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Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, we have a special episode for you

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Speaker 1: today from How We Survive, an award winning podcast from

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Speaker 1: Marketplace about the messy business of climate solutions. Hosted by

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Speaker 1: Amy Scott. This season explores large scale geoengineering interventions, which

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Speaker 1: some people think are the last hope in the fight

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Speaker 1: against climate change. In this episode, Amy explores one of

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Speaker 1: the wildest climate interventions to date, de extinction. She takes

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Speaker 1: a tour of Colossal Labs, a ten billion dollar Dallas

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Speaker 1: startup betting it can reverse engineer extinction with plans to

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Speaker 1: turn pigeons into Dodos and Asian elephants into wooly Mammett's.

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Speaker 1: But just because we can mess with nature, does that

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Speaker 1: mean we should. I really loved this episode. It's stuck

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Speaker 1: with me for days after listening, and I think you'll

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Speaker 1: find it interesting too.

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Speaker 2: And of course you.

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Speaker 1: Can find more How We Survive on your favorite podcast

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Speaker 1: app Enjoy.

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Speaker 2: Oh my god, they're so cute? Do they have names?

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Speaker 3: Uh?

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Speaker 4: Chippindale.

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Speaker 3: Inside a small glass cage, two mice are running around.

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Speaker 3: They've got a little wooden house to play in a

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Speaker 3: water bottle. It's pretty much your normal mouse habitat. But

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Speaker 3: even though they're acting like typical mice. They don't look

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Speaker 3: like them. They're fuzzy, kind of poofed up. They've got shaggy,

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Speaker 3: golden hair that's dense and soft.

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Speaker 2: This is their first trip to the podcast studio.

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Speaker 4: This is not their first podcast.

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Speaker 5: Theo he've bear at.

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Speaker 2: Least once before. Celebrity mice. Yeah, they're so jaded.

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Speaker 3: The reason Chip and Dale are VIPs is because they're

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Speaker 3: a testament to the potential of a new complicated science

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Speaker 3: de extinction. In Dallas, Texas, a company called Colossal Biosciences

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Speaker 3: is on a mission to bring animals back from the dead.

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Speaker 3: Their biggest target the wooly mammoth, which when extinct around

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Speaker 3: four thousand years ago. Colossal claims that using tiny bits

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Speaker 3: of mammoth DNA preserved over thousands of years, they can

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Speaker 3: use gene editing to bring the giant creature back, but

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Speaker 3: they have to start small. Ben Lamb, the CEO of Colossal,

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Speaker 3: explains how Chip and Dale got their luxurious fur.

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Speaker 5: We identified core genes in the mammoth genome that relate

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Speaker 5: to hair thickness, color density, how it grows, and whatnot,

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Speaker 5: and we applied all of those into the mouse equivalent

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Speaker 5: of them, and so what we notice about them is

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Speaker 5: obviously their coat thickness, obviously their coat color. Behaviorally, we

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Speaker 5: didn't adjust anything, so they behaved like mice, right, just

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Speaker 5: cuter versions of mice, and.

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Speaker 3: What they learn from creating cuter mice could help bring

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Speaker 3: back the mammoth. Ben comes from the startup world. He'd

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Speaker 3: founded or co founded a bunch of other tech companies

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Speaker 3: before starting Colossal in twenty twenty one. Today he's wearing

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Speaker 3: a shirt that looks like a concert tee, but instead

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Speaker 3: of a band, it has a picture of a dire wolf,

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Speaker 3: the first creature that Colossal claims to have successfully de extincted.

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Speaker 5: It actually says original chur date eighty five hundred BC

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Speaker 5: Encore performance twenty twenty five.

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Speaker 3: And it's not just about bringing animals back. Ben says

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Speaker 3: that with Colossal's tech, they'll be able to prevent all

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Speaker 3: the losses yet to.

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Speaker 5: Come, whether people wake up and think about it every

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Speaker 5: day in their lives.

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Speaker 4: We are in the sixth mass extinction.

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Speaker 2: I'm Amy Scott.

