Happy Friday!
Mammoth Comeback
Environmental circles often debate rewilding. Rewilding generally means reintroducing formerly local plants and animals to ecosystems degraded by human influence. Rewilders often point to wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone or growing regional grasses in urban gardens as ways of restoring ecological balance. Rewilding is controversial—especially insofar as it can divorce humans from nature as separate and unnatural beings—but it does force us to reconsider humanity’s place in nature. It also makes for great storytelling. I’m eagerly awaiting a copy of Once There Were Wolves, a fictional account of reintroducing wolves to Scotland (you can read an excerpt here).
But using mammoths was a new one to me.
Carl Zimmer over at the New York Times wrote this delightful piece about Colossal, a Jurassic Park-inflected company that plans to grow woolly mammoths—well, genetically modified elephants—in artificial mammoth wombs that weight two hundred pounds. Their ultimate goal? Rewiliding Siberia. With mammoths. Check it out:
Today the tundra is dominated by moss. But when woolly mammoths were around, it was largely grassland. Some researchers have argued that woolly mammoths were ecosystem engineers, maintaining the grasslands by breaking up moss, knocking down trees and providing fertilizer with their droppings.
Russian ecologists have imported bison and other living species to a preserve in Siberia they’ve dubbed Pleistocene Park, in the hopes of turning the tundra back to grasslands. Dr. Church argued that resurrected woolly mammoths would be able to do this more efficiently. The restored grassland would keep the soil from melting and eroding, he argued, and might even lock away heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
It’s intriguing. There are ethical problems with resurrecting extinct species—or, more accurately, modifying present species to resemble their extinct relatives. But I’ll admit, there’s something attractive about using animals as organic climate agents over other technological interventions.
The mammoth story reminds me of Columbian drug hippos. Pablo Escobar, a Columbian drug lord, had a penchant for fabulous animals—so he imported hippos for his private zoo in Columbia. These hippos have since reproduced in the wild and, as of last year, there are about one hundred of them. Some scientists speculate that, because hippos bear resemblance to prehistoric animals from the region, this imported species could create ecosystems not seen for millennia in Columbia. Here’s how ecologist Erick Lundgren put it on NPR’s Science Friday last year:
. . . if you broaden our perspective of what nature is to begin not when Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, but towards the larger evolutionary context of Earth’s history, before humans arrived in South America, South America was full of giant, strange animals. And many of those are quite similar to hippos, although sometimes in different combinations of traits.
So hippos are strangely most similar, when you look at all their traits in total, to a giant llama, which is kind of a ludicrous comparison. But they’re also very similar to these rhino-like notoungulates, which were probably semi-aquatic. And so hippos are kind of like a Greek chimera of all these different extinct species. And there’s a real strong chance that what they’re doing in Colombia in these rivers resurrects certain processes that were once widespread on that continent for 30 to 40 million years.
Wild.
There’s also a normative question here: what kind of ecosystems are desirable? Is it good to recreate centuries or millennia-old environments? Maybe! Recreating ancient landscapes might be core part of adapting to climate change. In A Tale for the Time Being, a novel by Ruth Ozeki, a central character in British Columbia plants “groves of ancient naties—metasequoia, giant sequoia, coast redwoods, Juglands, Ulmus, and ginko—species that had been indigenous to the area during the Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago.” The character hoped that, by planting tropical trees in Canada, he could help the ecosystem and its humans adapt to global warming in the coming century. And while fictional, Ozeki’s character reflects very real permaculture efforts in warming communities.
This, then, brings us back to mammoths. Is planting redwoods and ginkos in Canada the same as unleasing genetically modified megafauna on the Siberian tundra? Or should we stick with the trees and cocaine hippos? I am inclined toward the latter. But what do you think?
On Long Walks
We have walked so much since moving to Norway. There are beautiful trails to hike, yes, but everyday commutes entail long jaunts between our home, the subway, and the office. Some days we begrudge the walk, especially in winter, but it’s also an excuse for fresh air and city views.
In The Atlantic, Arthur Brooks reflected on his recent trek down the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He sang walking’s praises and suggested that long wanderings can become spiritual experiences. Take this section, for example:
If one surrenders to the music, the Camino becomes a form of extended walking meditation, a practice in many religious traditions. “Each mindful breath, each mindful step, reminds us that we are alive on this beautiful planet,” the Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote of walking meditation. “We don’t need anything else. It is wonderful enough just to be alive, to breathe in, and to make one step.” In his book Three Mile an Hour God, the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama mixes Hanh’s Buddhist interpretation with his Christian faith, writing that the speed at which humans walk “is the speed the love of God walks.”
