"1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
"5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Well, the theory was in a Scholastic News for my 3rd grade class so it was rather watered down for that level. It was presented as a yes/no debate for bringing them back.
I can’t get my digital subscription copy to load right here at home but I can get the article in reading form. Here it the beginning plus the YES argument.
Imagine a furry elephant. Creatures like that, called woolly mammoths, once lived in colder parts of the world. They became extinct thousands of years ago, but what if they were to return from the dead?
A company called Colossal hopes to bring back woolly mammoths with a process called de-extinction. It’ll use DNA from a frozen mammoth. DNA is in cells, and it decides how living things look and behave. Scientists will copy the DNA into the cells of the mammoth’s closest living relative, the Asian elephant.
Some people think it would be exciting to see mammoths alive. But many scientists worry de-extinction could cause more harm than good.
Should we bring these extinct creatures back from the dead?
YES
Colossal says mammoths could help slow climate change. The frozen soil where they lived is called permafrost. It contains tons of trapped greenhouse gases.
Today, snow covers the permafrost. It is like a blanket that warms the soil. As the soil thaws, it releases greenhouse gases, which speed up climate change.
Colossal says bringing back mammoths could help. They could scrape away some layers of snow as they look for food. Without the snow, cold air could reach the soil and keep it frozen. Gases would stay trapped.
Supporters say the mammoths could help restore their habitat in other ways. They would tear down trees for food. The area might return to the grassy plains it was long ago.
I did some searching and apparently this is a thing.
That article is pure fantasy. Not the bringing back the wooly mammoth part, the stopping climate change part. First off, there are no trees on the tundra for them to uproot, but secondly, the snowfall on the tundra is insufficient to retard freezing of the ground, but compression of the vegetation by the mammoths would cause the permafrost to melt everywhere they walked. Destruction, or even just disturbance, of the vegetation is the number one cause of melting permafrost in the Arctic. Those guys who postulated that are ignorant idiots.