by Ben Mezrich
The scientists were excited to learn of Church’s advance. These were the tools that would make their own work possible. It made the presentations that followed, regarding the de-extinction of the passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian wolf, the European aurochs, and others, seem much less like science fiction, much more like future fact.
But Church was most excited by the presentation by Sergey Zimov, who had come from the edge of the world, Siberia, at Brand’s invitation.
Church hadn’t been familiar with Zimov’s work and had needed to look him up online. But the minute Zimov took the stage, Church realized that his message was going to be something different, unexpected.
Zimov’s appearance was itself a spectacle. Long gray beard trimmed to a sharp point, noble, broad features lined by weather, hardship, and age, he looked like a figure who might have been painted on czarist-era Russian nesting dolls. Zimov wasn’t fluent in English, so his words were filtered through a competent translator. He made it clear from the start that, though he might look like a reclusive scientist, he wasn’t a loner. His son, Nikita, was a partner in their multigenerational mission.
And Sergey and Nikita’s work was spectacular. In a world well north of where most people could survive, Zimov conducted his research on an expanse of steppes surrounding the Chersky Science Center, where howling winds often reached sixty miles per hour, and temperatures dropped below minus ninety degrees. There, over millennia, species after species had gone extinct, and even the ground itself had gone from plains teeming with thick, sustainable grass to jagged permafrost strangled by moss, weeds, and lichen.
That permafrost stretched for tens of thousands of miles in either direction, crossing multiple continents, circling the entire globe. A landmass covering as much as 20 percent of the Earth’s surface. It was solid, seemingly impervious, perhaps ten, eleven feet thick. And this permafrost, which circled the world like an icy crown, held a devastating secret: It wasn’t invulnerable at all—it was a ticking time bomb. Locked in a fragile balance with a worldwide ecosystem that was shredding at the seams, it could release enough carbon to tip the planet into an irreversible global warming.
Hours after Zimov’s talk, Church was mobilizing to deal with the dark future the Russian had described.
Global warming, climate change, whatever words humanity chose to define the slow drip of the carbon-powered faucet that was drenching the world, had hit the Arctic especially hard. Data from space satellites and ice sensors showed that the area was warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. The sea ice that had surrounded the polar cap since the last ice age would melt entirely during some summer season within a single generation. A rise in water level due to the melting glaciers was less of a threat than a more insidious danger, one that began just inches below where Zimov and his family spent most of their days.
The tundra wasn’t just ice and rock; the permafrost that stretched around the cap of the world contained massive pockets of methane and almost three times more carbon than all the forests on Earth combined. As the Arctic warmed, and the permafrost began to melt, that carbon dioxide and methane would be released—a trickle at first, but once it gained momentum and passed a certain point, a feedback loop would engage. That carbon dioxide would billow out into the air, warming more and more of the permafrost, which in turn would release even more carbon. That trickle would become a toxic flood. Eventually, the permafrost would release more carbon than would be created by burning all the forests on Earth three times over.
The effects would be disastrous. The melting permafrost could suffocate the world.
According to Zimov, there was still a chance to hold back the feedback loop. Zimov’s data, which he’d been painstakingly collecting for decades, proved that the tundra of his home, as forbidding as it seemed, could change. And the key he described wasn’t some futuristic technology; quite the opposite, the key came from the distant past.
Church had circled the meeting hall twice, and still had found no sign of the Russian scientist. Perhaps he had already started his long journey back to Siberia. Zimov didn’t leave his home often. In the past three decades, the man had not been out of Siberia more than a handful of days. Maybe that was the reason his experiments had taken so long to reach the outside world—why they were still unknown to the majority of scientists. Why his elegant solution to one of the most frightening consequences of climate change seemed completely new, even though it was, at its heart, a reversal of time, turning back the clock by millennia.
