"Made of Wildness"
On de-extinction, hot takes, hyper-objects, hope
You’ve likely seen the news by now about dire wolves being officially de-extincted. I don’t like that word (de-extincted), but ooh, I love the word dire. As in: urgent, serious. Possibly warning of disaster.
Broken record alert: Like so many things I encounter in this realm—that of the recovery of endangered (even extinct!) species like the red wolf—the story is far from simple.
A little humor never hurts. This headline, from what I assume is an A.I.-written article, made me laugh:
It’s hilarious to think they are actually talking about the wolves from Game of Thrones, (which I believe were computer-generated?), rather than the species those wolf-characters were modeled after, and it’s also hilarious that, for the entirety of the article, the fact that the dire wolf went extinct thirteen years ago is repeated several times. Thirteen years. That’s how old my beloved standard poodle Cosmo was when he went extinct, as it turns out… I think they mean 13,000…
Back to the real story: Cloning! Resurrection! De-extinction!
These exclamation points aren’t meant to be sarcastic (I enjoy exclamation points, I admit! Also parentheses!). These topics—as well as these words—are truly exciting.
Allow me to backtrack and explain, briefly, if you haven’t seen the much-hyped announcement and ensuing responses over the past week or so: a company called Colossal Biosciences announced that it has successfully cloned a long-extinct species, the dire wolf —or “something like it,” per this New Yorker article, which I enjoyed—an animal made famous in part from its prominence in the fictional book/TV series Game of Thrones. In the same announcement, Colossal reported that it has also cloned some American red wolves using ghost DNA—more on that below—and devoted impressive space on its website to this critically endangered animal (if you click, scroll down), and also on why conservation is so critical, and what they can do to help.
I’ve been thinking carefully about how I want to respond to this announcement, and to the barrage of media coverage that followed. There have been such an incredible range of reactions—the announcement is a sham, it’s a miracle, it’s an abomination, it’s the future of wolves. To me (broken record alert, again): it’s complicated. It’s potentially all of these things, and more…? I tend to agree in general with this Snopes piece, “Supposed dire wolf ‘de-extinction’ is part cool science, part flashy marketing.”
This is the world we live in.
Here’s a photo of one of the cloned wolves - there are three. Gorgeous, whatever its genetic makeup.
I’m wondering if ‘hot takes’ exist anymore, in this world of clickbait and ‘engagement’ and shortening attention spans. Meaning: is everything a hot take now? No— I suppose there are still, by definition, extremely off-the-cuff, hastily-shared reactions, just as on the flip side there are deeply-reported, intensively researched stories… And also, of course, “breaking news” is breaking news—I’m not saying everything needs to be mulled over and well-digested to be made public. Colossal worked with some journalists (from the above-linked stories at Time and The New Yorker, just for example) and allowed them access to what was happening well in advance of the big coordinated announcement.
My two cents: I was impressed and intrigued to see Beth Shapiro’s name associated with Colossal as their chief scientist (seems I’m not alone, as I saw several experts and scientists quoted as saying how much they respect her, that she lends the entire enterprise credibility), since I read her book How to Clone a Mammoth a few years ago (Colossal is also attempting this, too, by the way—cloning mammoths). I was diving deep at the time into de-extinction and re-wilding efforts, along with the ethics of such things, and where such human-led experiments overlap, if at all. I haven’t really stopped exploring these ideas. Really hard questions, really difficult problems that people are trying to solve in assorted ways. So this Colossal announcement—and especially its inclusion of red wolves—provokes both excitement and trepidation and amazement and concern. I’ve been spending the past week or so aggregating media responses, until it started to feel like too much, like I could go on and on simply accumulating a back-and-forth of contrasting takes...
