Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative

with @andersen @omnivorousread @smc90 On making a really wild (quite literally wild;) geo-engineering idea at massive scale real – specifically, bringing back lab-grown woolly mammoths, which was discussed in a 2017 feature by Andersen in The Atlantic (and also discussed in the 2020 documentary with Stewart Brand, We Are As Gods) -- and is still a relevant and active topic today. But the conversation is also about the evergreen power of narrative...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sonal?

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6andZ Podcast. I'm Sonal and as your primary host, editor, and showrunner here of the past seven years, I wanted to share some of my very favorite, just a few selected, episodes for you on this feed as I get ready to make a change and as we get ready to relaunch this show with a new host. The first of these three episodes is a conversation that originally took place in summer 2017, but both the work discussed in here on making a really wild, quite literally wild, geoengineering idea at massive scale real, is still actively being discussed, relevant, and at play today. It's on bringing back lab

• 0:40Sonal?

  grown woolly mammoths, which was also discussed in the 2020 documentary with Stewart Brand, We Are As Gods. But I'm sharing this episode as a personal all time favorite, also because the meta theme is all about how we humans can and do use the power of narrative to drive great feats of change, including engineering. This has been a signature theme for me in forming the identity of the A6andZ Podcast, and the conversation that follows is one that takes place among three tech and science editors, including our former colleague Hannah, who was also a host on this podcast for four years. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6andZ Podcast. I'm Sonal. Today Hannah and I are doing another one of our on the road shows from Washington DC, and today's guest is Ross Anderson, Senior

• 1:25Sonal?

  Editor for The Atlantic's Science, Health, and Technology Coverage. And he wrote a story earlier this year in the April issue called Welcome to Pleistocene Park, which you don't have to have read to follow this conversation, but here's what you do need to know. A small group, a very small group, in fact, of Russian scientists in Arctic Siberia are trying to resurrect an Ice Age biome, complete with lab grown woolly mammoths, through a scheme for rewilding grassland instead of forest. And while we focus on the particulars of all that in this episode, in a hallway style riff, beginning with the connection to climate change, and then moving to gene editing, to discussing the science of paleontology, and the sociocultural and economic aspects of radical geoengineering.

• 2:10Sonal?

  This episode is really more broadly about what motivates seemingly crazy ideas, moving them from the lab to the field, quite literally in this case, through marketing and narrative, which is where we end and begin the conversation.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  So when I landed on the website and I see that these guys are trying to rewild all or a great part of northern Siberia and Alaska and the Canadian Yukon with this Ice Age grassland biome and that they want to put woolly mammoths there. You know, I had the same reaction that everyone listening to this has, right? Which is like, what?

• 2:44Sonal?

  Jurassic Park. Yeah, Jurassic Park. Yeah, Ice Age.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Those crazy people. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was excited to write the piece. And then the other thing about this project that was really compelling is that it's not that these guys were only just romantic about bringing the Ice Age back to this huge stretch of the earth. Their primary motivation for doing it is to, as a climate change mitigation strategy, which is to say that the Arctic is warming very fast and under the surface in the Arctic is what's called the permafrost, this ice that has been there for, in some cases, tens of thousands of years.

• 3:14Sonal?

  And in fact, very deep, I read in your article, like up to like a mile deep in some places.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  That part of the world was so rich in grass and in large animals at that time. It's got lots of sort of organic matter, which has lots of carbon in it. In fact, more than like the entire output of the United States right now.

• 3:31Sonal?

  Let's take a step back for a minute. First of all, what's the connection between the permafrost and climate change? Like, how can a grassland step with some fluffy furry animals stop climate change bluntly?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Totally. Okay. So most of that part of the world up in the Arctic is covered with tundra. You might think of it as Arctic desert.

• 3:53Sonal?

  Okay.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Like very little grows on it. It's kind of like scrub. And what's neat about grasslands is they actually keep the earth underneath them colder. First of all, they reflect away more sunlight than the darker kind of tree regions. You're already hedging against the warming, right? By having grasslands out there.

• 4:10Sonal?

  Shade.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  And in the winter, shade, boom.