Twenty thousand years ago, Zimov had explained, the tundra was very different than it is now. During the last ice age, the last great global freeze which marked the tail end of the Pleistocene Era (which stretched from 2,588,000 years ago to 11,700 years ago, when our anatomically modern human ancestors emerged), the tundra wasn’t a scarred bed of moss and lichen; it was a lush refuge of high grass. Megafauna—herds of giant, furry herbivores, from horses and buffalo to reindeer and Woolly Mammoths—populated the steppes in huge numbers, continually trampling and turning the topsoil above the world’s largest biome as they grazed. Even as the ice age ended and the world began to warm, the herbivores naturally tilled the earth, churning the soil to expose the frozen ground beneath to the even colder air, keeping the permafrost perpetually chilled.
Zimov believed that the megafauna could have survived the changing climate. Their own grazing and foraging activity kept the topsoil perfect for grasses, while preserving the permafrost beneath. But as the glaciers receded, an even greater danger emerged for the animals of the steppes. As the air warmed, the newest mammalian inhabitants moved north: tribes of humans, with an appetite well beyond that of any other predator that had ever reached the tundra. By the end of the Pleistocene Era, a mass extinction had begun. The megafauna were hunted to extinction, and with them went the ecology of the finely balanced system. The grasslands withered and died. The moss and lichen took over. Trees sprang up haphazardly between the weeds. And over time, the permafrost began to melt.
The time bomb began to tick.
But Zimov believed—and had convinced Church, Brand, and Phelan—that there was a way to slow the ticking. Maybe even stop it for good.
Pleistocene Park.
Even the name sent pleasurable chills down Church’s spine. Zimov had started the project almost thirty years ago, in 1988, beating Jurassic Park novelist Michael Crichton to the punch by two years. Simply put, Pleistocene Park was a conservationist’s attempt at time travel. Using 160 square kilometers of Siberian tundra given to him by the Russian government, Zimov’s goal was repopulating the area with modern equivalents of prehistoric animals that had adapted to Arctic conditions. As the herbivores turned and stomped the topsoil, continually exposing the permafrost to the cold air and wind, the permafrost beneath would cool, preserving the precious permafrost—in the warmer months, knocking down trees and curating the grasses, increasing reflectance of the surface (the albedo effect), and restoring the ecology of the late Pleistocene.
Working within the limitations of his Soviet-era budgets, Zimov had managed to stock his Arctic refuge with moose, Yakutian horses, Finnish reindeer, and even North American bison. Now with the help of his son he’d brought in more animals—elk, musk oxen, and special breeds of yak. Although his herds were still small, sometimes fewer than ten members, he mimicked larger herds’ behavior by using tractors, pile drivers, and bulldozers. To re-create the effects of Woolly Mammoths on the land, he’d brought in a World War II tank, which he’d bought off a defunct military base and driven hundreds of miles across Siberia to his home. Punching holes in the snow, bashing away rocks and trees, churning up the moss and lichen, using the tank treads to mimic the continual stomp of Mammoth feet, he’d worked the land, year after year. And along the way, he’d accumulated data that were staggering in their implications.
Within his 160-square-kilometer refuge, he had lowered the permafrost temperature by an average of fifteen degrees. Church believed that Zimov had sufficiently pro
ved that the megafauna of the Pleistocene Era had lived in balance with their ecology, and that a reintroduction of similar megafauna could sustain that ecology for the foreseeable future. Zimov’s “laboratory” was small, a tiny percentage of landmass compared to the whole, but if he could duplicate his Pleistocene Park on a larger scale, he could keep the permafrost from melting for decades.
The Russian had found a way to defuse the ticking time bomb.
In Hubbard Hall, Church realized that he wouldn’t be able to catch up with Zimov. He would have to communicate with him in a different manner: through the tools and inventions of his craft, through the science of his unique Harvard lab.
There were only so many bison and Yakutian horses Zimov and his family could buy and transport to their refuge at the top of the world. Their budgets were limited, and their data were just that—numbers on a page.
