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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
What I found with permafrost was a way to rethink extinction as messier. It's a kind of more generative occurrence that doesn't necessarily have a beginning or an end, but is instead a kind of process of making and remaking and unmaking. The whole system of
Pey-Yi Chu:a loss, you know, itself shows how frozen Earth is dynamic.
Charlotte Wrigley:Hi, to everyone out there in the podcast world. My name is Charlotte Wrigley. I'm gonna be talking today about, my book that was recently released, with the University of Minnesota Press. It's called Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Plummerfrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic. A little bit about myself.
Charlotte Wrigley:I'm a I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger in Norway. I'm currently working on a project on bird scaring and how humans and nonhumans have made their homes together throughout history. So a little bit different to what I wrote the book on, but that is the life of precariously employed academic, I guess. So I'll start off with why I wanted to write the book. I identified a lack of engagement really within the social sciences and the humanities, with permafrost.
Charlotte Wrigley:Aside from Pais's book, who's going to be talking to me today, and, Susan Crate's book, An Anthropologist, there isn't really that much out there. Pais is coming from a a historical perspective. Susan's from an anthropological perspective. But I kind of saw the need for something a bit more geographic. My background is in human geography, and I wanted to examine what permafrost is as a substance, not just materially, but also spatially, socially, politically as a dynamic container of things that is in relation to the various actors in it and on it.
Charlotte Wrigley:And this was particularly in the context of extinction, the climate crisis and kind of other ongoing environmental issues that are really pertinent to kind of our daily lives. And also particularly because the Arctic has become such a, a kind of hot topic, for want of a better word, in recent years in the humanities, social sciences. But I noticed that permafrost had kind of been a blind spot, and I wanted to know why that was. You see this in the media reporting too. They tend to focus on sad polar bears, melting ice caps.
Charlotte Wrigley:And this narrative of the Arctic has been a long problematic one, which kind of paints it as a pristine environment, one that's devoid of human life, and one that's incredibly fragile. And this is a very colonial idea, and it's been thoroughly critiqued by Arctic Scholars. But I wanted to draw attention to how this narrative kind of moves within permafrost, which can be seen kind of as a sort of a less flashy, more hidden element to Arctic landscapes, potentially even quite boring, when you think of the kind of majestic iceberg. So I thought maybe that is why it's been left out of the conversation, and I I wanted to start this conversation in relation to permafrost.
Pey-Yi Chu:I guess this would be a good time for me to introduce myself to the podcast audience out there. So my name is Pei Yi Chu, and I'm an associate professor of history at, Pomona College in Claremont, California. And as Charlotte mentioned, I'm a historian, a historian of, the Russian empire and The Soviet Union, and my research is focused on the history of science and environmental history. And my first book, was called The Life of Permafrost, the History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science, and it traced the history of permafrost as an idea and the history of permafrost science as a field to show how these things, both permafrost as a concept and permafrost science as a field, were profoundly shaped by the history of Russian colonization and Soviet industrialization of Eastern Siberia. And, you know, as Charlotte mentioned, when I first began research on that book back in the mid noughties, the mid two thousands, most of the people writing about permafrost were scientists.
Pey-Yi Chu:And so as a historian investigating the history of this idea, I didn't have many other humanists and social scientists to be in conversation with. And so it is therefore my special pleasure to be here today to talk to you, Charlotte, about your wonderful book and to engage with the, you know, all the ideas that you've put out there that I found so fascinating. So first I just want to say congratulations. I really loved your voice in the book, and I was so amazed by all the different places that you traveled to, all the peoples that you encountered, and, the experiences that you had. And I hope we'll get to you'll get to share some of these in the course of our conversation today.
Pey-Yi Chu:So maybe we can just get right into it and invite you to dig into some of the arguments and stories that you you tell in in the book. I thought we could maybe start by asking you, how do you think people who don't live in regions with permafrost typically understand permafrost as a phenomenon? I mean, because as you mentioned, you know, it can seem like a substance that's kind of boring. It's kind of, you know, enigmatic. People hear about it in the press, but they may not have ever even encountered it in their lives, if they don't live in, regions with permafrost.
Pey-Yi Chu:So what kind of popular conception of permafrost do you think people have and that you wanted to challenge in your book? And, you know, where do you think these popular conceptions come from?