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Speaker 3: Welcome to How We Survive, a podcast from Marketplace about

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Speaker 3: the messy business of climate solutions. This is episode five,

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Speaker 3: in which we're asking just because we can mess with nature,

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Speaker 3: should we. For centuries, we have unintentionally, in many ways,

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Speaker 3: irrevocably damaged the natural world. So far this season, we've

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Speaker 3: spoken to a lot of people who think it's our

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Speaker 3: duty to try and fix it, including Ben Lamb.

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Speaker 4: Look, I think it's unethical not to do what we're doing.

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Speaker 3: Colossal's vision of the future is kind of seductive. If

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Speaker 3: we figure out how to bring animals back from the dead, nothing.

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Speaker 2: Ever has to die.

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Speaker 3: Maybe all of the fossil fuels we've burned and trees

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Speaker 3: we've cut down could be cleared from our collective karma.

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Speaker 3: But not everyone shares Ben's vision of a tech enabled utopia.

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Speaker 6: Unfortunately, we are in this so deep that there's really

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Speaker 6: no turning back, and that's very, very ugly realization.

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Speaker 3: That's Elizabeth Colbert, journalist and author of Under a White Sky,

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Speaker 3: a book about the many ways, big and small, that

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Speaker 3: humans have intervened in nature and the unintended consequences. In

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Speaker 3: this episode, we'll talk to Elizabeth about whether, after the

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Speaker 3: mess we've made of the planet, we have a responsibility

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Speaker 3: to put it back the way it was. But first

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Speaker 3: we'll take a tour of Colossal. The startup looking to

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Speaker 3: the past to try to preserve the future.

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Speaker 6: Welcome to Colossal Labs.

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Speaker 7: We are going to be starting with the wooly mammoth project,

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Speaker 7: which is our flag shit species. So the wooly mammoth

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Speaker 7: was the first species.

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Speaker 3: Sarah Ord, director of Species Restoration, is giving us a

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Speaker 3: private tour of colossals shiny new headquarters in Dallas, complete

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Speaker 3: with state.

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Speaker 2: Of the art labs, a life.

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Speaker 3: Size animatronic direwolf, and of course the podcast studio for

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Speaker 3: all of Chip and Dale's media appearances. We make our

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Speaker 3: way down a long hallway with walls covered in diagrams

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Speaker 3: of ancient creatures. Doors to labs branch off the hall,

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Speaker 3: each one with scientists working on a different piece of

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Speaker 3: the de extinction puzzle. Michael Abrams leads the mammoth project.

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Speaker 8: Our first step is to sequence the wooly memoth genome,

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Speaker 8: and we've got multiple samples. You can see here this

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Speaker 8: is a wooly memoth moler. It's about the size of

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Speaker 8: a brick, and we take a little piece of that

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Speaker 8: and we sequence.

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Speaker 3: It using preserved wooly mammoth samples like a tooth or

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Speaker 3: a bone fragment. They scrape off a little piece that

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Speaker 3: contains ancient DNA. Then they sequence it, figuring out as

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Speaker 3: much as they can about which specific mammoth genes code

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Speaker 3: for important physical traits like curved tusks.

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Speaker 2: And dense wooly fur.

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Speaker 3: Eventually, they plan to try and edit a few genes

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Speaker 3: in an Asian elephant, the mammoth's closest living relative, to

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Speaker 3: produce those physical traits, creating a modern day mammoth, or

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Speaker 3: at least an Asian elephant that looks a lot like one.

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Speaker 7: It's also a lot of fun just to try and

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Speaker 7: figure out the genetic underpinnings of the phenotypes in these animals,

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Speaker 7: because the Dodo had.

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Speaker 3: Some down the Hall and a Keat is working on

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Speaker 3: Avian genome engineering with a goal of bringing back the

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Speaker 3: Dodo by modifying its relative, the common street pigeon.

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Speaker 7: We've identified a lot of the edits that we think

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Speaker 7: are going to be most important for producing a Dodo.

