Endling. The word describes the last surviving member of a species before it goes extinct. It is a word Congress hoped would become obsolete with the passage of the Endangered Species Act. Enacted during a time of accelerating biodiversity loss, the Endangered Species Act reflects a deliberate congressional judgment that the destruction of species in the wild is a harm to America of a different magnitude – irreplaceable, intolerable, … irreversible. But now, emerging technologies coupled with a dismantling of the statute threaten to shift the Endangered Species Act’s precautionary approach to one of techno-optimism. Whereas in the past society might invoke traditional conservation interventions like captive breeding, reintroduction, and genetic rescue as last-ditch efforts to save a species from extinction, de-extinction technologies offer the promise of resurrecting species that have been lost to extinction. The concern is that society might increasingly rely upon future conservation interventions, be they tested or novel, in tolerating present harm to biodiversity. Such decision-making may enable wildlife management agencies to permit levels of harm that would otherwise jeopardize the continued existence of species, and thus be prohibited, on the unproven assumption that technology can later resurrect them.
This Article identifies this dynamic as “conservation by resurrection,” a form of decision-making that relies on speculative biological recovery of individual members of a species while sanctioning the degradation of the ecological conditions necessary for species survival. It draws on Endangered Species Act doctrine, administrative law, and the scientific framework of representation, resiliency, and redundancy (the 3Rs), which the Department of the Interior has converted into a policy framework for all its conservation decisions. The Article proposes a fourth R: “reversibility” as a conservation criterion requiring that a future conservation intervention must be demonstrably feasible, ecologically sufficient, timely, and reliable before agencies rely on it.
Reversibility draws a necessary line as society weighs the tradeoffs of racing toward or away from species extinctions. It insists that the promise of future conservation interventions cannot excuse present biodiversity or habitat loss unless that intervention produces real and sufficient conservation benefits. It forces society to confront not whether we might someday bring species back, but whether we are willing to let them disappear in the first place.