Charlotte Wrigley:Yeah. Thank you for the introduction, Pee. That's a great question. And firstly, I think, until very recently, a lot of people didn't know that permafrost even existed. It is something that, as you say, it's quite enigmatic, and most people do not live on permafrost.
Charlotte Wrigley:And this is why I think perhaps we were both drawn to write about Russian permafrost because that is kind of an anomaly there. There are lots of people who live on permafrost. We'll get into why that is later, I imagine. But your kind of average person living in, say, California, when you where you live, maybe wouldn't even heard of permafrost until, I guess, it has, in recent years, begun to enter the reporting around the climate crisis, climate change. But I noticed, that permafrost tends to be framed in quite apocalyptic overtones.
Charlotte Wrigley:There's a lot of phrases that are, used in relation to permafrost, things like ticking time bomb, tipping points, runaway thaw. You've also got the, things that are happening due to permafrost thawing, which, of course, is crucially is the release of greenhouse gases, but also things like zombie viruses waking up and finding all sorts of weird things down there. It's very kind of fear mongering in a way, thinking kind of quite imaginatively about what is going to come out of the permafrost to terrify us all. So it's kind of framed in this idea that it's a looming mass somewhere up there at the top of the planet that could kind of explode at any point. And this is, I think, in a kind of normal response to the terror of climate change.
Charlotte Wrigley:What is going to happen? We can't, you know, know the unpredictability of, these weather events that are occurring. But you also can't ignore the way that the media is sensationalizing this stuff. And I imagine you get quite irritated with some of the headlines that are kind of scaring people unnecessarily. You talk to most permafrost scientists, and they will tell you to wait a minute.
Charlotte Wrigley:It's not going to be all just the permafrost the media is kind of making out. But then again, you can you get these kind of headlines, like the doorway to the underworld. It's a very very much couched and often quite religious apocalyptic overturns. And, again, I think the the name isn't particularly helpful as as as you, talk about in your book. This idea of perma, of course, is problematic, but also the word frost can also conjure up other sorts of imagery.
Charlotte Wrigley:You kind of imagine this, like, white pure ice when you think of frost, or at least I do. And this kind of feeds into those misconceptions around the Arctic that I mentioned, this kind of vast empty expanse of ice, and permafrost is is kind of not like that at all. Yeah.
Pey-Yi Chu:And I hope we're gonna get, I think, later into to this critique that your book makes of the the narrative of of apocalypse and what kind of function does that narrative serve. You know, it sort of sets up the need for a savior, you know, the need for some kind of fix that the book, I think, really compellingly critiques. But first, okay. So we've got the popular conception, perhaps, of of permafrost. You mentioned ticking time bomb or runaway thaw, zombie viruses.
Pey-Yi Chu:So you, of course, had the opportunity to spend time in places with permafrost and then to actually encounter it yourself, to talk to others for whom permafrost is part of their everyday lives and specifically Northeastern Russia. So could you talk about, like, how did your observations and experiences in regions with permafrost challenge both this big narrative that you kind of sketched out for us, the apocalyptic narrative, and also your understanding of permafrost? What did you learn and realize about permafrost from being there?
Charlotte Wrigley:A lot. I'm kind of very, a big supporter of going to the regions you're going to talk about if you're a geographer. And I was very keen to to go to, firstly, the the Pleistocene Park, which is where I did my main case study in, Northeastern Saka Republic, right on the, coast of the Arctic, but also Yakutsk, which is the largest city, coldest city in the world built on permafrost. And of course, I read a lot about permafrost before I went there, but I think the first thing that struck me was how materially heterogeneous it was. Because again, it's it's this assumption that permafrost is this just permanently frozen ground, but of course it isn't.
Charlotte Wrigley:There's the active layer that thaws seasonally. And because I, did my main stints of field work in the summer, this active layer was like jelly, essentially. There's a fun video of me and some permafrost scientists, kind of bouncing up and down on the permafrost like a trampoline. And it's just this, like, really weird substance that is kind of impossible to imagine without actually being there. But also just kind of seeing the effects of thaw on, the kind of infrastructure that is up there, the subsidence of the roads, buildings collapsing.
Charlotte Wrigley:But also there are a lot of permafrost tunnels, which are just kind of tunnels dug into the permafrost, either for research purposes or for keeping food and, and milk and stuff cold. And being in one of those tunnels is absolutely just an experience you can't really, imagine without without being there. Just frozen air almost, of being quite far underground into the perm frost. But again, also being able to watch it almost thaw in front of your eyes. I remember taking a visit to a permafrost bank, called Duvani Yar in the Sakho Republic and just watching the mud just kind of melt away under the sun.
