The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018

by Sam Kean

  The mammoth’s extinction may have been our original ecological sin. When humans left Africa 70,000 years ago, the elephant family occupied a range that stretched from that continent’s southern tip to within 600 miles of the North Pole. Now elephants are holed up in a few final hiding places, such as Asia’s dense forests. Even in Africa, our shared ancestral home, their populations are shrinking, as poachers hunt them with helicopters, GPS, and night-vision goggles. If you were an anthropologist specializing in human ecological relationships, you might well conclude that one of our distinguishing features as a species is an inability to coexist peacefully with elephants.

  But nature isn’t fixed, least of all human nature. We may yet learn to live alongside elephants, in all their spectacular variety. We may even become a friend to these magnificent animals. Already, we honor them as a symbol of memory, wisdom, and dignity. With luck, we will soon re-extend their range to the Arctic.

  “Give me 100 mammoths and come back in a few years,” Nikita told me as he stood on the park’s edge, staring hard into the fast-growing forest. “You won’t recognize this place.”

  The next morning, I met Sergey Zimov on the dock at the Northeast Science Station. In winter, when Siberia ices over, locals make long-distance treks on the Kolyma’s frozen surface, mostly in heavy trucks, but also in the ancestral mode: sleighs pulled by fleet-footed reindeer. (Many far-northern peoples have myths about flying reindeer.) Sergey and I set out by speedboat, snaking our way down from the Arctic Ocean and into the Siberian wilderness.

  Wearing desert fatigues and a black beret, Sergey smoked as he drove, burning through a whole pack of unfiltered cigarettes. The twin roars of wind and engine forced him to be even louder and more aphoristic than usual. Every few miles, he would point at the young forests on the shores of the river, lamenting their lack of animals. “This is not wild!” he would shout.

  It was early afternoon when we arrived at Duvanny Yar, a massive cliff that runs for six miles along the riverbank. It was like no other cliff I’d ever seen. Rising 100 feet above the shore, it was a concave checkerboard of soggy mud and smooth ice. Trees on its summit were flopping over, their fun-house angles betraying the thaw beneath. Its aura of apocalyptic decay was enhanced by the sulfurous smell seeping out of the melting cliffside. As a long seam of exposed permafrost, Duvanny Yar is a vivid window into the brutal geological reality of climate change.

  Many of the world’s far-northern landscapes, in Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, are wilting like Duvanny Yar is. When Nikita and I had driven through Cherskiy, the local mining town, we’d seen whole houses sinking into mud formed by the big melt. On YouTube, you can watch a researcher stomp his foot on Siberian scrubland, making it ripple like a water bed. The northern reaches of the taiga are dimpled with craters hundreds of feet across, where frozen underground soil has gone slushy and collapsed, causing landslides that have sucked huge stretches of forest into the Earth. The local Yakutians describe one of the larger sinkholes as a “gateway to the underworld.”

  As the Duvanny Yar cliffside slowly melts into the Kolyma River, it is spilling Ice Age bones onto the riverbank, including woolly-rhino ribs and mammoth tusks worth thousands of dollars. A team of professional ivory hunters had recently picked the shore clean, but for a single 30-inch section of tusk spotted the previous day by a lucky German scientist. He had passed it around the dinner table at the station. Marveling at its smooth surface and surprising heft, I’d felt, for a moment, the instinctive charge of ivory lust, that peculiar human longing that has been so catastrophic for elephants, furry and otherwise. When I joked with Sergey that fresh tusks may soon be strewn across this riverbank, he told me he hoped he would be alive when mammoths return to the park.

  The first of the resurrected mammoths will be the loneliest animal on Earth. Elephants are extremely social. When they are removed from normal herd life to a circus or a zoo, some slip into madness. Mothers even turn on their young.

  Elephants are matriarchal: males generally leave the herd in their teens, when they start showing signs of sexual maturity. An elephant’s social life begins at birth, when a newborn calf enters the world to the sound of joyous stomping and trumpeting from its sisters, cousins, aunts, and, in some cases, a grandmother.