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Speaker 7: How do you get this much larger bird, this weird beak,

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Speaker 7: a certain type of feathers, those kinds of things. That's

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Speaker 7: a really fun project too.

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Speaker 2: What do you think Darwin would think?

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Speaker 4: Oh boy, I don't know.

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Speaker 2: I be excited.

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Speaker 3: After we leave the labs. I have a lot of

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Speaker 3: questions for Colossal's CEO, Ben Lamb, So why do this?

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Speaker 3: I mean, other than it being kind of cool to

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Speaker 3: bring back the wooly mammoth, why do this?

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Speaker 4: Wine?

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Speaker 5: We think that doing this creates a lot of value,

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Speaker 5: right because we are in a private company, So we're

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Speaker 5: building a lot of technologies, and we're iterating faster than

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Speaker 5: anyone else in medicine or synthetic biology.

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Speaker 3: Technologies, he says, could help develop vaccines and other advances

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Speaker 3: in human and animal healthcare. The company has been valued

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Speaker 3: at over ten billion dollars and is backed by some

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Speaker 3: buzzy investors Peter Jackson from the Lord of the Rings movie,

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Speaker 3: Tom Brady, Paris Hiltan, and in q Tel, the investing

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Speaker 3: arm of the CIA.

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Speaker 5: Secondly, we open source all of the technologies for conservation,

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Speaker 5: whether people wake up and think about it every day

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Speaker 5: in their lives.

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Speaker 4: We are in the sixth mass extinction.

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Speaker 5: So we need new tools to help combat that crisis.

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Speaker 5: And then we separately launch our Colossal Foundation, which has

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Speaker 5: one hundred million dollars of additional capital that will use

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Speaker 5: to fund other researchers to develop new tools for conservation.

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Speaker 4: So second is impact, so it's.

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Speaker 3: The subject of some debate. Many scientists agree with Ben

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Speaker 3: that we're currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, one brought

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Speaker 3: on by humans, climate change, deforestation, and overfishing, agriculture, hunting.

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Speaker 3: All of these activities have resulted in an extinction rate

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Speaker 3: some estimate is one hundred to one thousand times greater

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Speaker 3: than normal, and once a species is endangered, it can

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Speaker 3: be hard to bring it back from the brink. The

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Speaker 3: smaller and animal's population gets, the more vulnerable it is

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Speaker 3: to the consequences of inbreeding. Gene editing could be a

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Speaker 3: real game changer. Introducing more genetic variety to struggling populations

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Speaker 3: could make them stronger, more resistant to defects or disease,

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Speaker 3: and if those efforts fail, Colossal is trying to build

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Speaker 3: the ultimate Plan B.

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Speaker 5: I think that the same technologies that we're using, including

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Speaker 5: creating new ways of cryopreservation and cloning frien dagered species,

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Speaker 5: are going to be absolutely required at the extinction rates

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Speaker 5: that we currently have.

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Speaker 3: Cloning and cryo preservation it's some very science fiction y stuff.

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Speaker 3: Far from Dallas, they're also working with Dubai's Museum of

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Speaker 3: the Future to create a biovault for endangered species, a

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Speaker 3: place to store genetic material so that no animal ever

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Speaker 3: has to go the way of the Dodo.

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Speaker 5: I don't think that human caused climate events are going

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Speaker 5: to slow down, and so I do think it's important

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Speaker 5: that we have mitigation strategies against that, which includes the

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Speaker 5: extinction tools right, because I'd rather have a the extinction

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Speaker 5: toolkit than not needed the needed the extinction toolkit.

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Speaker 4: And not have it.

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Speaker 5: I think fundamentally, you know, we can't think of a

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Speaker 5: lot of reasons why not.

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Speaker 4: To do this.

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Speaker 2: Okay, I admit it.

