Pleistocene Park and a Case for Cautious Geoengineering
Pleistocene Park is a good example of limited research in geoengineering that is justified due to its potential to lessen the most severe impacts of climate change on both humanity and nonhuman nature. Naomi Oreskes and Stephen Gardinier stress, respectively, the reality of possibly devastating climate change and the need to address it. David Keith persuasively justifies the use of a little geoengineering as CO2 emissions peak in tandem with continual, committed mitigation. Christopher J. Preston persuasively argues that, despite the presumptive argument against geoengineering in environmental ethics, geoengineering may be justified in being the lesser of two evils and prioritizing human-well-being. Unlike the geoengineering strategies of atmospheric aerosols and weather control that Keith and Preston describe, Pleistocene Park aims to bring Earth gradually back to a previously experienced state and is more compatible with mitigation. This makes Pleistocene Park a less risky and more attractive example of geoengineering.
Pleistocene Park, a project in northeastern Russia run by scientist Sergei Zemov, reduces carbon emissions from permafrost and supports re-introduced mammal populations. The Park is a 160 square kilometer area of land around Chersky, Russia populated with grazing animals. These animals can help replace the boreal forests of the Far North with the grasslands of the Pleistocene Epoch, the last Ice Age. The Far North’s permafrost contains more carbon than the Earth’s atmosphere and forests combined (“One Russian scientist”), and therefore must be protected to prevent a positive feedback loop of melting. The ever-replenishing grasslands that the grazing animals foster protect permafrost by cooling soil temperatures and decomposing to allow for soil to better sequester carbon (“SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND”). Pleistocene Park’s expansion is justified if sufficient boreal forest ecosystems are left untouched and the animals introduced live good lives without harming the surrounding environment.
Climate scientists undisputedly hold that bold action is needed to prevent runaway climate change that significantly harms humans and nonhuman animals, although climate models are not certain about the precise nature of these impacts. Naomi Oreskes explains that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other, geographically diverse scientific institutions have concluded that recent climatic warming has been caused by greenhouse gases emissions by humans, and that the vast majority of climate scientists agree with this conclusion (608-612). Oreskes clarifies: “to say that man-made global warming is underway is not the same as agreeing about what will happen in the future. Much of the continuing debate in the scientific community involves the likely rate of future change” (613). She explains that climate models are best viewed as what-if scenarios, not perfect predictors, but that if many models are run in ensemble, the likely range of options can be viewed; she shows a graph of thousands of example models from Climateprediction.net that illustrate that CO2 concentrations double at pre-industrial levels lead to warming in virtually all models, but at different rates and magnitudes. She notes that models show that the more greenhouse gases emitted by humans, the more severe the climate impacts (Oreskes 619-620). Stephen Gardinier implies that action to mitigate and adapt to climate change is likely justified by the precautionary principle (676-677). Oreskes also points out that the reality of anthropogenic climate change does not discount debates about the importance of climate change in comparison to other issues and the best ways to respond to climate change (614).
David Keith promotes the idea that geoengineering is justifiable if its risks are minimized by only authorizing its use for a short time of peak CO2 concentrations and alongside strong, committed efforts at mitigation. Keith defines geoengineering as “a deliberate attempt to transform nature on a planetary scale” (690). He admits that geoengineering’s possibility may dangerously reduce the incentive to cut greenhouse gas emissions because it may appear to ensure the avoidance of the worst-case climate change scenario. However, he expresses that even if a strong, internationally agreed-upon mitigation strategy is pursued, geoengineering may be needed if the Earth’s climate is more sensitive to CO2 increases than we currently think or if CO2’s long atmospheric lifetime causes rapid glacial melting and sea-level rise even with mitigation (Keith 693). Keith uses figures to point out the differences between two scenarios in which geoengineering is used; in the first scenario, geoengineering substitutes for mitigation efforts, while in the second scenario, geoengineering minimizes the risks of peak CO2 concentrations while committed mitigation efforts are underway. He argues that the first strategy will troublingly lead to many unexpected side effects from both increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations and geoengineering, while the second strategy will lead to reduced risk because it is better to face higher CO2 concentrations with geoengineering-induced lower temperatures than those same concentrations with higher temperatures (Keith 693-694). Keith adds that under either an anthropocentric or even a non-anthropocentric view of value, temporary geoengineering permissible because it may crucially minimize harmful impacts on the Earth; in fact, he thinks that geoengineering is likely to be debated before 2100 if accelerating emissions and exponential negative climate impacts continue (694-695).
Christopher J. Preston explains that the biggest obstacles for geoengineering, as sufficient international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions remain elusive, are moral and ethical, not financial and scientific. These moral and ethical issues include socio-political concerns, aesthetic concerns, and concerns about altering the Earth’s basic biogeochemical processes: this last set of concerns is most salient to environmental ethicists (Preston 697-698). Preston cites Keith and Bill McKibben’s worries about fundamentally changing humanity’s relationship with the Earth by making the climate a human artifact (Preston 698-700). Preston also notes that a variety of non-anthropogenic and even anthropogenic environmental ethicists have stressed the rightness of non-interfering or interfering in a limited manner with the Earth’s natural environment. He argues that environmental ethicists have held a presumptive argument against geoengineering because they believe that Earth’s eons-long natural processes should not be altered by humans, who are prone to mismanage these processes’ complexities (Preston 700-702).
