Over the past 20 years, a preserve known as Pleistocene Park has been created in Siberia with the goal of restoring grasslands once home to megafauna like mammoths. The theory behind the park, as described in The Atlantic, is that restoring the wildlife inhabiting it more than 12,000 years ago will create an ecosystem that will slow the thawing of Arctic permafrost, which has more carbon locked in it "than there is in all the planet’s forests and the rest of the atmosphere combined." Two scientists, a father and son named Sergey Zimov and Nikita Zimov, have dedicated their lives to clearing the forests that now cover the Mammoth Steppe by reintroducing species such as musk oxen, wild horses and other large herbivores. However, they need mammoths, "a keystone species on account of their prodigious grazing, their well-digging, and the singular joy they seemed to derive from knocking down trees." The project has inspired geneticist George Church to accelerate his research, which uses the CRISPR genome-editing technology to attempt the creation of a close relative of the mammoth. The article notes, "Nikita and Sergey seemed entirely unbothered by ethical considerations regarding mammoth cloning or geoengineering. They saw no contradiction between their veneration of 'the wild' and their willingness to intervene, radically, in nature." According to Nikita Zimov, “Playing God doesn’t bother me in the least. We are already doing it. Why not do it better?” Read the entire article here.