, 23.
52. Elizabeth Quill, “These Are the Extinct Animals We Can, and Should, Resurrect,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-are-extinct-animals-we-can-should-resurrect-180954955/.
53. Rachel Riederer, “The Woolly Mammoth Lumbers Back Into View,” The New Yorker, December 27, 2018.
54. Greely has a ten-minute TED talk that reiterates all of these points, including the one he considers most important—“wonder.” Greely, “De-Extinction: Hubris or Hope?,” April 1, 2013, YouTube, accessed August 6, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuRk0V2LoMY.
55. Jacob S. Sherkow and Henry Greely, “What If Extinction Is Not Forever?,” Science Magazine 340 (April 5, 2013): 33.
56. Sherkow and Greely, “What If,” 33.
57. Sherkow and Greely, “What If,” 33.
58. Barbara Kiser, “Books in Brief,” Nature, October 19, 2017, https://www.nature.com/articles/550331a.
59. Philip J. Seddon, “The Ecology of De-Extinction,” Functional Ecology 31 (May 8, 2017): 994.
60. Douglas Ian Campbell and Patrick Michael Whittle, Resurrecting Extinct Species: Ethics and Authenticity (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 98.
61. Shlomo Cohen asks whether technologically revived mammoths would retain the ability to evoke the sublime, given that they are human creations. He notes that the fact that we can create something does not mean we can control it and that in the face of the fearsome power of a de-extincted woolly mammoth (particularly one raging out of control), an experience of the sublime is arguably still possible. See Cohen, “The Ethics of De-extinction,” Nanoethics 8 (2014): 165–178.
62. Minteer, “The Perils of De-Extinction,” Minding Nature 8, no. 1 (January 2015): 13–14.
63. Minteer, The Fall of Wild, 110–112.
64. Minteer, The Fall of the Wild, 109.
65. Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
66. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closing of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 16.
67. John Brockman, “We Are as Gods and Have to Get Good at It,” Edge.org, August 18, 2009, https://www.edge.org/conversation/stewart_brand-we-are-as-gods-and-have-to-get-good-at-it.
68. Christopher Preston, “De-extinction: A Tale of Two Visions,” Humans and Nature, September 9, 2015. Minteer, The Fall of the Wild, 117.
69. Lucia Martinelli, Markku Oksanen, and Helena Siipi, “De-extinction: A Novel and Remarkable Case of Bio-objectification,” Croatian Medical Journal 55, no. 4 (August 2014): 423–427.
70. Preston, “De-extinction,” 117.
71. Jennings, “The Moral Imagination.”
72. Michael Archer, quoted in “The Scientist Trying to Reverse Extinctions (Think ‘Jurassic Park’),” FiveThirtyEight, November 25, 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-scientist-trying-to-reverse-extinctions-think-jurassic-park/.
73. Archer, “How We’ll Resurrect the Gastric Brooding Frog, the Tasmanian Tiger,” TEDxDeExtinction, March 2013, accessed August 6, 2022, https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_archer_how_we_ll_resurrect_the_gastric_brooding_frog_the_tasmanian_tiger.
74. Sandra Swart, “Frankenzebra: Dangerous Knowledge and the Narrative Construction of Monsters,” Journal of Literary Studies 30, no. 4 (December 2014): 45–70.
75. Church and Ed Regis, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 201.
76. Church and Regis, Regenesis, 13.
77. John Brockman, “Constructive Biology: George Church,” Edge, June 26, 2006, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/church06/church06_index.html.
78. Peter Miller, “George Church: The Future Without Limits,” National Geographic, June 2, 2014, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140602-george-church-innovation-biology-science-genetics-de-extinction.
79. Brand originally proposed that humans are as gods with the first publication of Whole Earth Catalogue in 1968. He has since updated this diagnosis to say, “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (New York: Viking, 2009), 20.
80. Nicole Faires, “Can De-extinction Save Our Planet? An Interview with Brit Wray,” Eartheasy, October 13, 2017, https://learn.eartheasy.com/articles/can-de-extinction-save-our-planet-an-interview-with-britt-wray/.
81. W. Dow Edgerton, “Asking About Who We Are,” Theology Today, January 1, 1994.
82. Edgerton, “Asking About Who We Are.”
83. Jennings, “Unnatural Selection,” Center for Humans and Nature, June 21, 2017.
84. Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2008, https://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/faustian-economics/.
85. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creatureliness, Creativity: The Wisdom of a Finite Existence,” in Being-in-Creation, ed. Brian Treanor, Bruce Ellis Benson, and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
86. Williams, “Creation, Creatureliness, Creativity,” 35.
87. Williams, “On Being Creatures,” Eric Symes Memorial Lecture, delivered at Westminster Abbey, May 15, 1989.
88. R. W. Hepburn, “Wonder,” in “Wonder” and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1984), 131–154, 146.
89. Jennings, “Unnatural Selection.”
90. Rebecca Solnit, “On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story that Never Ends,” Literary Hub, April 23, 2020, https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-life-inside-this-strange-new-fairytale-doesnt-have-to-be-lonely/.
91. Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000), 13.
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