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Speaker 3: It would be pretty cool to see a bully mammoth,

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Speaker 3: but as we've seen over and over again, when we

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Speaker 3: mess with nature, the effects can be unpredictable. The habitat

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Speaker 3: mammoths once roamed a vast grassland known as the mammoth Step,

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Speaker 3: no longer exists. Where would they live and how would

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Speaker 3: their presence affect other life? And even if Colossal succeeds,

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Speaker 3: what makes this new creature a mammoth and not just

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Speaker 3: a mammothy elephant?

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Speaker 2: And what are they bringing back? Really?

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Speaker 6: The extinction? You know, that's a form of nostalgia. We're

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Speaker 6: just going to bring these things back and everything's going

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Speaker 6: to be, you know, just the way it was. Well, that's,

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Speaker 6: you know, obviously not true.

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Speaker 2: That's after the break.

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Speaker 3: After reporting on all of these controversial interventions this season,

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Speaker 3: I was eager to talk with Elizabeth Colbert. She's a

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Speaker 3: climate journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Her book Under

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Speaker 3: a White Sky goes deep on some of the topics

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Speaker 3: we've covered this season, including humans' outlandish efforts to rescue

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Speaker 3: other species after driving them to the brink. So I

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Speaker 3: had to know what she made of all these attempts

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Speaker 3: to save the planet and our natural environment by further

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Speaker 3: messing with it, starting with colossal plan to bring back

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Speaker 3: the wooly mammoth.

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Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, those efforts always get a tremendous amount

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Speaker 6: of attention. They're really interesting, they're fascinating, they're definitely thought provoking.

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Speaker 6: But we are very still very far. I don't want

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Speaker 6: to say we will never be able to do it,

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Speaker 6: but we're still very far. First of all, to in

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Speaker 6: order to bring back and extinct species, you have to

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Speaker 6: have the complete genome. In the case of the mammoth.

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Speaker 6: You know, we have good genomes, but I'm not sure

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Speaker 6: anyone would say, we really have the exact genome, and

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Speaker 6: you have to make many, many, many changes between their

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Speaker 6: closest relatives, which in this case are Asian elephants, in

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Speaker 6: order to actually bring back a mammoth. And then you

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Speaker 6: have the question that we don't really have We don't

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Speaker 6: have any mammoths, So whatever we brought back would be

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Speaker 6: you know, it might have a mammoth genome, but would

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Speaker 6: it act like a mammoth. So all of these are

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Speaker 6: really really big questions that often get overlooked in the

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Speaker 6: sort of hype around bringing back extinctpeces.

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Speaker 3: Even though so many species have been lost, some to

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Speaker 3: human activities, some not. Elizabeth writes that we as humans

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Speaker 3: don't want to be the asteroid that kills off more.

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Speaker 3: One example, the Devil's Whole Pupfish.

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Speaker 6: Well, the pupfish story is a wonderful story. It's its

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Speaker 6: tiny little fish about an inch long, beautiful little bluefish

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Speaker 6: that lives in one place, in one place only this

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Speaker 6: geothermally heated pool in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

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Speaker 6: And you know, that fish was one of the first

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Speaker 6: animals listed under the Endangered Species Act, and so that

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Speaker 6: fish is protected.

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Speaker 3: In her book, Elizabeth tells this wild story of how

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Speaker 3: to save this little pupfish that only lives in one

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Speaker 3: water filled cavern called Devil's Hole. The US government built

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Speaker 3: a four and a half million dollar replica of the

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Speaker 3: fish's habitat to breed a backup colony and stabilize the population.

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Speaker 3: It's a prime example of how humans will do pretty

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Speaker 3: much anything but change our ways.

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Speaker 6: But we see this time and time again that we

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Speaker 6: let something happen and we bring a creature or a

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Speaker 6: plant very close to the edge of extinction, and then

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Speaker 6: suddenly people get really interested in it. But I think

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Speaker 6: that the lesson, the profound lesson which we don't seem

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Speaker 6: very keen on learning, is you know, we should be

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Speaker 6: preventing species from getting to the brink, because once they

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Speaker 6: do get to the brink, you have all sorts of

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Speaker 6: pretty obvious difficulties in bringing them back. You just have

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Speaker 6: a very tiny population and something that you've done has

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Speaker 6: made it very difficult for them to survive. And in

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Speaker 6: the case of the Devil's Hull pupfish, it was pumping

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Speaker 6: groundwater out of that area that really started to mess

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Speaker 6: with their one little tiny habitat.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, you also write about geoengineering, from carbon removal to

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Speaker 3: stratospheric aerosol injection. Where did you land on whether you

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Speaker 3: think these approaches are going to be necessary to preserve

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Speaker 3: anything like the climate that we have grown used to.

