
‘De-extinction' isn't real, but the conservation questions it raises are
This story was originally published by High Country News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration
What was the dire wolf? Like many species lost before living memory and known only from remains, the 1854 discovery of a jawbone from this extinct North American predator was more suggestion than revelation. 'Certain naturalists may regard the fossil as an indication of a variety only of the Canis lupus,' or gray wolf, wrote paleontologist Joseph Leidy, describing what he tentatively called Canis primaevus. ' (Of) the correctness of such a view,' he added, 'I shall not attempt to decide.'
In early April, 169 years after Leidy's cautious account, the venture-capital-funded startup Colossal Biosciences showed no such hesitation in announcing the species' purported resurrection in its laboratory. 'For the first time in human history, (we have) successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction,' its website boasted. The company had used gene-editing technology to create three wolf pups that, according to its scientists, recreate some of the physical characteristics of the long-gone species.
After an initial flurry of favorable press, the skeptics weighed in. Biologists argued that a handful of genetic changes to a cloned gray wolf — a species from which the dire wolf diverged 5 million years ago — did not add up to 'de-exinction.' 'The three animals produced by Colossal are not dire wolves. Nor are they proxies of the dire wolf,' the members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Canid Specialist Group concluded. Even if the company had recreated something much closer to the species, said critics, the production of a handful of individuals destined for life in captivity would be far from an ecologically meaningful accomplishment. Can an animal whose prey, habitat and climate no longer exist ever really flourish again?
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — who, as South Dakota governor, oversaw a $3 million grant to Colossal — praised the company, however, and used its dubious success to attack the Endangered Species Act. 'Since the dawn of our nation, it has been innovation — not regulation — that has spawned American greatness,' Burgum posted on X. '(De-extinction) can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.'
Burgum's interest comes at a perilous time for the Endangered Species Act, which is currently in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration. A January executive order sought to resurrect the 'God Squad,' a committee empowered to overrule the law when species protections prevent development. More recently, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed redefining the law's definition of 'harm' to species so that it no longer includes habitat loss. The impact on vulnerable species and ecosystems remains uncertain. What is clearer is that gene editing and Colossal's so-called de-extinction technology pose new ethical and philosophical challenges to one of our bedrock environmental laws.
What we call 'species' are an attempt to fit the complex, untidy reality of nature into convenient categories, and biologists frequently use new data (or new interpretations of existing data) to redefine where one species ends and another begins. Recognizing this, the Endangered Species Act was originally written to apply to 'any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature,' intentionally vague language meant to allow agency scientists and managers to adapt to evolving science.
Species definitions become even more complicated when individuals from two such 'distinct population segments' interbreed and produce hybrids. Hybrids are natural phenomena, but if their interbreeding continues unchecked, they can become threats to the integrity of their parent species. Unsurprisingly, Fish and Wildlife has struggled to clarify if and how the Endangered Species Act applies to hybrids, and its policies remain ambiguous.
In a future where gene editing is increasingly prominent in biodiversity conservation — and companies like Colossal might create chimeric organisms with traits of endangered species but no direct connection with their inspiration — the risks of such ambiguity are growing. Would the release of a tankful of desert pupfish lookalikes meet the recovery goals for the species, one of the world's most endangered fish? Would the propagation of transgenic, disease-resistant whitebark pines counteract the loss of their original lineage to the blister rust that now plagues the species? For now, the Endangered Species Act and the policies that shape its interpretation have little to say on the subject.
These questions are difficult because they are as much philosophical as biological and legal. There is something instructive in Joseph Leidy's uncertainty: The messiness of biological diversity can be readily exploited by bad-faith actors like Burgum, but the processes responsible for it cannot be so easily faked. Species, however they are defined, are the dynamic products of biological evolution, rooted in landscapes and ecological communities. In a future where agencies can once again work to strengthen rather than weaken the Endangered Species Act, policies on hybrid and transgenic organisms should prioritize this fundamental generative force — not by the outright rejection of genetic modification as a conservation tool but by recognizing the central importance of unbroken chains of ancestry and kinship, produced over centuries and millennia by self-willed organisms. By this standard, Colossal's dire wolf project is a failure.