  Mammoth herds were likewise matriarchal, meaning a calf would have received patient instruction from its female elders. It would have learned how to use small sticks to clean dirt from the cracks in its feet, which were so sensitive that they could feel the steps of a distant herd member. It would have learned how to wield a trunk stuffed with more muscles than there are in the entire human body, including those that controlled its built-in water hose. It would have learned how to blast trumpet notes across the plains, striking fear into cave lions, and how to communicate with its fellow herd members in a rich range of rumbling sounds, many inaudible to the human ear.

  The older mammoths would have taught the calf how to find ancestral migration paths, how to avoid sinkholes, where to find water. When a herd member died, the youngest mammoth would have watched the others stand vigil, tenderly touching the body of the departed with their trunks before covering it with branches and leaves. No one knows how to recreate this rich mammoth culture, much less how to transmit it to that cosmically bewildered first mammoth.

  Or to an entire generation of such mammoths. The Zimovs won’t be able to slow the thawing of the permafrost if they have to wait for their furry elephant army to grow organically. That would take too long, given the species’ slow breeding pace. George Church, the Harvard geneticist, told me he thinks the mammoth-manufacturing process can be industrialized, complete with synthetic-milk production, to create a seed population that numbers in the tens of thousands. But he didn’t say who would pay for it—at the Northeast Science Station, there was open talk of recruiting a science-friendly Silicon Valley billionaire—or how the Zimovs would deploy such a large group of complex social animals that would all be roughly the same age.

  Nikita and Sergey seemed entirely unbothered by ethical considerations regarding mammoth cloning or geoengineering. They saw no contradiction between their veneration of “the wild” and their willingness to intervene, radically, in nature. At times they sounded like villains from a Michael Crichton novel. Nikita suggested that such concerns reeked of a particularly American piety. “I grew up in an atheist country,” he said. “Playing God doesn’t bother me in the least. We are already doing it. Why not do it better?”

  Sergey noted that other people want to stop climate change by putting chemicals in the atmosphere or in the ocean, where they could spread in dangerous ways. “All I want to do is bring animals back to the Arctic,” he said.

  As Sergey and I walked down the riverbank, I kept hearing a cracking sound coming from the cliff. Only after we stopped did I register its source, when I looked up just in time to see a small sheet of ice dislodge from the cliffside. Duvanny Yar was bleeding into the river before our very eyes.

  In 1999, Sergey submitted a paper to the journal Science arguing that Beringian permafrost contained rich “yedoma” soils left over from Pleistocene grasslands. (In other parts of the Arctic, such as Norway and eastern Canada, there is less carbon in the permafrost; if it thaws, sea levels will rise, but much less greenhouse gas will be released into the atmosphere.) When Beringia’s pungent soils are released from their icy prison, microbes devour the organic contents, creating puffs of carbon dioxide. When this process occurs at the bottom of a lake filled with permafrost melt, it creates bubbles of methane that float up to the surface and pop, releasing a gas whose greenhouse effects are an order of magnitude worse than carbon dioxide’s. Already more than 1 million of these lakes dot the Arctic, and every year, new ones appear in NASA satellite images, their glimmering surfaces steaming methane into the closed system that is the Earth’s atmosphere. If huge herds of megafauna recolonize the Arctic, they too will expel methane, but less than the thawing frost, according to the Zimovs’ estimates.<
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  Science initially rejected Sergey’s paper about the danger posed by Beringia’s warming. But in 2006, an editor from the journal asked Sergey to resubmit his work. It was published in June of that year. Thanks in part to him, we now know that there is more carbon locked in the Arctic permafrost than there is in all the planet’s forests and the rest of the atmosphere combined.

  For my last day in the Arctic, Nikita had planned a send-off. We were to make a day trip, by car, to Mount Rodinka, on Cherskiy’s outskirts. Sergey came along, as did Nikita’s daughters and one of the German scientists.

