Screening: 'Pleistocene Park' (dir. Luke Griswold-Tergis, 2022)

In the mid 1990’s, eccentric Russian scientist Sergey Zimov made the startling discovery that melting arctic permafrost threatened to release huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, potentially creating a feedback loop that will lead to runaway climate change. Impatient with world’s slow reaction to this news Zimov proposed that millions of horses, bison, reindeer, yaks, muskoxen, camels — and perhaps cloned wooly mammoths — once again roaming the northern half of Asia, can stabilize permafrost and prevent this catastrophic scenario of runaway global warming.

His "Pleistocene Park" is a controversial attempt to mitigate melting permafrost by reverse engineering the ‘Mammoth Steppe’ ecosystem – a now vanished ice age grassland, complete with Serengeti-like herds of roaming herbivores, which once stretched from Spain to Canada.

Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (OWNER), Slavic Languages & Literatures

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