The point with diverting funds depends on whether those funds really would be available for other stuff. The money for the Apollo moon landing programme could have done more if spent in a different way, I think de-extinction, if it is to be done, is perhaps best thought of as it's own Apollo Programme or Human Genome Project or a mission of that magnitude. It's not really part of conservation necessarily.
I agree with this very strongly.
In conservation, we often have the concept of an 'umbrella species' -- part of this idea that if we can convince people tigers are worth protecting, and they donate for tigers, we can use that money to protect all of the many species in the same ecosystem as tigers. I would argue US zoos lean towards a similar system - where many donors are donating to build exhibits for elephants or gorillas or polar bears, and the zoo may use some funding to include or improve other exhibits for smaller species. I think to some degree though these strategies are also an admission that people are more likely to donate for charismatic megafauna than wildlife conservation for its own sake, and that we need to be strategic.
The public wants pandas and giraffes, and conservationists and zoos find ways to use that money to do more. I think that's very much the state of things.
The other reason I think the Apollo comparison is a good one especially is that the "moonshot" added a lot of energy and momentum to space exploration as a whole long during the sixties well before we reached the final goal, so much was accomplished outside the moon landing; and crucially, while the moon landing remains a pinnacle of human achievement, the landing itself did not 'end' space exploration by any means (there are low ebbs, including the mid-70s, but then there was Skylab and the Space Shuttle) and is still one of the biggest symbols with the general public of space exploration and astronomy. The general public doesn't understand the geological and mathematical parts of it just like they don't understand everything wildlife biologists do, but just like saving pandas, the moon landing gets the money that keeps it going.
I'm partially convinced Colossal is run by a secret group of conservationists and zoologists using the possibility of de-extinction as a front for getting tech startup levels of funding for real projects like elephant HPV, cane toad toxin resistance and rhinoceros reproductive research...
This is exactly core to my belief and I'm glad to see someone else expressing it. I have suspected this for a while as the headlines about de-extinction are rarely accompanied in the text by progress on the big, public-facing goals. Every thylacine article talks about dunnarts instead. The elephant vaccine felt like a validation of this as I see no reason for a theoretical, Jurassic Park-ish company to offer that freely if they viewed it only as a stepping stone to mammoths.
It's a marketing scheme, and honestly, appears to me a really effective one. Some of these rich donors may very likely be people who might turn their nose up at a northern white rhinoceros ("don't most zoos have those already?") or an Asiatic lion ("can't they use African ones?") but are probably donating to have their name on a what they think is a as good as a dinosaur, and the company still appears to be using these funds to help living species, some endangered, on this planet -- and if they are doing enough of that, then I no longer view it as mutually exclusive risk if they happen to accomplish their thylacine or dodo cloning goals later on.
This is a very interesting one. I think having optimism can be immensely valuable for conservation and fear of extinction and a feeling of hopelessness/the looming inevitable void is not usually a good motivator.
I want to agree on this, too -- as personally, I am someone who struggles to maintain optimism a lot and often conversations about hopelessness end up with me disengaging from the field or point of interest. This isn't specific to wildlife conservation but a general behavior - even during my time as a movie buff, I often felt inclined to disengage from all movies when dealing with "everything is terrible" types.
Some believe hopelessness can drive outrage towards goals but I think this really only works in circumstances where there is a strong sense of urgency.
? Also, wouldn’t it’s reintroduction cause much chaos upon the environment or food chain?
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. Reproducing and capability of surviving is near to none imao, it’s and extinct species after all. If this argument continues, it should definitely move to a new thread upon this topic.