Charlotte Wrigley:It was kind of like very, striking imagery. But also being there really kind of brought home how much Russian and Soviet history is kind of entangled with the Arctic landscapes and the permafrost. And of course, EuroBuck goes into this really thoroughly. And it just spending so much time in Chairsky, which is where the Pleistocene Park is based, and Yaput, kind of laid bare, not only the way that Russia had kind of moved industry into the Arctic during the Soviet Union, like no other nation, as I mentioned previously, but also this kind of history of persecution and colonialism, which isn't really discussed in the same way as say the colonization of The Americas. And indigenous people in Siberia have made their homes on the permafrost, on the tundra for for way longer than Russians have.
Charlotte Wrigley:But the Cossack brutality, Soviet force collectivization has has really changed their relationship to the permafrost. And it became very apparent to me upon speaking to indigenous people up there and and seeing, indigenous villages say that they are dealing with both climate change, but also the the legacy of colonialism that has taken place in the Russian Arctic. But it also very interesting to see these, kind of failing Soviet towns. Russians were enticed up to the Arctic, with the promise of jobs, cheap housing. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, all this money has kind of dried up.
Charlotte Wrigley:So you get a lot of out migration, but also a lot of really awful poverty of people who can't afford to move. Prices are sky high, food and other other stuff. So much of Tversky kind of portrays, that legacy of that of the Soviet Union's collapse, which is often kind of reflected literally in the collapse of the buildings, the roads, the other forms of infrastructure. But what I find interesting is, especially since the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is that Putin is now kind of putting a lot of a lot more importance into the Arctic. He kind of sees it as a very important geopolitical strength, which is, again, is very interesting.
Pey-Yi Chu:It's interesting what you mentioned about, yeah, the history of colonization and colonialism and how that has changed local people's understandings and perceptions of permafrost. And I'd love to invite you to talk a little bit more about that. So how do local people think about permafrost and and how do they interact with it? And do they also subscribe to or build this narrative of of apocalypse and runaway thaw and, you know, zombie viruses? Or does the way they talk about permafrost differ from, you know, what we get you know, we in temperate, you know, climates and zones, like, think about about permafrost?
Charlotte Wrigley:Yeah. Absolutely. And I would say that the first thing on people's minds when they think about permafrost is how to kind of survive. And you are seeing just a lot of, livelihoods of the people who live up there either being threatened or completely destroyed due to permafrost thaw. You have, for example, the Saka people who are the majority group who make up the Saka Republic.
Charlotte Wrigley:They are traditionally agricultural people. They herd cows, horses, and they, have relied for centuries on an ecosystem called Alas, which is a kind of depression in the permafrost that fills with water, which, will allow their cattle and their horses to to drink. And these Alas ecosystems are being, vastly threatened by permafrost thaw. But what was incredibly interesting to me was a lot of people I spoke to didn't really equate permafrostol with the wider kind of climate crisis. And I think this is a lot to do with climate denialism that Russia kind of puts into the media, but potentially more that local people are kind of focused on, like I said, surviving.
Charlotte Wrigley:There was a fisherman that I met, Leonid. He had fished on the Colima River for all of all of his life, pretty much. And this was the first year that it had flooded. His lake his fishing lake had flooded, and the the lake had breached and gone into the river. And a lot of the fish had escaped into the river.
Charlotte Wrigley:And this was a product of, climate change because there was too much snow, and therefore too much meltwater and, the flooding had occurred. And he'd been told this, but he just couldn't kind of reconcile the two. I don't know if it was disbelief or it was just, didn't want to believe that this was something that was going to continue to happen. But it was very striking to me that this kind of was quite a strong opinion that a lot of people were holding. But, I mean, there's a lot of, indigenous ideas I engage with regarding tundra and permafrost.
