George Church, he of Harvard and a glorious beard, is a proponent of de-extincting the mastodon as part of a plan to restore the tundra. The idea being that mastodons help create the tundra by their herd migration, breaking up hard ground with their feet, fertilizing the ground with their urine and manure, and allowing the tundra to rebuild itself. The idea is called Pleistocene Park (http://www.pleistocenepark.ru/en/).
This is very close to the ideas of Alan Savory’s Holistic Management (my notes available at http://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2014/03/holistic-management-new-framework-for.html) who works with grasslands using existing herd animals, continually moving the grazing ground so that no place is overgrazed and each place has enough time to recover before being grazed again.
Savory’s work is “controversial” but I wonder if Church or the Russians involved in Pleistocene Park have ever even mentioned Savory’s ideas let alone defended him.