But their moose, horses, bison, reindeer, and elk had proved that Pleistocene Park could work. Now they needed something much bigger, something much more ambitious to capture the world’s attention.
As Zimov had said at the end of his presentation, “To fight the forest, instead of Mammoths we now use military tanks. Unfortunately, they don’t create dung.”
The rest of the scientists had laughed, while Church exchanged looks with Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan.
The Russian scientist had just given them their reason to resurrect their species.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Excerpted from “The Wild Field Manifesto” by Sergey Zimov
For hundreds of millions of years, terrestrial ecosystems were an arena of struggle between plants and herbivores. To avoid being eaten, plants protected themselves with thorns, tall heights, bitterness, acids, and sharp smells. Many developed numerous poisons: Solanaceae developed nicotine; poppy developed morphine; and willow developed aspirin. But, 20 million years ago, life on the planet changed. Grasses and quickly growing pasture herbs appeared. They did not spend resources on thorns and poisons; their main strategy was rapid growth. All of them were tasty, nutritious, and not afraid of being eaten. Giving several harvests a year, these plants fed numerous big herbivores. What wasn’t eaten by “bulls” and “horses” was eaten by omnivorous “sheep” and “goats.” In this way, the evolutionarily youngest ecosystems were formed—pasture ecosystems.
Like in economics, in ecology the rate of the capita turnover is important. According to the V. I. Vernadsky law, evolutional processes are directed towards increasing the turnover of biological elements. For instance, in the evolutionarily relict spruce forest, bio-cycling is slow and green leaves live for ten years. This biomass is barely edible and decomposes slowly on the soil surface. In contrast, grasses in pastures live only a few weeks on average. In the warm stomachs of herbivores, they decompose in just one day and their main ecosystem capital (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) is quickly returned into the soil, and eventually into new leaves.
These rapidly growing grasses needed abundant mineral supplies, which herbivores themselves maintained. Abundant herbivores managed and extended their pasture ecosystems themselves. Moss and lichens were trampled. Goats and roes ate the young trees and shrubs seedlings. Bison and deer killed trees by eating the bark. Elephants and mammoths simply broke trees. Through fertilizing, harvesting, and trampling, herbivores managed their pastures in any climate.
Fifteen thousand years ago, pasture ecosystems were at the peak of their evolution. They occupied most of our planet. . . .
Fourteen and a half thousand years ago, sharp climate warming took place. The Ice Age was over. Human chances for survival, especially for kids, substantially increased in the middle and high latitudes. People populated north of Eurasia and then penetrated into America. Experienced and well-armed hunters met herds of untamed animals. The further humans moved from their historical motherland, the more they engaged in their “blood-thirsty pursuit.”
In northern Asia, 8 megafauna species went extinct upon human arrival, in North America, 33, and in South America almost all—50 species in total. As hunting and technology developed and animal density on the pastures declined, the animal density in most regions became insufficient to maintain pastures. As a result, forest and tundra (shrubs, trees, moss) began to press pastures, causing forest area in the world to increase ten-fold. . . .
Of all the wars humankind has fought in the past, the war with pasture ecosystems is the longest lasting one. But today it can and must be stopped. . . .
Most of the species that once roamed in the pasture ecosystems have survived—some in the forests, some in deserts, some in the zoos, and some as domestic species. Other animals are proposed to be re-created through genetic engineering. All that is required to re-create pasture ecosystems is to reliably fence off a territory where grasses and herbs grow. The second step is to collect all animals that can live on this territory. Once there, the animals will remember how to live with each other themselves. They will divide pastures and occupy all ecological niches according to their professions. It is their job to self-regulate density; the weak will die, the strong will re-populate, the ecosystem assemblage will stabilize and, then, will be ready to reintroduce into new territories. . . .
