Beth Shapiro

We figured out how to only take the males or leave the juveniles or some way of maintaining that population so that you knew you could go back to the hunt the next year and they would be there again.

And we domesticated things.

And then we transformed to really authority over everything.

When we protect a species, people who think about conservation often think of this as super hands-off.

Like, I'm not doing anything.

Everything just gets to evolve the way that it should be.

That's bullshit.

Like, we decide how many animals live, where they get to live, what they get to eat, how many they get to eat.

We call them when we want to.

We protect them if we want to.

We don't if we want to.

We are as gods, as Stuart Brand wrote in the Whole Earth Catalog, right?

And we just better get good at it.

These technologies are not exactly the same as the technologies that our ancestors had because we are directly changing DNA sequences, right?

But they are technologies that we can deploy to hopefully try to fix some of the things that we have fucked up already.

And I think the biggest challenge that I have is to show people that deciding not to allow ourselves the space that we need to figure out what we can do with these technologies matters.

We're still operating within regulatory frameworks.

We're still operating within the bounds of biological reality.

There's a long way to go here.

But if we decide that that's too scary, that we don't trust ourselves, that we're always going to make the worst decision, first of all, it's that attitude of negativity, right?