This Is Uncomfortable

Bonus: Should we mess with nature? From "How We Survive"

This Is Uncomfortable

Show Notes

This week we’re sharing an episode of the Marketplace climate solutions podcast “How We Survive.”

The new season is all about the controversial ways humans are tinkering with nature in an effort to save the planet, from shooting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, to launching sunshades into space. In this episode, they explore the wildest intervention to date: de-extinction.

The team takes a tour of Colossal Labs, the $10 billion Dallas-based startup betting it can reverse-engineer extinction itself, to see how they plan to turn pigeons into dodos and Asian elephants into woolly mammoths.

But whether it’s bringing back the woolly mammoth from extinction or shooting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, just because we can mess with nature, does that mean we should? After the tour, host Amy Scott chats with Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert to find out.

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