• 4:12Sonal?

  Like wearing white on a hot day.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  And then in the winter, you have the, the snow cover is like, on the grass is really thin, such that like the Arctic cold in the winter, when it's really dark and it's just the auroras up there, can really penetrate the ground, deep.

• 4:29Sonal?

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  And keep the permafrost even more frozen.

• 4:32Sonal?

  Well, you actually use a language that it's like locked in some thermodynamic vault.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  I did, I don't want to roll that out.

• 4:37Sonal?

  I'm rolling it out for you.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 4:39Sonal?

  That's a really good way of describing it. And so what happens when those, because isn't that a good thing to have all that organic matter? I mean, that creates oil, it creates, you know, this rich ecosystem that fertilizes our ground. What's wrong with that melting?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  What's wrong with that melting is that bacteria will get at it and through the process, they will decompose it and release carbon as part of that process.

• 4:58Hanne Tidnam?

  And it's melting, not just because of the warming, but isn't there an ecological contribution to the, to the grass going away?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  What's so important about the animals being there is that the animals help to maintain that grassland ecosystem. And the woolly mammoth is involved because woolly mammoths, like many of their elephant cousins are really good at knocking down trees. In fact, they're, they were excited about it. Like, it was like, they're, one of their favorite things to do.

• 5:23Sonal?

  But we could just like knock down trees ourselves. Like, why do we need the animals to do this? Like, why don't we just like raise a shit ton of forest trees, you know, pine trees, whatever, and just create like grassland? Why do we need these woolly mammoths to be there?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  In the absence of mammoths, they've just had like a huge Russian military transporter out on the plains that they're literally just like slamming into trees with.

• 5:43Hanne Tidnam?

  They're weeding.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  To knock them down.

• 5:45Hanne Tidnam?

  With, with their like military vehicles.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  As you'd imagine, throwing out like a fleet of tractors that can knock down the trees of the taiga and like the entire Arctic region would be a pretty carbon intensive activity.

• 6:00Sonal?

  So it's like actually making the problem worse and trying to solve it versus...

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Like, we need all the world's oil.

• 6:03Hanne Tidnam?

  Can I back up and ask a question? Like, what I was trying to get, why are there trees, why did trees grow up that now are a problem? You know what I mean? That we need to like, if you, why is the problem starting?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Well, one theory is that trees took over and that, first of all, you had the end of the ice age, which... Created a whole bunch of warming, right?

• 6:20Sonal?

  Right.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And so the trees kind of, that helped them spring up out there. But also, in the absence of large herbivores like the woolly mammoth, it's easier for trees to like spring up.

• 6:32Sonal?

  Right.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  And so lots of people think that when these animals went extinct, and we can talk about how they went extinct and some of the really interesting debates around that.

• 6:40Sonal?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  That made, that paved the way for these forests.

• 6:43Sonal?

  Actually, one of the things that struck me, and I feel like I reference sapiens a lot on this podcast, the thing that just blew my mind is Yuval Harari paints this picture of how humans are basically the worst predators in Earth's history. And that, and we're so tiny relative to these huge megafauna, both on land and in water, from like huge woolly mammoths to whales in the ocean. And that everywhere humans move, you can immediately see a decline drastically in the number of large mammals that would walk the earth.

• 7:14Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah, it was so interesting when you talk about this birth period and also like, and in quick succession, right? Just ravaging.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  That's the word, yeah.

• 7:21Sonal?

  Absolutely.

• 7:22Hanne Tidnam?

  Like the wildlife and you know what?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting that a lot of that science has crystallized as our timelines for where humans have showed up in the world have gotten more refined. So from very early on in paleontology, the consensus was everyone noticed these large animals had died out at the end of the Ice Age and they thought, well, the end of the Ice Age, there was this period of warming and these animals didn't adapt. And then as time went on, it's like, well, glaciations, like the Ice Age, was not 3 million years of glacial cold. It was like 10,000 year bursts of glacial cold. And then interglacials, they're called, where things would warm again. And these animals had weathered like 30 of those.

• 7:59Hanne Tidnam?