Semi-related recommended reading (also M.R. O’Connor’s Resurrection Science which isn’t shown in this photo, and How to Clone a Mammoth):
Summing up facts, as I see them (the TL;DR if you will… but please KR —keep reading—and also this TL;DR is long): Colossal is doing amazing things with genetic technology and gene editing, which has the potential to be very helpful for conservation; they are backed by private funders (not government money) including billionaires and celebrities like Paris Hilton and George R.R. Martin and Chris Hemsworth; what they are calling a dire wolves have primarily gray wolf DNA with some key changes made by gene editing, in part based on DNA recovered from fossils of dire wolves that lived long ago; they did this—produced seemingly healthy genetically-modified wolves, in an astonishingly short amount of time, something like 18 months; these genetically modified wolves are a scientific breakthrough and a remarkable achievement; people don’t like that Colossal calls them “dire wolves,” and it isn’t accurate to imagine actual prehistoric dire wolves brought back to life just as they were, like an unfrozen Encino Man or something (no one alive knows exactly what dire wolves were actually like, for one thing, and there are lots of unedited genes involved…etc); the dire wolves embryos were implanted in a dog (to me this doesn’t mean they are dogs at all, at least not genetically, a dog carried them to term; just clarifying); the cloned red wolves that Colossal mentions were created using ghost alleles/red wolf DNA found to have persisted in wild canids on the coast of the Gulf of MEXICO (see what I did there) in SW Louisiana/Galveston areas, and are not by official definition red wolves.
Lots more to unpack, but that is the gist…
Bold emphasis mine here:
"It's never gonna be possible to bring something back that's genetically identical to a species that used to be around, and also a species is more than just its DNA," said Beth Shapiro, Colossal's chief science officer. "It's the DNA interacting with the ecosystem, which also isn't present."
Truth: gene editing technology has the potential to truly help in the salvation of endangered species.
Also truth: (and one of the scariest and least-desirable potential side-effects of this announcement): Some could use the existence of this technology, or its potential, as an excuse to remove much-needed legal protections for threatened species. Some are, in fact, trying to do that right now.
I went back to some of my notes from a few years ago, and found this excerpt from How to Clone a Mammoth, specifically re: habitat conservation being essential for the salvation of threatened species: “All disruptive strategies are inherently risky. What if sufficient habitat can’t be preserved? What if species do not re-establish populations in the habitat that is preserved? Few habitats have avoided completely the effects of human population growth, suggesting that, at some level, intervention has already occurred. Further intervention may be required simply to reduce the damage that has already been done.”
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” as Stewart Brand said in Whole Earth Catalog, 1968--I’ve referenced this quote in my SubStack too many times now—wanting people to imagine with bold optimism a future that was different, pleasant and full of wonder.
Brand’s goal “for de-extinction is that it will become ‘a reframing of possibilities as momentous as landing humans on the moon was.’ That the most momentous change will be in tour attitudes toward living species… we can ‘engineer sustainability into threatened populations.’”
For Shapiro: de-extinction is a “step forward” rather than just turning back the clock to right ancestors’ wrongs—it’s “actively creat[ing] a future that is better than today.”
I noted how giddy and intoxicating these perspectives were; the excitement felt contagious. Reading this, I wrote, I want to believe—meaning, I want to believe that technology is the way forward, that it’s okay that we are as gods. That the impact we’ve had on this planet is all a part of our continuing evolution as a species—some proponents believe this— and that we should continue to let things unfold in this manner, with human innovation leading the way.
I don’t really believe this... not whole-heartedly, at least. Scientific evidence and experts and scholarship all show that we need to take steps now to try to reverse some of the incredible damage we’ve done, the catastrophic impacts we’ve had on habitats and ecosystems and the atmosphere and on the countless other living beings with whom we share this Earth.
But this isn’t to say that human innovation and technology can’t be used to help endangered species. The discovery of above-mentioned “ghost” DNA some years ago in and around Galveston and the gulf coast—meaning coyote admixtures with what turned out to be high levels of red wolf DNA, called “ghost alleles” because they aren’t present in the current managed population of protected red wolves in the U.S., was hugely exciting, and still is… because it shows that certain genetic traits of red wolves endured in the wild, long after the wolves had been removed (and certain of them transferred to human care based largely on traits and characteristics, as current genetic technology didn’t exist in the 1970’s when they were going extinct due to human encroachment and killing). Only about 300 red wolves exist on a planet where there were once thousands upon thousands—and only about twenty of those are living wild.
“The irony of this age,” O’Connor writes in Resurrection Science, “is that often the more we intervene to save species, the less “wild” and autonomous they become. The looming ethical question is now whether or not humans, recognizing their evolutionary impact on species, should begin to consciously direct or engineer evolution in the direction they want it to go.”
