Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and C podcast. I'm Sonal. Today, Hen and I are doing another one of our

on the road shows from Washington, D.C. And today's guest is Ross Anderson, senior editor for the

Atlantic's science, health, and technology coverage. And he wrote a story earlier this year in the April

issue called Welcome to Pleistocene Park, which you don't have to have read to follow this conversation. But here's what you do need to know. A small group, a very small group, in fact, of Russian

scientists in Arctic Siberia are trying to resurrect an ice age biome complete with lab-grown

woolly mammoths through a scheme for rewilding grassland instead of forest.

And while we focus on the particulars of all that in this episode, in a hallway-style rift,

beginning with the connection to climate change, and then moving to gene editing to discussing

the science of paleontology and the sociocultural and economic aspects of radical geoengineering,

this episode is really more broadly about

what motivates seemingly crazy ideas, moving them from the lab to the field, quite literally in this

case, through marketing and narrative, which is where we end and begin the conversation.

So when I landed on the website and I see that these guys are trying to rewild all or a great part of

northern Siberia and Alaska and the Canadian Yukon with this Ice Age grassland biome and that

they want to put woolly mammoths there. I had the same reaction that everyone listening to

this has, right, Which is like, what?

Jurassic Park. Yeah, Jurassic Park, totally. The Ice Age for a joke.

These crazy people. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was excited to write the piece. And then the other thing about this project that was really compelling is that it's not that these guys were only just romantic about bringing the ice age back to this huge stretch of the earth.

Their primary motivation for doing it is to, as a climate change mitigation strategy,

which is to say that the Arctic is warming very fast and under the surface in the Arctic

is what's called the permafrost, this ice that has been there for, in some cases,

tens of thousands of years.

...