  These tsunamis, you call them like ice tsunami.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yes, and they'd been fine coming out of the other side of them. So why this one did all of these megafauna die? It showed everything definitely.

• 8:08Hanne Tidnam?

  Well, not everything, a specific kind of thing.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:10Hanne Tidnam?

  Right?

• 8:11Sonal?

  Grass, land played a big role because you no longer had this advantage where big animals could hide behind trees or rocks or big things. And so. Humans had to adapt by becoming very good at hunting, like shooting with spears or fire in order to attack these animals and essentially learn coordination as they got out of trees.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Well, one interesting question around there that I didn't get to in the early 14,000-word draft around this, but is that it's always a mystery on why Africa has kept a lot of its megafauna.

• 8:41Sonal?

  Why? What is that?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  So one of the running hypotheses is that the megafauna of other continents were what's called naive prey. Because like humans show up, harmless little thing. Whereas in Africa, they, the megafauna there had grown up alongside us evolutionarily.

• 8:57Sonal?

  Right.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  They like, they saw like, oh, these guys appear to be quite dangerous.

• 9:02Sonal?

  Yeah. Well, so back to your piece in The Atlantic, reading it is you usually, your use of this form of narrative journalism that gets you attached to the characters, the human characters. And I was actually more fascinated by the scientific characters. That is the brass, the mammoths, the role of, you know, elephants. And so we could, let's break each of those down and talk about, you know, what they are and how they connect to this.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting. That's interesting. I never even thought about it that way. I mean, I obviously thought about the human characters. Sergei and Nikita, it's these two guys, you know, this father and son in the Siberian Arctic, and they're very far east. And they're trying to rewild that part of the world into an ice age grassland with extinct woolly mammoths to fight climate change.

• 9:43Sonal?

  Okay, so let's break down the first character that I think is the most obvious and important one is this idea of manufacturing mammoths, and specifically the woolly mammoth. Talk to us about that.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  First of all, one of the other things that really attracted me to this story was the woolly mammoth. When you talk about animals that are no longer with us, short of the dinosaurs, the woolly mammoth is the most romantic one, right?

• 10:05Hanne Tidnam?

  It's so tied to this idea of like the first man, kind of. Like, it's like how we have this idea of a codependence on, codependence on this, you know, animal from a very early age, even in popular culture.

• 10:17Sonal?

  Yeah, if you think of things like Clan of the Cave Bear.

• 10:19Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's like a huge ice age mythology, right? The Clan of the Cave Bear, exactly. Yeah, they show up in cave paintings, right? They're so resonant with like this kind of emergence of humans.

• 10:31Sonal?

  And a woolly mammoth doesn't give us a visual picture. Basically is a big fat snuffleufagus with tusks.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  You got it. It's a furry elephant. And that's actually quite central to this piece because if you do want to manufacture woolly mammoths, which is a crazy phrase, you want to do it the same way nature did, which is, you know, Elephants were in Asia, in the temperate parts of Asia, before they were up north in the Arctic. As they slowly moved, nature modified their genomes through natural selection so that they had longer fur and smaller ears and, you know, an extra layer of fat so they could stay warm in the Arctic. It's nothing more complicated than that.

• 11:03Sonal?

  Except in this case, it's happening through CRISPR and scientists are manually modifying the genes to essentially edit in these characteristics from elephants, which are in the same family.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, they want to take, you know, basically an Asian elephant genome and just make really a small number of tweaks. The guy who's really at the forefront of this is George Church, who is a geneticist at Harvard and kind of has his hands on any number of sort of eccentric schemes like this. But, I mean, when I first heard about this, I thought, you know, really? But then I started talking to people in the field and they were like, "Look, he's out there." Not "he's out there like he's crazy." George is really the forefront of this. I mean, like, he's, he has the right approach, which is to make like, again, as few tweaks to this genome as possible, just so you get these basic features, and then let nature do the rest. Get, you know, five, 10 generations of these and they'll refine it.

• 12:00Hanne Tidnam?