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Speaker 6: I think, given the amounts of CO two that we're

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Speaker 6: pumping into the atmosphere, carbon removal is only going to

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Speaker 6: be possible and useful at the margins. It's not solving

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Speaker 6: anything now. Geoengineering solar geoengineering, which would have a cooling effect,

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Speaker 6: but which would also have a lot of other effects.

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Speaker 6: That is, you know, when you reach that point, you

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Speaker 6: have really really reached a dangerous point. Are we going

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Speaker 6: to get to a point where some country or some

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Speaker 6: group of countries decides this is unbearable. We really have

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Speaker 6: to do something, and the only thing we can do

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Speaker 6: on a short timescale. It's a very you know, worrisome

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Speaker 6: thing about solar engineering. It's really your only tool that

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Speaker 6: can work on you know, sort of a year to

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Speaker 6: year basis. I think it's not at all out of

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Speaker 6: the question that we will reach that point.

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Speaker 3: The title of Elizabeth's book Under a White Sky refers

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Speaker 3: to a possible side effect of stratospheric aerosol injection. Some

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Speaker 3: scientists have predicted a whitening of the sky during the day.

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Speaker 2: I think you.

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Speaker 3: Noted that solar geo engineering, stratospheric aerosol injection. There are

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Speaker 3: gentler terms, more soothing terms, and.

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Speaker 6: Lately soil radiation management.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, lately, I think they're they're trying to go with

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Speaker 3: sunlight reflection.

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Speaker 6: It sounds, it sounds lovely. It does sound lovely, and

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Speaker 6: I think that's always a bad sign. I guess when

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Speaker 6: we keep changing the names of something to make it

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Speaker 6: seem less threatening. I mean, this couldn't be bigger. Really,

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Speaker 6: it's very appealing, obviously to think there's some get out

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Speaker 6: of jail free card. We've saved ourselves from disaster before,

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Speaker 6: and we'll do it again at the last minute. From

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Speaker 6: a practical standpoint, when you just think about all the

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Speaker 6: geopolitics involved here, that doesn't seem very likely. Should we

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Speaker 6: be having these conversations, Should we be doing out there

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Speaker 6: doing field research? Those are really serious questions. Some scientists

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Speaker 6: I have a lot of respect for would say, yes,

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Speaker 6: you know, we're screwed if we don't. Twenty years from now,

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Speaker 6: you might need this tool. And if you don't have it,

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Speaker 6: you know, that's going to be bad, bad, worse than

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Speaker 6: having it, And some scientists I also have a lot

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Speaker 6: of respect for, would say that's absurd. You know, this

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Speaker 6: is the most dangerous thing you could possibly do. We

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Speaker 6: shouldn't even be talking about it because talking about it

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Speaker 6: suggests that there is this magical cure, and there is

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Speaker 6: no magical cure. So let's just go about, you know,

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Speaker 6: the hard work of reducing carbon emissions.

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Speaker 2: So I love this line in your book.

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Speaker 3: The choice is not between what is and what was,

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Speaker 3: but between what is and.

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Speaker 2: What will be, which often enough is nothing.

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Speaker 3: Can you talk about that distinction and why it's important

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Speaker 3: as we think about engineering nature.

