Some ofthe media headlines have been breathless. Time magazine hailed “TheReturn of the Dire Wolf.” Onthe venerable news magazine’s cover, the word “Extinct” is crossed out. “Thisis Remus,” the cover declares, above the image of a large white canid. “He’s adire wolf. The first to exist in 10,000 years. Endangered species could bechanged forever.” RollingStone was equally credulous: “12,000 years later, Dire Wolves areback.”
No. As The Washington Post and Scientific American ably pointed out, Remus is not really a direwolf. They aren’t “back.” Dire wolves are still extinct. A company calledColossal Biosciences, backed by Peter Thiel, among other God-cosplaying billionaires, wasable to breed grey wolves with some dire wolf DNA, creating some bigger andwhiter creatures. In addition to a sister, Khaleesi, there are two wolf brothers, named Romulus and Remus for the human twins who, according to mythology, weresuckled by a wolf mother, in a series of unlikely events leading to thefounding of Rome.
You can’tmake this stuff up: As the American empire teeters on the brink of collapse,the billionaires laying waste to what’s left of our natural world and humancivilization are not only trying to bring back dangerous, long-extinct animals but naming them after the mythological founders of an empire that went extinctitself due to its rulers’ arrogance. These admittedly handsome critters couldeasily become symbols of our own imperial collapse.
It wouldbe hard for these animals or any descended from them to survive in the wild;the large game that dire wolves hunted isn’t as plentiful in our current world,and their old habitats are mostly gone. It’s easy to imagine that without woolly mammoths or buffalo to eat,these future hybrids could turn on us, in a Parable of the Sower scenario. Not exactly what we need right now!
But evenmore disturbing than the overexcitable media coverage or the dystopianpossibilities are the conclusions that the current administration has drawnfrom this quixotic little adventure. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, abillionaire, like many others in the Trump administration, says the appearanceof these wolves shows that endangered species need “innovation, not regulation,”an echo of the trendy “abundance” discourse currently beloved by centrist Democrats. Burgumtold employees in an Interior Department meetingWednesday, “Ifwe’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunityto bring them back. Pick your favorite species, and call Colossal.” (Colossalalso has plans to bring back the woolly mammoth, an even stupideridea but one that Elon Musk is excited about.)
Burgum’sposition is dangerously deranged. Nature itself is “innovating” all the time,but the most important way that humans can save endangered species is byregulating our own activities to protect them and their habitats. The latter isthe only known way that species like the Florida panthers have returned fromnear-extinction, and keeps many other species from getting there. As The WashingtonPost implied in an article Thursday, the administration is using this weirdscience experiment to justify its own plans to decimate endangered species protectionsthat have been in place since the Nixon administration.
Evenbefore Trump and his band of anti-environmental bandits announced these plans,scientists had flaggedmore than a million species for risk of extinction in the coming decades.The changes that Burgum is currently making will imperil spotted owls, sea turtles, and many more.
Why, inthis context, do our oligarchs eschew protections for the animals we alreadylove—like whales and manatees—preferring to bring back some rejiggered haplessversion of the ancient dire wolf, which no current ecosystem needs? Preciselyfor the reason Burgum admits: They don’t want regulation. They claim that’sbecause regulation has “failed,” but that’s nonsense: The Endangered Species Acthas saved the vast majority of listed species fromextinction,including the gray whale, the peregrine falcon, the grizzly bear, and the bald eagle, our national bird. Oligarchsprefer Colossal’s entirely untested and wildly inefficient approach because itssupposed “innovation” puts them at the center, and because, even better,shredding regulation allows them tocontinue trashing the world unhindered, destroying anything that stands in theway of their profits.
Speakingof current species that need the regulatory system that Bergum is trying so hardto eviscerate, we still have real live wolves. It’s particularly rich thatthese so-called dire wolves are essentially gray wolves with a little bit ofgene editing, because the gray wolf, a magnificent animal that cannot beimproved by oligarchic interference, is particularly besieged by humanpolicies. That wolf has been protected by the Endangered Species Act since1974, when it was hunted nearly to extinction. Since then, the species hasrebounded in many Western states, but Trump removed protections for gray wolvesin 2020, and Idaho and Montana are deliberately seeking toreduce theirnumbers, killing them recklessly. Republican billionaires and far-rightpoliticians may applaud the engineering of this strange lab-grown model, butthe world they’re creating is utterly inhospitable to the real wolf.
The onlyway this “dire wolf” project could be helpful to the cause of animalconservation is if Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi grow up with a special appetitefor oligarchs. That, I must admit, would be an outcome worthy of significantresearch investment. But it’s likely not what Peter Thiel has in mind.