  I love when you say that you realize the idea isn't why, how crazy this is to do it is actually like, "Well, it's actually not that, you know, it's actually not that crazy." The reason is like, "Why wouldn't it work?" Right? Like, do we know exactly what the woolly mammoth was? Are we, do we know exactly what we're aiming for or are we guessing?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  We have used several DNA fragments to sequence like the entire woolly mammoth genome. However, we're not trying to make, so I'm speaking out of two corners of my mouth here because I'm saying we're going to manufacture mammoths, but what we are actually going to do is manufacture a furry, fatty, Asian elephant. Like, we are not aiming for the original genome, for the exact genome of the original mammoth. We're just looking to re-modify Asian elephants.

• 12:46Hanne Tidnam?

  An Asian elephant with the characteristics of a woolly mammoth in certain key areas.

• 12:51Sonal?

  Just to give some textural feel, you described that Church and his group are adding cold resistant hemoglobin, a full body layer of insulating fat, they're shrinking the ears.

• 13:02Hanne Tidnam?

  Why are they shrinking the ears?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Good question. Well, like, imagine, you know, in the Arctic, you get, you know, 70 below during the winters.

• 13:10Hanne Tidnam?

  Frostbite.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  The African elephant has these huge ears and those will not be in the Arctic.

• 13:14Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  You said cold resistant hemoglobin, and I wanted to call it antifreeze blood.

• 13:19Sonal?

  Like a new version of True Blood, like drink this antifreeze blood.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  That's right. And they wouldn't let me get away with it.

• 13:25Sonal?

  Hannah, you asked an amazing question about, you know, is it actually doing it from truth or not? But is there a truth? Because you also point out, we have this dead DNA problem. Like, you think of DNA as this thing that lives on for ages and eons.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:36Sonal?

  But in fact, this DNA is decomposed and not really available even to draw from.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  That's right. One reason that we're looking to just modify Asian elephant genomes instead of like, doing the Jurassic Park style, like, oh, we found it in the amber.

• 13:48Sonal?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Is that, look, even after a few thousand years, DNA gets really decayed. And by cosmic rays and by microbes and by any number of,

• 13:59Speaker 01

  nature is a really, you know, the universe is a really harsh place.

• 14:01Hanne Tidnam?

  So it sounds like you're sort of saying like, it almost doesn't matter as long as an elephant can live there. It's okay if it's, but once we start giving them these different, and we're introducing a new animal into this very complicated ecosystem environment, like, does it maybe matter that they're not exactly the woolly mammoths?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  My view is that it's worth what will probably be some considerable suffering on the part of the first few, if not more, generations of these mammoths. And like, I am alive to that, and I actually try to talk about, in particular, the social suffering.

• 14:31Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  I mean, elephants are really social animals. They hang out in matriarchal herds, their grandmothers are around, like, teaching them, you know, all of these behaviors. They grieve their dead, that they have like a really rich communication.

• 14:44Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  With like, you know, these low rumbling sounds, many of which are inaudible to the human ear. They're some of the most social animals on the planet.

• 14:51Hanne Tidnam?

  How do they even know, you know, these, these unformed, untaught, these poor,

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:57Hanne Tidnam?

  difficult, new, new things dropped into this new landscape.

• 15:01Sonal?

  All at the same age.

• 15:02Hanne Tidnam?

  They would know to do what we want them to do. I mean, it's.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  I suspect that. Have you ever seen the zoo, like, the, like, the, like, the guy who, like, gets in the mama tiger suit?

• 15:09Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  I think there might be something like that happening early on. I, I, I mean, I can't imagine.

• 15:15Sonal?

  Think of these as purely biological things and we forget that there's a transmission of culture that has to happen as part of it. In fact, even the language you use in the piece, I actually was a little taken aback. You have this language and it's beautiful. As editors, I'm like, oh gorgeous diction. You talk about how we sculpt them to survive the winter, but let natural selection do the polishing. It felt more like playing God, just bluntly. Like it's like creating a Galatea clay. I don't know, Pinocchio and Galatea, like, you know, whatever.

• 15:42Hanne Tidnam?

