Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum quickly embraced news earlier this month of the misleadingly named “de-extinction technology” introduced by bioscience engineering company Colossal Biosciences. The premature and misguided celebration by Secretary Burgum, among many others, glosses over real, present-day conservation concerns and threatens progress to recover real species teetering on the edge of extinction.

Genetic technology to recreate long extinct species that will live the rest of their lives in captivity, held as curiosities for exhibition and publicity stunts, cannot be viewed as the solution to human-caused extinction.

Rather than celebrating emerging and untested technology attempting to recreate animals that have long since been extinct, our focus must be on the real, present-day conservation concerns and threats to existing species facing extinction. Our research efforts, conservation dollars, and legal tools should be focused on restoring and preserving the species currently on the ground and in need of help.

Genetically altering an animal to mimic one long-extinct species costs millions of dollars that could have been invested to prevent the extinction of over 1,600 species currently identified as endangered.

Instead, politicians vilify the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and claim we can Frankenstein our way to the future where nothing is natural but instead born out of a petri dish and raised in a man-made ecosystem.

If Secretary Burgum and the administration truly believed in wildlife conservation, they would not be opening massive swaths of our public lands to logging, drilling, and mining, nor........

© Common Dreams