George Church, the Harvard Medical School professor of genetics behind Colossal’s dire wolf project, was part of a team that successfully used CRISPR to change the genome of blue-green algae so that it could absorb up to 20% more carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Silicon Valley tech incubator Y Combinator seized on the advance to call for scaled-up proposals, estimating that seeding less than 1% of the ocean’s surface with genetically engineered phytoplankton would sequester approximately 47 gigatons of CO2 a year, more than enough to reverse all of last year’s worldwide emissions.
But moving from deploying CRISPR for species protection to providing a planetary service flips the ethical calculus. Restoring a chestnut forest or a coral reef preserves nature, or at least something close to it. Genetically manipulating phytoplankton and plants to clean up after our mistakes raises the risk of a moral hazard. Do we have the right to rewrite nature so we can perpetuate our nature-killing ways?
“We’ve gone from talking about how to let nature carry on as best it can, to ‘How can we engineer it to provide this vital service?’” Preston, the environmental philosopher, told me. “We’re not trying to preserve a natural system. We’re just trying to find the best way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. That requires a little bit more humility.”
— Read on www.noemamag.com/editing-nature-to-fix-our-failures/
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