Pleistocene Park: Extinction and Eternity in the Russian Arctic

FAIN: FEL-281480-22

Anya Bernstein
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)

Writing leading to a book on Pleistocene Park, a project to combat climate change by reintroducing species in the Russian Arctic. 

In Pleistocene Park: Extinction and Eternity in the Russian Arctic, I extend my previous work on technoscience and future scenarios in Russia to issues of climate change and geoengineering. The project chronicles the efforts of a transnational team of scientists to “resurrect” an extinct ecosystem in Arctic Siberia through “Pleistocene rewilding,” or repopulating the area with large herbivores. The animals, they hypothesize, will (re-)turn the tundra into Pleistocene-era grasslands, slowing down the melting of permafrost via a complex system of interactions between the animals and land. Drawing on original ethnographic work and archival research, I show that Pleistocene Park, as a “soft” climate engineering project of the present, has deep and contradictory roots in the history of Russian imperial and early Soviet science, as well as the tradition of Russian apocalyptic utopianism and its concern with the end of life on Earth as we know it and fears of human extinction.