Wooly Bully-ish

 Let's see, vast herds of 8 to 11' mammals weighing 4 to 6 tons roaming the thawing Arctic tundra for the first time in 4,000 years? Thinking. Thinking. Thinking.

Uh, no.

The impetus for this project comes from tech and software entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church via their company Colossal. Why? Yes, indeed, why?

According to Church their "goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant, but its going to look and behave like a mammoth. Not because we are trying to trick anybody, but because we want something that is functionally equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at -40C, and do all the things that elephants and mammoths do, in particular knocking down trees."

Mammoths enjoying--enjoying--life at -40C. But, I'll let that notion slide for now.

Their thinking goes, apparently, knock down trees, expand grasslands. And grasslands are better cover for permafrost regions than trees. But wait, there's more. Bonus notion, as stock use Asian elephants which are dwindling rapidly towards extinction.

Hold on, cosmic neophytes.

Gareth Phoenix (some things you can't make up), professor of plant and global change ecology, has doubts about the effort. "...We know in the forested Arctic regions that trees and moss cover can be critical in protecting permafrost, so removing the trees and trampling the moss would be the last thing you'd want to do."

Even more to the point, a 2020 study published in Nature concluded "...The sensitivity study shows that considerable less herbivore density and hence less snow depth reduction will also have a high  potential to prevent permafrost from thawing. Hence, our study demonstrates the need of much more detailed field studies and experiments about the effect of herbivores, such as reindeer, on snow depth at a landscape scale."

Yes, at scale. Victoria Herridge, evolutionary biologist at the Natural History museum in London, is not so sure about this plan. "You are talking about hundreds of thousands of mammoths which each take 22 months to gestate and 30 years to grow to maturity."

I never played a scientist on television, so my first thought may be pretty pedestrian. Holy methane, Batman!

For me, once again, the slippery slope rule applies. Don't know enough to go forward, then don't. What next, saber tooth tigers because of a prey-predator imbalance? Or, Neanderthals?

Of course the holy grail of modern capitalism--entrepreneurship--may prevail. Rarely doesn't. Wonder what Mary Shelley would think?

Wait, where are her bones interred? Bournemouth, here we come!