Also truth—let’s get into this a bit, below: scientists don’t even agree on the basic definition of what makes something a species.
And species evolve.
What is a species?
This is a big, unwieldy question; biologists don’t even agree on the answer. A 2021 survey found that they use 16 different definitions for the word.
“You could probably get as many different species concepts as the people you interview,” Princeton geneticist Bridgett vonHoldt, who is a primary scientist and expert investigating the ghost wolves of Galveston, told me in a fascinating conversation back in 2021. One might argue “who cares” about the technical definition—how much percentage of red wolf makes something a red wolf, for example; a brief answer is: the law. The law cares. Which animals we protect federally depend on certain definitions of the species.
vonHoldt again: “[When] we look at a broader picture, which includes aspects that are ecology-based, morphology-based, behavior-based, predation-based…ecological interactions, and genetics…you have, in my opinion, a more holistic view of how the red wolf fits into this puzzle piece of a landscape or community. And for me, the way I've interpreted ESA, and just conservation efforts, is that the red wolf is a diverse, different entity than a coyote or a gray wolf by many measures. And we have arbitrary thresholds as to how different must they be [genetically]. And that's a challenging construct of human language and federal legislation. But, but to me, the core of conservation and the ESA is to say, hey, the red wolf is [distinct]. It has a very distinct place and function.” Basically: it deserves to be protected.
First Nations like the Cherokee and Tuscarora have become important voices for endangered animals like red wolves, which are sacred to them. This lovely video was made in collaboration with the USFWS:
“If they want me to make a thousand red wolves that are genetically diverse,” Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm said recently, referring to conversations with Dept of Interior officials in early 2025, “we can do that for them.” This is a worrisome oversimplification (even as cloning 1000 wolves is far from simple). Conservationists caution against seeing “de-extinction” as an excuse to avoid the necessary and immediate work of conserving habitat and taking other measures to protect threatened animals. Joanna Radin, Professor of History of Medicine and Science at Yale, called such technological innovations as cryogenic preservation a “technology of deferral to the future. And the future may be a future that never actually arrives.”
I’m taken with this passage from the gorgeous book H is for Hawk: “The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the dimunition of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?”
More from H is for Hawk, about condors and captivity: “Some people… believed honestly and sincerely that once all birds were captive, condors would cease to exist. These birds are made of wildness, they argued. A captive condor is a condor no more.”
I’ll write more soon about ideas of wildness, about re-wilding and where it fits in to the problem of habitat loss and destroyed or fast-changing ecosystems…
And I was going to write about hyperobjects here, I realize, but I’m going to save that (and Tim Morton’s books and ideas), for next time.
Teaser: “How do we transition from seeing what we call “nature’ as an object ‘over there’? And how do we avoid ‘new and improved’ versions that end up doing much the same thing… just in a cooler, more sophisticated way? When you realize that everything is inter-connected, you can’t hold onto a single, solid, present-at-hand thing ‘over there’ called Nature.”
Other stuff:
Pretty exciting to see this clip about red wolf recovery in NC covered on The Today Show:
Doing a little light reading (ha)—recommend all:
Springtime is the best in the American South. Azaleas have been popping off lately (somewhere a tween is cringing):
Just learned:
Happy Hours are illegal in North Carolina.
Lovely/funny:
I initially saw Lizzie Simon’s post on SubStack about how she was launching an elementary school newspaper, something I did at my kids' school for the past two years, so I wrote quickly offering to share what limited resources/wisdom I’d gleaned from the experience, if she was interested (summing up: I loved all of it) and she kindly responded, and then soon after that I saw a post about how she’d had her friend Sebastian Freaking Junger come speak to the kids about the importance of journalism and I was like, “uhhhh I think she’s got this covered” LOL
Lizzie linked to this lovely video in her most recent newsletter, and having just ridden a ferry past the Statue of Liberty myself a couple of weeks ago with my family, on a vessel packed with people from many different nations—a visceral, emotional experience—I’m sharing it with you:
Looking forward to:
A Tuscarora powwow in May. Possible new red wolf litters. Holding my newborn nephew. Flowers everywhere.
Coming soon to Refuge with Wolves:
Fair chase and fox pens;
threats to the ESA (ongoing);
why come (as they say in this movie, which feels so scarily prescient) dogs good but wolves bad?