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Speaker 6: Well, I think, you know, there's a lot of nostalgia

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Speaker 6: in the environmental world, like we're going to bring things

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Speaker 6: back to the way they were, and we're not bringing

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Speaker 6: things back even if we, you know, maintain a habitat

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Speaker 6: for some creature or another, which would certainly be a

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Speaker 6: good idea, it's going to be affected by warming. Everything's

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Speaker 6: going to be on the move. And that's another reason

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Speaker 6: I would also bring us back to the subject of

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Speaker 6: de extinction. You know, that's a form of nostalgia. We're

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Speaker 6: just going to bring these things back and everything's going

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Speaker 6: to be, you know, just the way it was. Well,

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Speaker 6: that's you know, obviously not true. And so I was

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Speaker 6: trying to argue that both these views that there's some

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Speaker 6: techno utopia out there, that we're going to technologize our

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Speaker 6: way to some happy conclusion after mucking around with the

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Speaker 6: entire planet, that's probably an illusion. And it's also probably

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Speaker 6: an illusion unfortunately that simply by stopping doing certain things

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Speaker 6: or that we can restore things to their quote unquote

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Speaker 6: natural state. Unfortunately, we are in this so deep that

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Speaker 6: there's really no turning back, and that's very very ugly realization.

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Speaker 3: I'm curious if you feel, if you feel you can

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Speaker 3: share this, that we have a duty as a species.

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Speaker 2: To try to counteract some of the harm that we've caused.

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Speaker 6: Well, I that's sort of the ultimate question. Yes, certainly

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Speaker 6: we have a duty to try to counteract it. I

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Speaker 6: think the question at the heart of Under White Skies

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Speaker 6: is how do we do that? And are we really

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Speaker 6: cap of doing that in a way that won't do

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Speaker 6: more harm than good. You know, one of the lessons

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Speaker 6: that we keep learning or not learning, depending on how

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Speaker 6: you want to look at it, is how complicated. These

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Speaker 6: natural systems are, and we stick our hands in them

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Speaker 6: and we want one thing. We want, you know, to

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Speaker 6: grow one crop. We want to propagate one you know,

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Speaker 6: cows or cheap or whatever, and not worry about the

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Speaker 6: rest of it. You know, there's a very famous quote

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Speaker 6: from John mu Or I'm not getting exactly right, but

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Speaker 6: when we try to pick up one thing by itself,

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Speaker 6: we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

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Speaker 6: And the natural world is a product of evolution, which

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Speaker 6: is a random process over you know, billions of years.

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Speaker 6: We have gotten the planet that we have and that

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Speaker 6: we love or should love. And to think that, you know,

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Speaker 6: even with all the tools that we have at hand,

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Speaker 6: that we're somehow going to be able to improve on

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Speaker 6: it or do exactly what we want to it and

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Speaker 6: not have that come back and bite us is a

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Speaker 6: kind of hubris. And the way we've been operating, and

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Speaker 6: the way we are operating even more vigorously, you know

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Speaker 6: right now at this particular moment, is with a lack

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Speaker 6: of humility that I think is going to prove to

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Speaker 6: be are very dangerous. Let's put it.

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Speaker 2: I'll just leave it there. You're going to say, are

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Speaker 2: undoing I was heading there. Yeah, me too.

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Speaker 3: Thanks for listening, and as always, if you like what

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Speaker 3: you hear, please rate, review and share us with a friend.

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Speaker 3: All season, we've been asking what you want to know

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Speaker 3: about geo engineering and other climate interventions. Next week we

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Speaker 3: answer your questions. I'm your host, Amy Scott. Rachel Kahn

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Speaker 3: produced this episode with production support from Hailey Hirshman, our

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Speaker 3: senior producer. Caitlin esh is deputy managing editor. She also

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Speaker 3: edited this episode Special thanks this week to toluwani O Sibamawo,

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Speaker 3: Daisy Pelacios, and Marissa Cabrera. Scoring sound design and mixing

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Speaker 3: by Charlton Thorpe. Our theme music is by Wonderleaf. Bridget

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Speaker 3: Badner is Director of podcasts, Kelly Silvera is News director,

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Speaker 3: Joanne Griffith is Chief Content Officer, and Neil Scarborough is

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Speaker 3: the Vice president and general manager of Marketplace