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National Observer
14 hours ago
- National Observer
The smoke from Canada's wildfires may be even more toxic than usual
This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration More than 200 wildfires are blazing across central and western Canada, half of which are out of control because they're so hard for crews to access, forcing 27,000 people to evacuate. Even those nowhere near the wildfires are suffering as smoke swirls around Canada and wafts south, creating hazardous air quality all over the midwestern and eastern parts of the United States. The smoke is even reaching Europe. As the climate changes, the far north is drying and warming, which means wildfires are getting bigger and more intense. The area burned in Canada is now the second largest on record for this time of year, trailing behind the brutal wildfire season of 2023. That year, the amount of carbon blazed into the atmosphere was about three times the country's fossil fuel emissions. And the more carbon that's emitted from wildfires — in Canada and elsewhere — the faster the planetary warming, and the worse the fires. 'There's obviously the climate feedback concern,' said Mike Waddington, an environmental scientist at McMaster University in Ontario who studies Canada's forests. 'But increasingly we're also concerned about the smoke.' That's because there's much more to wildfire smoke than charred sticks and leaves, especially where these blazes are burning in Canada. The country's forests have long been mined, operations that loaded soils and waterways with toxic metals like lead and mercury, especially before clean-air standards kicked in 50 years ago. Now everyone downwind of these wildfires may have to contend with that legacy and those pollutants, in addition to all the other nasties inherent in wildfire smoke, which are known to exacerbate respiratory and cardiac problems. 'You have there the burning of these organic soils resulting in a lot of carbon and a lot of particulate matter,' said Waddington. 'Now you have this triple whammy, where you have the metals remobilized in addition to that.' What exactly is lurking in the smoke from Canadian wildfires will require further testing by scientists. But an area of particular concern is around the mining city of Flin Flon, in Manitoba, which is known to have elevated levels of toxic metals in the landscape, said Colin McCarter, an environmental scientist who studies pollutants at Ontario's Nipissing University. Flin Flon's 5,000 residents have been evacuated as a wildfire approaches, though so far no structures have been destroyed. The smoke from Canada's wildfires may be even more toxic than usual. #Wildfires #WildfireSmoke But a fire doesn't need to directly burn mining operations to mobilize toxicants. For example, in Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories, gold mining operations between 1934 and 2004 spread arsenic as far as 18 miles away, adding to a landscape with an already high concentration of naturally occurring arsenic. In a paper published last year, Waddington and McCarter estimated that between 1972 and 2023, wildfires around Yellowknife fired up to 840,000 pounds of arsenic into the atmosphere. Arsenic is a known carcinogen associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and developmental problems, according to the World Health Organization. (After the 2023 Lahaina fire in Maui, officials reported elevated levels of arsenic, lead, and other toxic substances in ash samples. California officials also found lots of lead in smoke from 2018's Camp Fire.) Within wildfire smoke is also PM 2.5, particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (a millionth of a meter) that gets deep inside human lungs. This can exacerbate conditions like asthma and raise the risk of cardiac arrest up to 70 percent. One study found that in California alone, PM 2.5 emissions from wildfires caused more than 50,000 premature deaths between 2008 and 2018. Canadian ecosystems known as peatlands are especially good at holding onto toxicants like arsenic. These form in soggy places where wet plant matter resists decay, building up into layers of peat — basically concentrated carbon. Peat can accumulate over millennia, meaning it can also hold onto pollutants deposited there decades ago. 'The peat soils are landscape hot spots for metals,' said McCarter. 'When it's dry and hot — like we've been seeing with the weather over the prairie provinces and central and western Canada — the peatlands can really start to dry out. Then the fire is able to propagate and get hot enough to start releasing some of these metals.' A peat fire behaves much weirder than a traditional forest fire. Instead of just burning horizontally across the landscape, a peat fire smolders down into the ground. This is a slow burn that lasts not just hours or days, but potentially months — releasing toxic metals and particulate matter as smoke all the while. Peat fires are so persistent that they'll sometimes start in the summer, get covered over with snow in the winter, and pop up once again in the spring melt. Scientists call them zombie fires. As Canada's wildfire smoke creeps down into the US, it's also transforming. Chemical reactions between gases and sunlight create ozone, which further exacerbates lung conditions like asthma. 'Once you get six hours to a day or so downwind, the ozone formation inside smoke plumes can start being problematic,' said Rebecca Hornbrook, an atmospheric chemist at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, who studies wildfire smoke. People fleeing Canada's fires have to worry not just about losing their homes, but also losing their health. More than 40 percent of wildfire evacuations happen in communities that are predominantly Indigenous — an irony given that First Nations people know how to reduce the severity of these conflagrations, with traditional burning practices that more gently clear out the dead vegetation that acts as wildfire fuel. That strategy of prescribed burns, though, has only recently been making a comeback in Canada. 'Let's not forget that it's immediately affecting a lot of, in particular, First Nations communities in the northern parts of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan,' said Waddington. This haze is already bad for human health, and now there's the added potential for arsenic and other toxicants in the Canadian landscape to get caught up in wildfire smoke. 'It's a bad-news scenario,' Waddington said. 'It's quite scary.'

