Bringing The Passenger Pigeon Out Of Extinction

Bringing extinct animals back to life is now within our grasp, says Long Now Foundation researcher Ben Novak.

“Conservation has done 40 years of ‘Save the pandas. Save the rhinos. If they go extinct, everything will go to hell.’ And it’s been a lot of doom and gloom with not a lot of emphasis on, ‘Here’s a problem, how do we solve it?’ ” laments ecologist Ben Novak, lead researcher for the Revive and Restore project at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Novak wants to solve the problem of species endangerment by retrieving genetic material from bygone, taxidermied animals and revivifying it with help from their surviving cousins. It’s all part of a “de-extinction” campaign being funded by the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco– based nonprofit project that includes the Whole Earth Catalog’s Stewart Brand, novelist Neal Stephenson, musician Brian Eno, and others. Founded in 1996, the foundation is dedicated to “long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” Long Now wants to bring back everything from the humble passenger pigeon to the majestic woolly mammoth.

The last passenger pigeon died in 1914, wiped out by humans armed with low-tech muzzle-loaded shotguns and nets. Prior to their eradication, the birds acted as catalysts to biodiversity, clearing forests and spreading guano in a way that promoted new plant growth and animal habitats. But the kind of method Long Now favors for bringing the pigeons back always runs into the same objection/cultural reference: Jurassic Park.