  Well, I think, yeah, it feels to me like making a Gollum, kind of, right? Because we're shaping the outside and we're not doing any of the, and when you're describing all the complexity of like, you know, the biology of the gut to eat the tundra and like all of that complicated, you know, and then we're just like shaping this stuff out, the exteriors and then plopping them down.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Well, the other thing, I mean, I think this really gets to one of the philosophical tensions that I wanted to confront. Your point about playing God, another thing that's like playing God is removing 95% of the megafauna from the surface of the earth. We have natural human biases around things like gene editing that are, that like get us all prickled and like, oh, oh, we're playing God.

• 16:21Hanne Tidnam?

  But in fact, we've been editing everything.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Tremendous effect on the earth.

• 16:25Sonal?

  So let's break down some more of the science on playing God. So we talked about CRISPR, the gene editing tool, and let's talk about the genes. So we described some of the characteristics and features that we want to add, but by my count, there are 95 genes to do the job. Because 15 that were completed, 30 that are being tweaked. And he says, George Church was guessing that we need maybe 50 more.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  He actually was saying even a total of 50. Beth Shapiro, who I regard as sort of the world expert on this stuff, she was like, you know, not so fast. You have to see what those changes do to the rest of the body and how they interact with each other. So like, sure, maybe 50, but it's too soon to say.

• 17:01Sonal?

  Right. Well, the other thing that I found very fascinating, especially in the tales of that recent news about the artificial womb and an animal being able to be incubated, is that you essentially grow these mammoths in an artificial womb. So what's that process?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up because actually that is the most science fictional aspect of this whole thing.

• 17:21Sonal?

  That's the biggest.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  That's a biggest leap. Yeah. Like the gene editing, it's a known technology. It's a matter of trial and error. It's like, let's, you know, keep spitting out embryos with like different changes and eventually we'll get there. Growing an embryo, especially in where this is the animal with the longest gestation period.

• 17:38Sonal?

  Which is what, 22 months?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Two years, yeah, yeah, two years, that's right. And it's, you know, 200 pounds at the end of it and you're gonna do all that like really complex, fine tuning, maternal, fine tuning, like hormonal work in this huge closet sized tank. Like that is, that's more than 10 years away. George Church thinks that you can, that you can make a mammoth like genetically within five years. And he said to me, just like there's uncertainties on the pessimistic side, like, oh, actually it'll take 20. He's like, it could take shorter, you know, but the, growing an actual elephant, a furry elephant in a tank, we just don't, we're not there yet technologically. That is a thing that it's like, no one is working on even as hard as these guys are with the gene itself.

• 18:23Sonal?

  I hear you when you say it's the most science fiction of this whole piece, but when I heard the recent news about the artificial womb, it actually gives me great hope because you think about all the, you know, the collateral, good things that come out of this kind of science and work. Like, will we be able to have true artificial wombs for human beings as a result of this work? Or other things that we can essentially let women have kids with no, like, that's just a beautiful idea to me, that we can actually manipulate that in some level.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  It's completely lovely, but just to put that in context and to illuminate the challenge. If you were to make it analogous to human beings, women have like a 40 week gestational period. These were like preemie lambs, like they were born at like the equivalent of 22 human weeks and they stuck them in these artificial wombs and they were able to go to term.

• 19:07Sonal?

  Let's go back to breaking down the characters one by one. We need to talk about grass. You mentioned that Ice Age is actually really a grass age. And by the way, that the formal name of Ice Age is Pleistocene Age. I actually didn't connect, all three of those things are actually the same thing.

• 19:19Hanne Tidnam?

  Is it exactly what we think of as the Ice Age?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  It is the Ice Age, it is, but it's, so it's 3 million years. And the really interesting thing about it is it's kind of like the nursery period for human beings. Like this is where we sort of, you know, discovered fire, learned to harness fire, developed language, developed advanced tool use, and then all of a sudden we kind of... Pop up, history starts what, like, you know,

• 19:42Sonal?

  Accelerates.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Five, six thousand years ago, where you have kind of genuine writing, but all those behaviors were really incubated in the Ice Age. So I've always been kind of fascinated with that.

• 19:50Sonal?

  And time scale wise, that ended 10, 12,000 years ago.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:53Hanne Tidnam?

