The Future of Extinction

Abstract

As the global extinction crisis accelerates, conservationists and policy makers increasingly draw upon advanced biotechnologies such as reproductive cloning, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and DNA barcoding in the urgent effort to save species. This book considers the ethical, cultural and social implications of using these technoscientific tools for wildlife conservation. Drawing upon sources ranging from science to mass media to literature, I focus on the stories we tell about extinction and the meanings we ascribe to nature and technology. These narratives, far from being ephemeral to either politics or conservation, embody our fears and dreams about the future of nature and our place within it. Our increasing reliance on biotechnological tools is a matter of practical consequence, but also a platform for constructing a futuristic wilderness repopulated with such wonders as Tasmanian tigers, mammoths and moas. Biotechnology thus shapes the wildernesses we can envision and affects which species are likely to survive and even those which might one day be revived. This chapter begins with the story of the first known marine mammal to vanish in the twenty-first century, the Yangtze River dolphin, and then introduces the major themes and research questions of this book. The chapter concludes with a preliminary discussion of the emerging discourse of de-extinction.

The idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as creator even in living nature, forming it eventually according to his will.

—Jacques Loeb, letter to Ernst Mach, 26 February 1890 (Pauly 1987)