Redefining extinction through thawing permafrost.

In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity that affects both life and nonlife on earth. With a look at the coldest regions in the world, Wrigley examines the wild new economies and mitigation strategies responding to thawing permafrost, including such projects as Pleistocene Park, Colossal, and Sooam Biotech, and offers a new angle on extinction through the concept of discontinuity. Here, Wrigley is joined in conversation with Pey-Yi Chu.

Charlotte Wrigley is a postdoctoral researcher at The Greenhouse – Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She is author of Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic.

Pey-Yi Chu is associate professor of history at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is author of The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science. 

PUBLICATION REFERENCES:

The Life of Permafrost / Pey-Yi Chu

Once Upon the Permafrost / Susan Crate

The Breath of the Permafrost / Nikolai Sleptsov-Sylyk

Cryopolitics / Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal, editors

PLACES REFERENCED:

-Yakutsk, the capital of the Russian region of the Sakha Republic

-Chersky, Arctic port in the Sakha District on the Kolyma River

-Permafrost bank on the Kolyma called Duvanny Yar

-Pleistocene Park in Chersky

PEOPLE MENTIONED:
-Sergey and Nikita Zimov, geophysicist and son behind Pleistocene Park project

-George Church of Harvard University, behind the business Colossal

-Hwang Woo-Suk (Sooam Biotech), biotechnology expert and veterinarian who claimed to clone human embryonic cells and does work in Yakutsk with mammoths.

-Stewart Brand, environmentalist and founder of the Long Now Foundation, known for quote: “We are as gods, so we have to get good at it.”

More about the book: z.umn.edu/EarthIceBoneBlood