  Can I just have a moment of fan mail here? And I love when you looked at one blade as like this little soldier fighting this grand army, you know, of the wages of like the planet.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I went down deep in this ice cave with Nikita, the sun in this story, like walking around in a geode, like every, almost every surface is like covered, you know, with like sparkling ice. And we get to like the bottom in this little chamber and, you know, he sort of like scratches at the ice wall and he pulls out this, you know, pale, dead blade of grass from the Ice Age from 30,000 years ago. And at the time, I was, I will confess to you guys a little sort of writerly craft.

• 20:30Sonal?

  I thought you were going to confess fear because I was thinking about that whole thing. And I was like, holy crap, that's your phone, yeah. Cave, freak out, cold.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Totally, totally, fair, fair. So going into the piece, I really thought that the, the kind of reigning mythology that people will have in their mind, reading this article is Jurassic Park. And so how can I kind of subvert that, right? When they're like, when they're kind of explaining how they do the resurrection of these dinosaurs, there's a moment where like they're in a cave and they like, they hold up to the light this amber and there's an ancient mosquito trapped in it. And I thought like, is there a way I can get an image like that? And so then at the bottom, when he pulls out this piece of grass, I was like,

• 21:05Sonal?

  Here it is.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  That's my zip line into the deep path. I have to admit, I had always been much more romantic about forests than grass going into this piece. It was, Sergey is talking about grass and its importance and the rise of humans in particular. That really captured my imagination and was an idea that I felt like was not out there in the world.

• 21:22Hanne Tidnam?

  And what is that? What is the connection between grass and humans?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Well, grass is like the kind of the newest big plant based biome on the planet. Like forests have been around for, you know, three, 400 million years and grass is like less than, well. Big grasslands are less than, you know, 60, 70 million years old. And they're really neat. They grow really fast. They, they just like erupt out of the earth and they, um, they make food very easily for animals and they're not a, a lot of them are not afraid of being eaten. They love to be eaten. So you have trees, you know, will like, or, or other plants will invest all this energy into thorns and into poisons. Cause they're like, get away from me.

• 21:59Sonal?

  It's a good feeling.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Fine, let me do my thing I wanna grow. And grass is like, eat me, eat me, eat me, eat me.

• 22:04Sonal?

  They're sweet. They're like, yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Back out. So then I can grow even more. You can eat me again. And then just go, go, go, go, go.

• 22:10Sonal?

  You have this mind, actually, that's so much packed into it. By allowing themselves to be eaten, they partner with their own grazers to enhance their ecosystem's nutrient flows.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the animals poop them out and they pooped, you know, the great thing about poop, while we're, you know, talking about things that we didn't know were so great, like grass, is that it's really sort of warm and kind of seeps into the earth very quickly. Like it's, and it's, it's been processed by microbes. It's like, kind of, you know.

• 22:36Sonal?

  It's ready to go.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Juicy. Yeah. It's just fertilizer, right? We know, right? That's what do we use for fertilizer? And so it makes these grasslands just like cycle, cycle, cycle really quickly.

• 22:44Sonal?

  I agree. This idea of the grass is so counterintuitive. And I first came across it in Sapiens. And one of the things he says is that humans tamed, it created humanity. Because it allowed us to use wheat to like drive our lives. And there's all these different forms of grass that exist now. You're describing rice, wheat, corn, sugarcane.

• 23:04Hanne Tidnam?

  I thought it was really interesting how like, this is a portrait of all these, you know, cutting edge sort of science and tech discoveries and capabilities. And we're using it to like, reach deep into our like, no longer accessible past. Like you described this moment of, um, so nostalgia, right? Like this yearning for what once was. That's kind of part of the human condition.

• 23:24Sonal?

  And by the way, so nostalgia as in an existential grief for vanished landscape? Because I, that was the first time I ever heard that word.

• 23:29Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Sonal?

  I didn't know what the hell that was.

• 23:31Hanne Tidnam?

  No, me too. Yeah. I was hoping you would define it. Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm really drawn to stories that, uh, that show humans interacting on, on long time scales, which is a thing that I think we're doing more and more now.