Charlotte Wrigley:I engaged with a Sakan book called The Breath of the Permafrost. This is a Sakan scholar who he almost chides, the Sakan people for kind of turning their backs on, traditional ways of life, because his, understanding is that the permafrost is not so much a living thing, but something that does breathe and must be treated with respect for the breath to remain pleasant, I guess. You can experience a foul breath, which will bring bad luck, bad spirits to your home. And his thesis was that there needs to be a much more engagement with
Pey-Yi Chu:the land, with the landscape,
Charlotte Wrigley:that he believed that the Sakans had lost. There's also ideas around mammoths, mammoth carcasses, but a belief in the mammoths being still alive, still active beneath the surface. There was also a permafrost law that was being put through the Sakan government, that was going to, afford permafrost its own subjectivity, which was, kind of in, not alongside the Russian government, the main Russian government, but rather something that the Sakan government was discussing on its own. But I was also speaking to, indigenous people who had moved from their kind of nomadic lifestyle or their villages into the city, and they were kind of talking about the loss of their traditional ways of life. Like, talked about the permafrost tunnel as being a way for people to store, milk, meats, other things that needed to be, preserved.
Charlotte Wrigley:Speaking to this one lady who'd moved into the city as a child, and she was so confused when she first saw a fridge because she had never considered the other people used to preserve their food in this way. It was just the permafrost tunnel was the only way to preserve. And then she moved to the city and, it was a fridge. So the really kind of interesting tension between, indigenous cosmologies potentially being lost with the it becoming more difficult to live on the tundra, to live on permafrost, and kind of these kind of new, modernist, I guess, ways of engaging with permafrost, through city life, infrastructure, etcetera.
Pey-Yi Chu:Yeah. I I wanna pick up on a kind of a few things you just, brought up, you know, just now, you know, things like a loss, this idea of the breath of permafrost and, you know, mammoths still being alive. Something I was wondering is so a loss, you know, we think about you mentioned a loss ecosystem is being threatened by permafrost thaw, but in a way, you know, a loss itself sort of results from permafrost thaw. You know, I mean, like, the way you get an a loss is when, you know, Earth has freezing frozen, thaws, there's a depression, water accumulates, there's a lake, this lake eventually drains, and you have, like, grassland or kind of grassland surrounding a lake. And so it strikes me that the the whole system of alass, you know, itself shows how frozen earth is dynamic.
Pey-Yi Chu:You know, that that it's not just permanently frozen or eternally frozen if we're going by the kind of Russian name for it. Like, the whole existence of a loss, it's a cycle, you know, it's a cycle of thawing and, and draining. It kind of really emphasized how in a way alive, the, the land is, but not in this kind of apocalyptic monster alive, but just that it's constantly changing and evolving. And, you know, the idea of mammoths still being alive and thinking about what European explorers in in like the seventeenth century commented on when they spoke to local peoples, you know, these these creatures, subterranean creatures that are moving to and fro, and it's because of their movement that we have the expansion of the earth and then the sinking. So anyway, all of this sort of suggests to me that local people might have a more acceptance of frozen Earth as dynamic as opposed to this expectation that we and who don't live there might have of of permafrost as being permanent.
Pey-Yi Chu:I'd be interested in your thoughts about that. Like, is there more of this recognition that permafrost is dynamic as opposed to this expectation that it be eternally frozen?
Charlotte Wrigley:Yeah. I'd absolutely, say that. And that's kinda why I liked the breath of the permafrost because if you think about a chest moving in and out, it is almost the way that the permafrost, undulates its materiality throughout the season. It's kind of here and there and here and there. I talked to the lady who moved to the city and saw the fridge for the first time.
Charlotte Wrigley:Her family, used to be nomadic and she spent some time with, nomadic reindeer herders. And she spoke about this kind of understanding not only of the permafrost as being something that you needed to respect because it was not necessarily considered alive but had a liveliness to it, but also the necessity of of moving your body on the permafrost. It was this, the nomadism came almost from a necessity to move away from frozen earth because your body is warm, your camp is warm, your ranger are warm. It's this understanding that warmth will thaw things. So that was a reason for being nomadic, to allow the permafrost to kind of, refreeze itself and continue its natural cycle.
Charlotte Wrigley:And of course, this is almost over dynamism that is happening now is part of the reason why the nomadic, reindeer herders are getting less and less because it is much harder to keep reindeer when you can't rely on the feeding grounds or Sakans can't rely on the Alar systems to feed their livestock anymore. Being forced to go to towns and cities is almost a reaction to the permafrost becoming unbalanced. It's a sort of the dynamism obviously needs to be there. What we're seeing now is a way that it is not able to be in those conversations with Tundra people, indigenous people who are living on it.
