“The Department of the Interior is excited about the potential of ‘de-extinction’ technology,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum wrote on X.
Burgum does not understand conservation. Burgum suggests that the concept of de-extinction can “serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”
“Since the dawn of our nation, it has been innovation, not regulation, that has spawned American greatness,” he said.
In essence, Burgum is arguing that economic innovation should take precedence over regulation and traditional conservation. That is already a questionable position, but Burgum takes it a step further.
“It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation. Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list — not additions. The only thing we’d like to see go extinct is the need for an endangered species list to exist,” Burgum wrote in a post on X.
Without context, this might sound like a reasonable goal. Of course, no one wants an endangered species list — the purpose of conservation is to keep animals off it. But in the context of promoting de-extinction, this line becomes deeply unsettling.
Burgum is endorsing a world where the extinction of endangered animals is acceptable because, supposedly, we can just bring them back. This idea is horrendously misguided for two big reasons.
First, we do not want animals to go extinct. That is the whole point of the endangered species list. The goal should be to protect these species before they disappear, not to let them die off and play God with whatever technology we have left.
The second problem is that the so-called dire wolves brought back to life are not actually dire wolves. Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences “successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction.” But that’s not what the actual science says.
“Colossal’s critics have pointed out that, out of thousands of genetic differences that distinguish dire wolves from gray wolves, the company made only a handful of edits focused on recapitulating obvious physical traits such as fur color and texture,” Phie Jacobs, a writer for Science, said in an article critical of the tech company.
Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute, put it perfectly: “Would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human?”
Consider two of the most famous endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle and the West Indian manatee. If the sea turtle went extinct and we altered a tortoise’s genes to help it swim, would that really make it the same as the white-skinned turtle? If we took a dolphin and made it fatter, could we honestly call it a manatee?
In summary, Burgum’s statements, at best, paint him as someone dangerously misinformed about conservation and science. At worst, they reveal his true role as a grotesque mix of Cruella de Ville and Dr. Frankenstein, killing animals for money only to play God and bring them back as monsters.