• 23:45Sonal?

  By long time scales, you mean like trod dynamics or just anything that's like the arc of history? What is that?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I mean, like, when we think about what it's going to mean to be human beings now and in the future that we're taking into that context. 10, 20, 30, 40, millions of years into the past and perhaps 10, 20, 30,000 years into the future. And this is, I should again, give a shout out to Stuart Brand, who obviously has had many fertile thoughts along this path, but-

• 24:12Sonal?

  Stuart Brand, who is the father of the Whole Earth Catalog and now runs-

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And the Long Island Foundation. Yeah, but this idea of looking at our existence in a way that really zooms out from our current moment, which is certainly a relief in this particular historical moment we find ourselves in.

• 24:26Sonal?

  There's this interesting juxtaposition between past and present- Yeah. -that's so fascinating, both mechanically and then historically, but even down to some other random details, like you mentioned, the first most popular station, Arctic Station, besides this one, is the one in Alaska. Yeah. And that's the one place that Amazon Prime delivers to. I do, I was struck by that too. I was like, wow!

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Doesn't that sound awesome?

• 24:46Sonal?

  Yeah, that is so awesome. And it's so funny, because the other Arctic Station, it's like, okay, we don't have Amazon Prime, but we have Apple. Yeah. It's like a little competitive.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  They really go all in on it, too. The town that's close to Pleistocene Park is like a really depressed mining town. And so I was wondering, like, you must have poachers. And he said, well, no, you know, they hunt in all the forests around it, but they don't hunt in the park. And I was like, well, why not? And he said, like, you know, personal relationships. And then he says to me, like, you know, when the leader of the local mafia died, you know, I gave the opening remarks at his funeral.

• 25:17Sonal?

  I mean, it is an interesting thing about science meeting society. Like, when you have science not in a lab and playing out in the physical environment, you are going to bump into things like cultural realities, poachers. One of my favorite things I've ever done in my life was go to this Jurassic Park of India. It was just a few years ago that I went. It's called Balasineor. And it's the world's most ancient enclave of dinosaur eggs. Whoa. Yeah. And I found it by accident, because I was doing like some local research. And I rented a special truck. It took us forever to get there, even though it's so close, because it's on these downwindy roads. And the thing that was so amazing is you see these dinosaur eggs fossilize in the rock. But all the dinosaur pieces, the whole way that Balasinar was found is because some local women in huts nearby were using it for plates and bowls. Oh, my gosh.

• 26:01Sonal?

  I had no idea of the value. And they actually then put it on the market. Some scientists came across it and then all these scientists descended. But you have the government, you have the locals, you have the scientists, and you have all these characters. And one thing that did strike me in your piece is that you were kind of left unanswered is who's paying for all this?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  They've got NSF funding and funding from the Russian government at the moment. And they do that partly because if you want to study the permafrost or the Arctic in general, you need to have these various outposts. And so it's worth our money to do that. The more interesting question, even than the funding to me, which you were kind of getting to when you were talking about this lovely story about the dinosaur eggs in India, was that for this to expand, like Yellowstone right now, which is a thing that everyone loves, right? Like, you can't get people to say bad things about Yellowstone. People universally acknowledge it as being an amazing thing in the world. But like, its expansion impinges on real people's lives, you know, because all of a sudden, big predators are showing up in their backyard, et cetera. And so for something like Pleistocene Park to be successful, it's going to have to interact with and make peace with the human world

• 27:01Speaker 01

  on like quite a grand scale if they are going to do all of northern Siberia and Alaska and the Yukon, et cetera, et cetera. And that as being representative of the larger tension we have of trying to figure out how we coexist with wild animals and with the wild in general.

• 27:15Sonal?

  There's a socioeconomic component, too, because you think of these towns that don't have a lot of money to survive. They don't have a lot of economic opportunity. Why wouldn't you want to sell like ivory, you know, from these tusks and make some money for yourself to survive your family? Or dinosaur egg china. Right. And so it's really striking when you do think about this question of who funds it, because there's a lot of science and money that goes into this. And there's just a lot of trade offs that people have to make. And I just, anyway, another open question is like, this project is so radical in scheme and scope. That is anyone else doing anything this ambitious in the world, anywhere?

