Sergey Zimov says the park would be “the largest project in human history.” It was Nikita’s father, Sergey, who first developed the idea for Pleistocene Park, before ceding control of it to Nikita. This intergenerational work has already begun. Only in Siberia’s empty expanse could an experiment of this scale succeed, and only if human beings learn to cooperate across centuries. In its scope and radicalism, the idea has few peers, save perhaps the scheme to cool the Earth by seeding the atmosphere with silvery mists of sun-reflecting aerosols. Were that frozen underground layer to warm too quickly, it would release some of the world’s most dangerous climate-change accelerants into the atmosphere, visiting catastrophe on human beings and millions of other species. If Nikita has his way, Pleistocene Park will spread across Arctic Siberia and into North America, helping to slow the thawing of the Arctic permafrost. The park was founded in 1996, and already it has broken out of its original fences, eating its way into the surrounding tundra scrublands and small forests. He wants to summon the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem, complete with its extinct creatures, back from the underworld of geological layers. Nikita is trying to resurface Beringia with grasslands. But when the Ice Age ended, many of the grasslands vanished under mysterious circumstances, along with most of the giant species with whom we once shared this Earth. In Beringia, the Arctic belt that stretches across Siberia, all of Alaska, and much of Canada’s Yukon, these vast plains of green and gold gave rise to a new biome, a cold-weather version of the African savanna called the Mammoth Steppe. Even during its deepest chills, when thick, blue-veined glaciers were bearing down on the Mediterranean, huge swaths of the planet were coated in grasslands. Though colloquially known as the Ice Age, the Pleistocene could easily be called the Grass Age. Pleistocene Park is named for the geological epoch that ended only 12,000 years ago, having begun 2.6 million years earlier. I am trying to solve the larger problem of climate change. I’m not one of these crazy scientists that just wants to make the world green. “But I’m not doing this for them, or for any other animals. “It will be cute to have mammoths running around here,” he told me. It is, instead, a radical geoengineering scheme. Though its name winks at Jurassic Park, Nikita, the reserve’s director, was keen to explain that it is not a tourist attraction, or even a species-resurrection project. Beyond the broken trunks and a few dark tree-lined hills stood Pleistocene Park, a 50-square-mile nature reserve of grassy plains roamed by bison, musk oxen, wild horses, and maybe, in the not-too-distant future, lab-grown woolly mammoths. “But here, they are against our theory.”īehind us, through the fresh gap in the forest, our destination shone in the July sun. We rampaged 20 yards with this same violent rhythm-churning wheels, cracking timber, silent fall-before stopping to survey the flattened strip of larches in our wake. He squeezed the accelerator, slamming us into another larch, until it too snapped and toppled over, felled by our elephantine force. I remember thinking that in another age, Nikita might have led a hunter-gatherer band in some wildland of the far north. He fixed his large ice-blue eyes on the fallen tree and grinned. Even seated behind the wheel, he loomed tall and broad-shouldered, his brown hair cut short like a soldier’s. Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.
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