Stewardship of the Environment - a perspective I hadn't thought of

 Our discussion last week didn't include using de-extinction as a learning tool to use to help a threatened species. I'm including a link to a National Geographic blog post, and then the last few paragraphs of the article which looks at the feasibility of cloning a mammoth in light of learning more about the technology so it can be used to clone still living, but endangered species or perhaps just to fund raise for other preservation efforts.



 http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/12/mammoth-deextinction/
Conservation boost
Despite these many hurdles, Schuster does not dismiss the possibility of cloning a mammoth, especially with improvements in genetic techniques. “Every time a journalist asks me about this, one of those hurdles has been taken out,” he says. “I think it’s a little irresponsible to stand there and say it’ll never happen, but that doesn’t mean we should spend money on it. Maybe it would be better spent on preserving endangered species today.”
Can we really justify trying to bring the mammoth back from extinction when all three species of living elephant are in danger of joining it? “If you’d interviewed me two or three years, ago, I would have been much more aggressive against it,” says Hildebrandt. He has changed his mind after struggling with efforts to conserve other large animals like the Sumatran rhino. Only a few hundred remain, and many are so old that no amount of assisted reproduction will help them to breed. “Our only option is to clone them,” he says.
Mammoth-cloning projects might act as an attractive funding magnet in a way that conservation projects of little-known rhinos cannot. “The mammoth may be able indirectly help future conservation projects, by developing cloning technologies that could help modern species,” says Hildebrandt. It’s a sobering thought: as impossible as cloning an extinct animal might sound, the one good reason to try is that it might prevent a number of species from suffering the same fate.

It seems that every issue I use to add interest to my classes requires me to think about issues from a new perspective and then to ask students to also think. I love connections between the curriculum and real life!