Montreal Gazette
6 days ago
- Montreal Gazette
Brownstein: Montreal producer takes deep dive in documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster
By The documentary begins intriguingly enough: 'Where do you want to go in the ocean? What is the most known site in the ocean? It's clearly the Titanic.' The speaker is well-heeled, maverick American inventor Stockton Rush, whose mission it was to take paying passengers 3,800 metres into the Atlantic Ocean in his mini-sub to scope the ruins of the Titanic luxury liner that sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 after striking an iceberg 600 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland. More than 1,500 passengers died in that disaster. Five died, including Rush, when his submersible the Titan imploded on its way down to the Titanic wreck on June 18, 2023. The documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster takes a deep and disturbing plunge into the apparent arrogance of Titan mastermind Rush, the co-founder and CEO of the OceanGate undersea exploration company. The doc, co-produced by Montreal GalaFilm boss Arnie Gelbart and directed and co-scripted by acclaimed British director Pamela Gordon, begins streaming Friday on CBC Gem. It will also be broadcast on CBC Television June 20. The production team has done a thorough job in bringing this tragedy into fuller focus, aided and abetted by insightful interviews, rare footage of the Titan's final voyage and other failed dives plus access to the U.S. Coast Guard's investigation. Experts interviewed had misgivings about the Titan's structure, particularly its carbon-fibre hull, even if Rush had pulled off some dives prior to its final descent. There were other ominous warning signs, like seeping water damage and cracking engine sounds. Mutters one skeptic: 'Everyone stepping on board the Titan was risking their life.' The feeling was that Rush was 'hell-bent' on taking the Titan to dangerous new lows under the ocean, someone seeking to 'democratize deep-sea exploration.' Rush was an engineer who initially dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But when it became apparent he was never going to make it to 'Jupiter or Mars,' he turned his sights in the opposite direction. He concluded that would require a 'special sub.' Rush had the money, vision and drive to do so. He was a patrician whose roots went way back, with two of his ancestors having signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence. History, as is often the case, repeats itself here. How's this for cruel irony? Rush's wife's great-great-grandparents, owners of the fabled Macy's department-store chain, perished on the Titanic. They were rumoured to have been the richest passengers aboard. Christine Dawood is understandably livid. Among the five who died aboard the imploded Titan were her billionaire British-Pakistani husband, Shahzada, 48, and son Suleman, 19. She blames 'ego and arrogance' for their deaths. Gelbart has long been consumed by the Titanic and Titan. He brings to the documentary a wealth of factoids about both as well as Rush's participation. 'Rush had done some 88 dives prior to his last, but not all successful ones,' Gelbart says in a phone interview. 'It went down successfully only six times.' Gelbart had been involved since 2017 when Rush had come up with a working model of the Titan, which he had initially tested in the Bahamas. Then ensued a lot of correspondence with Rush, who was to move to his company's home in Everett, Wash. before heading to his last base in St. John's. 'He was looking for publicity, and I first wanted to make an Imax film, The Return to Titanic. What he was building for us was a remote camera that would go inside the hold of the Titanic, full of cars and furniture and other stuff that no one had seen since 1912.' Gelbart's project was initially to be a four-part series, retelling the Titanic story but using Rush's submersible to examine what was left of it, including its interior. 'We were looking for a Hollywood celebrity for the project,' Gelbart says. 'I would have liked to go down there myself, but because it was something like $250,000 a seat, it was not feasible. Instead, we included that price in our budget for a celebrity, someone to tell the Titanic story by being next to it.' Amid all the experimenting, failed testing and rebuilding of the original Titan, Gelbart stayed in touch with Rush. 'He was a great salesman and really believed in the Titan. As an engineer, he could talk the talk. We trusted him. We didn't think he was creating something that was fatally flawed. He explained the technology, but what do I know about carbon fibre? 