Longread #454 -- The Mammoth Cometh -- 2/28/14

I'm back already! Did you miss me?

I read this yesterday and felt compelled to share it. There are a lot of important questions raised in this article. To me, the key point is this one,

The ecologist Daniel Simberloff raised a related concern. “It’s at best a technofix dealing with a few species,” he told me. “Technofixes for environmental problems are band-aids for massive hemorrhages. To the extent that the public, who will never be terribly well informed on the larger issue, thinks that we can just go and resurrect a species, it is extremely dangerous. . . . De-extinction suggests that we can technofix our way out of environmental issues generally, and that’s very, very bad.”

We see this same issue across so many public problems: the idea that we can technologically solve problems that are related to unsustainable patterns of human consumption. The problem is that even if the technology works, the underlying problem -- that we live in ways that are often fundamentally short-sighted and irresponsible -- remain.

"The Mammoth Cometh" by Nathaniel Rich
Published in the New York Times, February 27, 2013

Eric