For me, the most transcendent effects of pilgrimage appeared after a few days. The Camino is all about walking, not arriving, which forces one to live in the moment and (at least temporarily) to abandon the fruitless chase for lasting satisfaction through bigger accomplishments and better rewards. On the Camino, one realizes that fulfillment cannot come when the present moment is merely a struggle to bear in service of the future, because that future is destined to become nothing more than the struggle of a new present, and the glorious end state never arrives. If we want to find true satisfaction, we must instead focus on the walk that is life, with its string of present moments.
I love that. It made me think about my daily walks to and from the office or the grocery store. Twenty minutes may not be enough to to synchronize with the pace of “the love of God.” But taking that time to embrace being, to simply walk and know you exist, here and now—it certainly makes me feel better about the world than my rushed commutes along interstates did back home. Maybe walking isn’t all that bad.
A Christian Case for Twitter?
I ditched Twitter several months ago and have not regretted it (much). I’ve felt better. I’ve thought better. I’ve had more control over my time. I haven’t compulsively scrolled the internet (as much). And, frankly, I don’t think I’d have time to write this newsletter if I still had Twitter. So, cheers to life without Twitter.
Nevertheless, over at Christianity Today, Anglican pastor Tish Harrison Warren wrote that there may be a “public responsibility” to remain on the platform and minister to the people there. Here’s how she explained it:
The church and some individuals within it are called to the public square and, whether we like it or not, social media is an increasingly important part of that. Those digital spaces will inevitably involve us in practices, systems, and formation that are harmful to our souls. But we have a moral obligation not simply to perfect purity and personal health but to a wider world—a misshapen world that will inevitably misshape us as well. We can and should take up practices that [limit] these harms. But we might not be able to avoid them altogether.
I’ve thought about this myself—especially as a historian! There are so many fantastic scholars on Twitter. They use Twitter as a professional platform, sharing their works and others’ in tweets and threads that can be really informative. But, Twitter being Twitter, my feed was still an incredibly angry place. And since watching The Social Dilemma, I have been increasingly convinced that Twitter, Facebook, and the like are a net loss for individuals and society alike.
Yet Warren adds a religious dimension to this question. We have to meet people where they are, and people are, well, on Twitter and Facebook. How do we navigate this?
I disagree with Warren’s ultimate conclusion, that we should remain on the platforms, but she asks the right questions. So, if not on social media, how do we minister in the digital world? Should we redouble our offline efforts? Pope Francis seems to suggest so. In Fratelli Tutti, he writes:
Digital relationships . . . do not really build community; instead, they tend to disguise and expand the very individualism that finds expression in xenophobia and in contempt for the vulnerable. Digital connectivity is not enough to build bridges. It is not capable of uniting humanity.
If Twitter is incapable of uniting humanity, particularly since it depends on dividing us, I think the longer game for human flourishing should be radical offlining. But what do you think?
What Shall We Eat?
About a year ago we started eating a vegan diet. I’ve loved it. But I understand it’s not for everyone, and I’m certainly not dogmatic about it (even though there is a strong environmental case for veganism). But this article from Amos Zeeberg over at Aeon provides a fascinating look at dietary ideologies and how they have developed over time. It’s a bit of a long read—lots of talk about scurvy and historicizing how and why we talk about food—but Zeeberg concludes with this reflection:
Our arguments over food are so polarised because they are not only about evidence: they are about values. Our choice of what we put inside us physically represents what we want inside ourselves spiritually, and that varies so much from person to person.
And, again:
Food is a vehicle for ideologies such as nutritionism and essentialism, for deeply held desires such as connecting with nature and engineering a better future. We argue so passionately about food because we are not just looking for health – we’re looking for meaning. Maybe, if meals help provide a sense of meaning for your life, that is the healthiest thing you can hope for.
Not wrong. So, what does food mean to you? Whether you’re a vegan or carnivore or somewhere in-between, why do you eat what you eat? What relationship do you have with your food? Are you eating it because of an ideological commitment, or because of relationships you have with the food and its source? And if eating ideologically, how does that ideology manifest in your particular home and community?
As you might have noticed, I did not stick to my new link-drop format introduced last week. I found these links interesting, and I figured you would want to read something interesting, too, rather than a newsletter that just stuck to form.
So, that’s it for this week!
Have a great weekend.
See you next week.