Preston argues that the presumptive argument against geoengineering of environmental ethicists may be overcome by arguments that geoengineering may be the lesser of the two evils and that geoengineering may best promote the critical, universal value of human well-being. He explains that for environmental ethicists to join important discussions about geoengineering, the presumptive argument must be accepted, but shown as defeasible by two different conditions (Preston 703). The first of these conditions, that geoengineering is the lesser of two evils in the event of an impending climate crisis, has been voiced by multiple organizations and influential individuals (Preston 703-704). Gardinier challenges the lesser of two evils argument for geoengineering in multiple ways. He argues that the choice between two evils may already be upon us or may be avoidable through methods other than geoengineering, that the moral failure to prevent the choice should lead to compensation to future generations other than geoengineering research, that justly implementing geoengineering as the lesser of two evils may be hard, and that supporting geoengineering is a form of hubris that turns attention away from mitigation efforts (Gardinier 686). Preston thinks Gardinier’s arguments are effective, but points out that they only have to be proven surmountable, not wrong, for geoengineering to be justified. He states that, despite the fact that it would take an extraordinarily difficult cost-benefit analysis to prove, there is nothing theoretically preventing geoengineering from being the lesser of two evils as opposed to the suffering and destruction caused by climate change (Preston 704). Preston also points out that the moral corruption Gardinier speaks of is not universal due to climate action that is ongoing, many proponents of geoengineering admitting that it needs to be used alongside other action, and many of these proponents stating that geoengineering is needed during this current generation (Preston 705). Preston adds that despite the fact we have blighted, as Gardinier argues, the Earth’s environment, this should not stop us from performing additional evils, and geoengineering could be part of the way in which we amend for these evils (Preston 706). The second of the conditions to the presumptive argument that Preston discusses is that geoengineering may be justified when vital interests of humans are prioritized. He presents a counterfactual in which global warming is occurring not because of anthropogenic emissions as it is in reality, but because of natural variability, and questions if in this case the presumptive argument against geoengineering would stand in this case. He states that it would not stand, as it would be ecofascism by omission, and that the vast majority of environmental ethicists who support the presumptive argument do not support letting people die in order to uphold environmental values. This conclusion allows Preston to argue that, when the situation becomes dire enough, anthropogenic ethics trump non-anthropogenic ethics, although he points out that geoengineering would likely help both humans and other species at the expense of Earth’s biogeochemical processes (Preston 706-708).
Pleistocene Park is different from the geoengineering which Keith and Preston discuss as justifiable, but despite these differences the Park can be justified on similar grounds to those in which the two authors bring up. Pleistocene Park is inherently less risky than the geoengineering using sulfate aerosols or space-based weather control technologies described by the two authors (Keith 690-693, Preston 698) because it aims to alter the Earth’s climate and the ecosystem of a region to similar states to those which the Earth has experienced before. Sulfate aerosols are naturally launched into the atmosphere by large volcanic eruptions, but these events cause destructive global cooling (Keith 691); sulfate aerosols can be released less dramatically with geoengineering, but their effects would be seen worldwide and would manifest unevenly in different regions’ weather over a quick timescale (Preston 698). Although Keith states that space-based sunshields would be less impactful and more predictable than sulfate aerosols, they allow for the potentially problematic notion of selective weather control, they would be much more expensive than aerosols (Keith 692), and they do not have a naturally-occuring parallel. Pleistocene Park’s most direct and near-term impacts, in contrast, are focussed on one area of the world, the Far North, that stably had the conditions it aims to foster for thousands of years. Also, these impacts are replacing a low-biodiversity tree-based ecosystem with a high-biodiversity grass-based ecosystem that sequesters more carbon and protecting permafrost that stores carbon which would otherwise be released into the atmosphere (“SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND”). In addition, seven of the nine grazing species in Pleistocene Park were not present in the region before the project’s start (“ANIMALS”). Unlike the methods of geoengineering discussed by Keith and Preston, Pleistocene Park is reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the future atmosphere, instead of cooling the Earth by other means; it therefore is more compatible with mitigation efforts because it will not substitute geoengineering for mitigation. If the animals in Pleistocene Park are given freedom to roam and the area of the Park is limited so that land-change effects are minimized and some boreal systems are maintained, there seem to be few moral reasons to not continue and even expand the geoengineering research at Pleistocene Park.
Pleistocene Park is clearly a speculative, small-scale study at present, and efforts to expand it enough to have a major impact on the Earth’s climate would likely cost billions of dollars and involve the efforts of many people and many thousands of animals (“One Russian scientist”). Yet the project, due to the urgent nature of climate change, may be justifiable as an example of relatively low-risk geoengineering which is the lesser of two evils and prioritizes the well-being of humans and wildlife.
Works Cited
“ANIMALS.” Pleistocene Park. https://pleistocenepark.ru/animals/. Accessed 19 May 2021.
Gardiner, Stephen M. “Ethics and Global Climate Change: An Introduction.” Pojman, Pojman,
and McShane, pp. 674-689.
Keith, David W. “Engineering the Planet.” Pojman, Pojman, and McShane, pp. 690-696.
“One Russian scientist hopes to slow the thawing of the Arctic.” The Economist, 16 Dec. 2020,
to-slow-the-thawing-of-the-arctic. Accessed 11 May 2021.
Oreskes, Naomi. “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not
Wrong?” Pojman, Pojman, and McShane, pp. 608-628.
Pojman, Louis P, Paul Pojman, and Katie McShane. Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory
and Application, Cengage Learning, 2017.
Preston, Christopher J. “Rethinking the Unthinkable: Environmental Ethics and the Presumptive
Argument Against Geoengineering.” Pojman, Pojman, and McShane, pp. 697-713.
“SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND.” Pleistocene Park. https://pleistocenepark.ru/science/. Accessed
19 May 2021.
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