Pleistocene Park: Engineering Wilderness in a More-than-Human World

Speaker
Anya Bernstein
Affiliation
Harvard University

Event Description
Pleistocene Park is a large-scale science experiment in Arctic Siberia in the form of a future-oriented rewilding project with the goal of mitigating climate change. The Park’s creators hypothesize that introducing large herbivores into the area will slow the thawing of permafrost. Using the approach of multispecies ethnography, in attending to the nonhuman agencies at work in the project, I argue that the Park differs from other rewilding projects, which are usually ecocentric, in emerging as a survivalist project with a distinct anthropocentric bent. Even so, however, the Park’s survivalist goal for humans coexists with ontologies based on collaboration and mutual aid between humans and nonhumans, and between organic and inorganic matter, with extensive agency assigned to nonhuman others. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the frame of the Park’s various genealogies, I trace the project’s underlying assumptions in equal measure to the history of Russian science and to the experience of the Park’s lead scientists of sociopolitical rupture following the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a case study, Pleistocene Park is especially suited to exploring issues of time and temporality, apocalypticism and redemption, extinction and eternity, in addition to particular visions of the natural and the human.

Contact
Lee Horinko Reed
lhorinko@princeton.edu