  Rodinka is referred to locally as a mountain, though it hardly merits the term. Eons of water and wind have rounded it down to a dark, stubby hill. But in Siberia’s flatlands, every hill is a mountain. Halfway up to the summit, we already had a God’s-eye view of the surrounding landscape. The sky was lucid blue but for a thin mist that hovered above the Kolyma River, which slithered, through a mix of evergreens and scrub, all the way to the horizon. At the foot of the mountain, the gold-mining town and its airstrip hugged the river. In the dreamy, deep-time atmosphere of Pleistocene Park, it had been easy to forget this modern human world outside the park’s borders.

  Just before the close of the nineteenth century, in the pages of this magazine, John Muir praised the expansion of Yellowstone, America’s first national park. He wrote of the forests, yes, but also of the grasslands, the “glacier meadows” whose “smooth, silky lawns” pastured “the big Rocky Mountain game animals.” Already the park had served “the furred and feathered tribes,” he wrote. Many were “in danger of extinction a short time ago,” but they “are now increasing in numbers.”

  Yellowstone’s borders have since been expanded even farther. The park is now part of a larger stretch of land cut out from ranches, national forests, wildlife refuges, and even tribal lands. This Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is 10 times the size of the original park, and it’s home to the country’s most populous wild-bison herd. There is even talk of extending a wildlife corridor to the north, to provide animals safe passage between a series of wilderness reserves, from Glacier National Park to the Canadian Yukon. But not everyone supports Yellowstone’s outward expansion. The park is also home to a growing population of grizzly bears, and they have started showing up in surrounding towns. Wolves were reintroduced in 1995, and they, too, are now thriving. A few have picked off local livestock.

  Sergey sees Pleistocene Park as the natural next step beyond Yellowstone in the rewilding of the planet. But if Yellowstone is already meeting resistance as it expands into the larger human world, how will Pleistocene Park fare if it leaves the Kolyma River basin and spreads across Beringia?

  The park will need to be stocked with dangerous predators. When they are absent, herbivore herds spread out, or they feel safe enough to stay in the same field, munching away mindlessly until it’s overgrazed. Big cats and wolves force groups of grazers into dense, watchful formations that move fast across a landscape, visiting a new patch of vegetation each day in order to mow it with their teeth, fertilize it with their dung, and trample it with their many-hooved plow. Nikita wants to bring in gray wolves, Siberian tigers, or cold-adapted Canadian cougars. If it becomes a trivial challenge to resurrect extinct species, perhaps he could even repopulate Siberia with cave lions and dire wolves. But what will happen when one of these predators wanders onto a city street for the first time?

  “This is a part of the world where there is very little agriculture, and very few humans,” Sergey told me. He is right that Beringia is sparsely populated, and that continuing urbanization will likely clear still more space by luring rural populations into the cities. But the region, which stretches across Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, won’t be empty any time soon. Fifty years from now, there will still be mafia leaders to appease, not to mention indigenous groups and the governments of three nations, including two that spent much of the last century vying for world domination. America and Russia often cooperate in the interest of science, especially in extreme environments like Antarctica and low-Earth orbit, but the Zimovs will need a peace that persists for generations.

  Sergey envisions a series of founding parks, “maybe as many as 10,” scattered across Beringia. One would be along the Yentna River, in Alaska, another in the Yukon. A few would be placed to the west of Pleistocene Park, near the Ural mountain range, which separates Siberia from the rest of Russia. As Sergey spoke, he pointed toward each of these places, as if they were just over the horizon and not thousands of miles away.

  Sergey’s plan relies on the very climate change he ultimately hopes to forestall. “The top layer of permafrost will melt first,” he said. “Modern ecosystems will be destroyed entirely. The trees will fall down and wash away, and grasses will begin to appear.” The Mammoth Steppe would spread from its starting nodes in each park until they all bled into one another, forming a megapark that spanned the entire region. Humans could visit on bullet trains built on elevated tracks, to avoid disturbing the animals’ free movement. Hunting could be allowed in designated areas. Gentler souls could go on Arctic safari tours.