'He moved his operation to St. John's for a number of reasons, one of which was so he wouldn't need to certify it in Canada. But on the downside was the weather there. And with water freezing, then thawing on the Titan lining outside, this could have created damage. In the final report of the U.S. Coast Guard, we heard this could have been one of the mitigating factors in the disaster.' That official report has yet to be released. Why? 'When (U.S. president Donald) Trump took over this year, he fired the head of the U.S. Coast Guard. So they're not allowed to release it until they get a new head.' Gelbart was shocked like most everyone else upon learning of the implosion. 'But 24 hours later, we had the commission from the BBC, Discovery U.S.A. and the CBC to make this documentary. It was such a whirlwind turnaround for a story that much of the world had been watching and waiting for news about what happened to the Titan and its occupants, until the fate was learned.' Gelbart's GalaFilm has more than 120 film and TV credits and has won dozens of awards, including multiple Gémeaux/Geminis and one Prime Time Emmy Award for the Cirque du Soleil series Fire Within. 'But this was the first time in my life I was involved with anything as well-known as this one.'


Canada Standard
7 days ago
- Canada Standard
Major Cereal Crops Fall Behind Because of Climate Change, Study Shows
Climate change has already held back global yields of wheat, maize, and barley by as much as 13% over the past 50 years-compared to what they would have been in a world without warming-although Canada may have dodged the worst effects so far, a new Stanford University study finds. The authors revisit the question of how climate change affects agriculture, especially in major production regions. They say their research draws attention to the dramatic shifts farmers are facing, as well as the overall effectiveness of climate models in projecting these shifts. They used 50 years of data comparing actual yields to what climate models predicted. Overall, global yields of wheat, maize, and barley were found to be 10%, 4%, and 13% lower than they would have been without climate change. And while past research has indicated that some climate outcomes might increase crop production, given the higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and longer growing seasons, "losses likely exceeded those benefits," the authors write. View our latest digests That wasn't true across the board. For soybeans and rice, "carbon dioxide benefits likely exceeded climate-related losses." The researchers determined these connections using a regression model that compared yield anomalies with anomalies of weather, explained lead author David Loebell, an earth system science professor at Stanford. This approach allowed the researchers to suggest that the yield losses were caused by climate change-rather than just correlated with them-as long as it is accepted that yield anomalies do not cause weather anomalies and that no unobserved factor is driving both sets of changes. Loebell told The Energy Mix the study deliberately didn't use a trend analysis, which focuses on changes of one variable over time, because there are so many other factors correlated over time with yield and weather. "The regression models are used to isolate the effect of weather on yield," he said. "Then these models can be used to estimate what would have occurred without the trends." Yield losses were mostly in line with what models would have predicted, but with two main exceptions. For one, North American crop production in Canada and the United States was less affected than in other regions of the world, and also less than what models show. The study chalks this up to a "warming hole" that has spared the continent from more significant climate impacts, though researchers are unclear about why the phenomenon exists, or how long it will persist. Secondly, increases in regional vapour pressure deficits (VPD), the difference between the amount of moisture that's actually in the air and the amount of moisture that air could hold at saturation, have been consistently underrepresented in climate models. VPD can be a main driver of stress on plants and high deficits can reduce growth. The findings have implications for both climate research and agriculture adaptation. The revealed yield changes indicate how climate change is likely to affect food production systems. The study also sheds light on how models can be improved, and helps quantify the damage or benefits of historical emissions, supporting efforts to develop financial mechanisms for compensating affected communities. The research also informs breeding and adaptation efforts by tracking "the relative speed with which specific climate stresses are changing, or certain crops or regions are being affected." Source: The Energy Mix