Hard To Keep Up With The Future

From an article about the facilitated adaption over on Motherboard:

"'From the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, we have influenced everything,' Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine, told me at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston earlier this year. 'On some level, that's terrifying, but maybe it frees us up a little to be flexible with our thinking.'

"And that's where colorful creatures like mammoth-elephant hybrids, bleach-resistant coral, and other human-designed frankenspecies get thrown into the speculative mix. This idea, sometimes called facilitated adaptation, posits that damage done to the planet's wildlife can be managed, and even reversed, by manually retooling the genes of threatened species for survival. These genetically modified organisms would be tailored to optimize the health of collapsing ecosystems, merging the futuristic visions of fields like gene-editing, de-extinction, and synthetic biology to support wildlife conservation."

From Austral:

‘Ecopoets were mostly nomads,’ I said. ‘Always on the move. You see that picture? The mammoth? The first ecopoets resurrected them from elephant stock and traits clipped from the genomes of pygmy mammoths that once lived on an island in Siberia. They were used to transport stuff from place to place. They helped with the landscaping, too. Shifting rocks and such.’