Frozen soils of the mammoth steppe contain lots of organic carbon—three times more than all tropical forests of the planet. When these soils thaw, microbes that were previously frozen there for millennia wake up and immediately start to decompose the soil organics, producing the greenhouse gases—CO2 and methane. If current climate change continues, then in the not too distant future the thawing soils of the mammoth steppe will be the biggest natural source of greenhouse gases on the planet. This will cause additional warming to the climate and permafrost will thaw even quicker. We cannot artificially stop this process.
However, pasture ecosystems can. . . .
Animals in pastures, looking for food, excavate and trample all snow several times each season, causing it to condense and lose its heat-insulating abilities. Therefore, the introduction of animals on pastures cools permafrost temperatures by 40 C, which can stop or substantially slow down permafrost degradation.
Forest and shrub lands are dark year-round and absorb the sun’s heat well. Pastures are much lighter and, in the winter, are white if they are covered with snow. Therefore, pastures reflect more of the sun’s heat and cool the climate.
It is very hard to agree to reduce industrial CO2 emissions. Reducing permafrost emissions is much easier. All that is needed is to cross mental barriers, accept that pasture ecosystems have a right to live and to freedom, and return part of the territory that our ancestors took from them.
PART THREE
I like to keep the median age in my lab low so we can dream together and make those dreams come true. They don’t yet think things are impossible.
—GEORGE M. CHURCH
It’s all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what’s impossible today with what’s impossible tomorrow.
—GEORGE M. CHURCH
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Winter 2012
77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, NEW RESEARCH BUILDING, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL.
Luhan Yang was moving fast as she navigated the crowded hallway that bisected the third floor of the New Research Building. Although everyone walked quickly at Harvard Medical School, Luhan was a bullet cutting through the stream of med students, lab technicians, and professors, determined not to be late to the open afternoon seminar on knockout genes and antimalarial mosquitoes. Even as she went—the crowd parting in front of her rocketing five-foot-three frame—she had her cell phone out in front of her, and her eyes were focused on the screen. The moving picture on the screen had nothing to do with mosquitoes. It was a video of an ultrasound, taken just a day earlier. Peering closely, Luhan could even make out the tiny, beating heart. The sight of something beautiful and precious and perfect, suddenly alive, gave her the ghost of a smile.
Luhan didn’t show emotions often. She was an exceedingly efficient perso
n, even in the way she walked. Usually, her limbs moved only the exact amount necessary, and at the moment, her jet-black hair was tied in a gravity-defying bun. She had a sharp sense of humor, and she could relax and let go in the right setting. But, day to day, she simply didn’t see the point of expending energy on unnecessary emotions.
“Hey, congrats!” shouted a med student as she passed Luhan and glanced at the screen over her shoulder.
“Thank you,” Luhan responded.
It wasn’t until she’d gone another five feet that she realized the medical student thought the baby was hers. It wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t a human baby at all.
It was a pig. That wasn’t entirely accurate either, because although most of the DNA of the fetus was indeed porcine, there was a little bit that . . . wasn’t. The pig fetus—named Laika after the first dog that the Russians had sent into space—had a liver that was partially human. Or more accurately, human compatible. And that little piglet, Luhan believed, would one day change the future of transplantation medicine.
Luhan didn’t feel any sense of hubris at the ambitious thought. Two years at Harvard had pretty much inured her to outcomes that might have seemed extraordinary at any other lab. She had done groundbreaking research (with another postdoc, Prashant Mali) on genetic engineering in human cells, which had caught the attention of a pair of transplant surgeons. The surgeons had been working for decades, mostly unsuccessfully, on using pig organs for liver and kidney transplantations, and now they wanted to see if the work Church and Luhan were doing could make possible what so far had eluded them.
To the uninitiated, Luhan could come off as intense. If a fellow student couldn’t understand something she was trying to explain, she didn’t coddle him. She had a great capacity for empathy, and knew that an iron mind alone wasn’t enough; as a woman succeeding in science, she knew it was important to be accessible, to do her best to inspire others to pursue their dreams. But sometimes, she didn’t keep it a secret that ignorance and laziness frustrated her.