  When Sergey was out of earshot, I asked Nikita whether one of his daughters would one day take over Pleistocene Park to see this plan through. We were watching two of them play in an old Soviet-military radar station, about 100 yards from Rodinka’s peak.

  “I took the girls to the park last week, and I don’t think they were too impressed,” Nikita told me, laughing. “They thought the horses were unfriendly.” I told him that wasn’t an answer. “I’m not as selfish as my father,” he said. “I won’t force them to do this.”

  Before I left to catch a plane back to civilization, I stood with Sergey on the mountaintop once more, taking in the view. He had slipped into one of his reveries about grasslands full of animals. He seemed to be suffering from a form of solastalgia, a condition described by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht as a kind of existential grief for a vanished landscape, be it a swallowed coast, a field turned to desert, or a bygone geological epoch. He kept returning to the idea that the wild planet had been interrupted midway through its grand experiment, its 4.5-billion-year blending of rock, water, and sunlight. He seems to think that the Earth peaked during the Ice Age, with the grassland ecologies that spawned human beings. He wants to restore the biosphere to that creative summit, so it can run its cosmic experiment forward in time. He wants to know what new wonders will emerge. “Maybe there will be more than one animal with a mind,” he told me.

  I don’t know whether Nikita can make his father’s mad vision a material reality. The known challenges are immense, and there are likely many more that he cannot foresee. But in this brave new age when it is humans who make and remake the world, it is a comfort to know that people are trying to summon whole landscapes, Lazarus-like, from the tomb. “Come forth,” they are saying to woolly mammoths. Come into this habitat that has been prepared for you. Join the wolves and the reindeer and the bison who survived you. Slip into your old Ice Age ecology. Wander free in this wild stretch of the Earth. Your kind will grow stronger as the centuries pass. This place will overflow with life once again. Our original sin will be wiped clean. And if, in doing all this, we can save our planet and ourselves, that will be the stuff of a new mythology.

  JACQUELINE DETWILER

  It’ll Take an Army to Kill the Emperor

  from Popular Mechanics

  I. Precision Medicine—Or, What Is Cancer, Though, Really?

  When you visit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, you expect to feel devastated. It starts in the waiting room. Oh, here we go with the little red wagons, you think, observing the cattle herd of them rounded up by the entrance to the Patient Care Center. Oh, here we go with the crayon drawings of needles. The itch begins at the back of your throat, and you start blinking very fast and mentally researching how much money you could donate without starving. Near a row of arcade games, a preteen curls his face into his mother’s shoulder while
she strokes his head. Oh, here we go.

  But the more time you spend at St. Jude, the more that feeling is replaced with wonder. In a cruel world you’ve found a free hospital for children, started by a Hollywood entertainer as a shrine to the patron saint of lost causes. There is no other place like this. Corporations that have nothing to do with cancer—nothing to do with medicine, even—have donated vast sums of money just to be a part of it. There’s a Chili’s Care Center. The cafeteria is named for Kay Jewelers.

  Scott Newman’s office is in the Brooks Brothers Computational Biology Center, where a team of researchers is applying computer science and mathematics to the question of why cancer happens to children. Like many computer people, Newman is very smart and a little quiet and doesn’t always exactly meet your eyes when he speaks to you. He works on St. Jude’s Genomes for Kids project, which invites newly diagnosed patients to have both their healthy and tumor cells genetically sequenced so researchers can poke around.

  “Have you seen a circle plot before?” Newman asks, pulling out a diagram of the genes in a child’s cancer. “If I got a tattoo, it would be one of these.” Around the outside of the circle plot is something that looks like a colorful bar code. Inside, a series of city skylines. Through the center are colored arcs like those nail-and-string art projects students make in high school geometry class. The diagram represents everything that has gone wrong within a child’s cells to cause cancer. It’s beautiful.