• 27:48Hanne Tidnam?

  Well, you compared it to one other major climate project, right?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So, yeah, there are geoengineering projects or proposals. Also, the American Prairie Reserve is another large grassland rewilding project. It doesn't have sexy extinct creatures to sell it.

• 28:05Hanne Tidnam?

  Right.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Or like a major climate change mitigation strategy to sell it. But it's really interesting and it's like part of Montana, right?

• 28:12Hanne Tidnam?

  Tell us, I would love to hear the story behind this story.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Funny, funny story is going up there, this is like a protected area. And so you have to get official Russian permission, not just like a regular visa, just to actually go to this region. So we get there and I'm with, I had a really good friend of mine, Grant Slater, who's an amazingly talented documentary filmmaker. We kind of worked together. I knew that he would have this sort of deep time sensibility alongside me. And so I was really excited to see what he would do with it. And it was also a really interesting creative tension, being out with a filmmaker, because he has things he needs to get, things I need.

• 28:44Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 28:45Hanne Tidnam?

  It's a different kind of storytelling.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Grant's paperwork, his official permission, had not come in on time. And so we had to like go get, we went and got questioned at the, at the military base by, you know, these Russian soldiers who are like in full fatigues, pretty big dudes. And what was funny about it was Grant had lost one of his suitcases in Moscow. He had to buy clothes like that at the airport. And the shirt he was wearing during our interrogation was a shirt that said in Russian, "Russia is a great power."

• 29:16Sonal?

  It's like a scene out of a comedy movie.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  I was devastated when I got kind.

• 29:21Hanne Tidnam?

  They thought he was a spy, right? Like they were like, you're obviously, and he's wearing this T-shirt that says Russia.

• 29:26Sonal?

  Even worse, they asked him if he was a spy.

• 29:28Hanne Tidnam?

  That's right.

• 29:29Sonal?

  A spy is gonna say, yes, I'm a spy. This is crazy. So just to close, I think the most striking thing about this piece, that this idea sounds so crazy at first. The thing that really struck me is that the, that the region that you were in was once famous for beaming propaganda throughout the country of Russia. And at the same time, like there's an element of marketing that has to happen in this idea, like for someone to convince other people, to like drive people towards their vision.

• 29:55Hanne Tidnam?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Sonal?

  To get them to believe it.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I'm also captured by this question of how, you know, when you have these really esoteric science projects that are tied into questions of human meaning in all kinds of different ways.

• 30:07Sonal?

  And sometimes cults of personality as well.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And cults of personalities. And how do you, how do you kind of make that? I mean, something that Elon Musk is really adept at.

• 30:16Sonal?

  I remember you did that Q and A with them in Eon a long time ago.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, he's really good at packaging crazy sounding ideas and like getting lots of governments, investors to throw lots of money into them and while managing to keep control of them. Part of that is the narrative, right? He does hook it into like larger questions and existential concerns in a way that I don't, I don't think is just manipulative. I think he sincerely believes those things.

• 30:37Hanne Tidnam?

  And I also think a lot of it is like just the saying like, this is happening now. Like sort of making us realize like, actually, this is happening now. You know, that's a lot of turning it around to feel possible, basically.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  People are working on it. It's a thing. You can go there.

• 30:51Hanne Tidnam?

  It's a thing. Yeah.

• 30:52Sonal?

  Well, and also that it takes time because one of the most telling anecdotes in your piece, because there, you know, there's a whole debate, and we don't have to go into this podcast, nor do we have time, about climate change deniers, climate change science, what's legit, what's not, whole other conversation. But what I found fascinating was that science initially rejected Dr. J's paper about the dangers, you know, in the warming. Right. And in 2006, the journal then asked him, he didn't have to approach them again, to resubmit it. And it was published later that year.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:21Sonal?

  And that just goes to show there's also a right time for some of this. Like, there's a readiness that has to happen. Thank you for joining the A C C N Z podcast.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for having me on.

• 31:28Hanne Tidnam?

  Thank you.