What's your stance on bringing back extinct species?

[The Grand Nudger]

IDK Anom, I mean... I do get the value in making a dirtball pitch to get the ball rolling...obviously, lol. Kentucky has the largest population of elk east of the big river and it's success is down to selling tags. That's the engine, but it's not why it was done or the primary benefit of the program. It wouldn't be a stretch to consider it a modified livestock operation ( i'm reminded of all the bison and gazelle and even exotic non natives I saw being bred out west as we drove through). I'm not convinced, though, that viewing ecology or restoration projects solely through the lens of what we think we can get out of it is the goal of conservation or that you would find many conservation minded people espousing such a guiding principle. That sort of thinking is a big part of how we found ourselves here and it turns out to have been shortsighted at best. It will be a much longer project than restoring a given habitat to change our attitudes on that issue.

At any rate, it's not for a lack of benefit to humanity or the environment that we'd decide not to reintroduce mammoths or any number of other species. I think that you'd really enjoy that link I posted. It speaks directly to the problem of trying to understand ecology with these crucial pieces missing. In the same way that it might be difficult to understand the current state of earth in the absence of human beings. I think it's fun to wonder, too, how much of our environment might one day be anachronistically adapted to us...as a then-past keystone species, as natural gardeners, not entirely unlike the many we've eradicated or nearly eradicated - even if our best work doesn't tend to last quite as long as those others.