Pey-Yi Chu:Yeah. It's almost like, you know, cranking up the dial to some some really high level or an acceleration of of thaw that sort of departs from this historic, patterns. So maybe now would be a good time to talk about Pleistocene Park, which is such a big focus of your book and, you know, Pleistocene Park, this rewilding project in Northeastern Russia, which is led by this father son pair of scientists, again, Nikkita Zimov. Their goal, you know, as you talk about in the book, is to stop permafrost from thawing by reintroducing large herbivores into the area with the idea that these herbivores will kind of compact the vegetation in the soil. It will reduce their insulating quality and thereby allow the frozen earth to be exposed to greater cold.
Pey-Yi Chu:And along with stopping permafrost from thawing, there's this idea of restoring the grassland ecosystem that existed during the Pleistocene epoch, a time when permafrost was very extensive. So this can all seem pretty bizarre to an outsider. Could you tell us how's this project going? And how would you explain the Zimov's motivations for doing what they're doing from, you know, your interviews with them, from your observations, and your participation in in the science station that they run? What seems to drive them?
Pey-Yi Chu:Why are they doing what they're doing?
Charlotte Wrigley:Yeah. Where to begin with Nikita and Sergei Zimov? Well, the main thing that drives them, I would say, is saving the world. And I heard this, motif several times, and it's kind of on all of the promotional material that they put out into the internet. It's saving the world, saving the world.
Charlotte Wrigley:And that kind of means saving the world for humanity. They don't particularly care about the animals themselves. They will freely admit there's a lot of death that occurs, and that happens when you're bringing creatures from thousands of miles away and much further south than where the Pleistocene Park is, which, as I mentioned, is on the Arctic Ocean coast. And these animals now have to survive minus 60 Celsius. They have to survive snowfall, just new landscapes, disease.
Charlotte Wrigley:So that's, really tough for them. But the Zimovs are implicit in saying that this is a project to save humanity. And that kind of manifests itself in a real kind of this apocalyptic doom mongering going up there kind of on a vein to the kind of permafrost media reporting that I mentioned earlier. This is particularly driven by Sergei. Nikita is a little bit more, logical, logical, a lot more logical than his father.
Charlotte Wrigley:Sergei is hoarding gold and oats. He's, you know, got a bug out bag for when things go really wrong. And I found this very interesting. And I was reading Casey Ryan Kelly. It's about the manpocalypse, this very kind of masculine idea of men saving the world, this kind of very frontierist science that kind of bypasses ethical issues.
Charlotte Wrigley:Because if you think about the Pleistocene Park, putting animals into a completely alien landscape where it's very difficult for them to survive is quite unethical. They're just simply not environmentalists. Nikita loves to tell people that he will kind of go around. They have an old Soviet tank with which they kind of drive around crushing trees, trying to mimic the the mammoth's tread. It is a pretty wild place.
Charlotte Wrigley:The project is amazingly still happening, still kind of clinging on, which is quite impressive given the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because the way they usually fund this project is that permafrost researchers, usually American ones, come to visit. They have a science station there where they, undertake permafrost research, and the Pleistocene Park is kind of an an addition to their money making research station. I mean, I'm not completely up to date with who is going there, but I imagine a lot of Americans no longer, using their science station. But I think they managed to get funding from, the Alrosa Diamond Mine. Again, not great with the ethics, but they're certainly not funded by the Russian government.
Charlotte Wrigley:Although there is a funny story about the Russian government putting out a call for businesses who wanted to move to the Arctic, and they'd get funding to do this. Again, a kind of reflection of what happened in The Soviet Union. And nobody applied for this fund because no one really wants to move to the Arctic, but Nikita did. He applied for funding for a goat farm where he would farm, like, goat's hair. And he actually got the money.
Charlotte Wrigley:But what he did, he just bought a load of goats just to put them put them into the park. I I think it's an incredible feat. They're just two people, essentially, them and their families. I think their aims overall to restore the permafrost, rewild the landscape are on the whole quite laudable. But it is coming from a flawed positioning, that imagines science could kind of get us out of this mess and that there is only one way of approaching and defining the permafrost.
Charlotte Wrigley:And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Peggy, because particularly in kind of relation to permafrost science, Soviet permafrost science, Those are most very dismissive of the work being done at the Malnikov permafrost institute in Yakuts, for example, to kind of see it as being stuck in time. But do you see any similarities between historic permafrost research in The Soviet Union and what they're doing?
Pey-Yi Chu:That's a great question. I mean, where I see it, the resonance is this idea of mastering nature and being like, we as humans have both the ability and the responsibility to control and and recreate and bring back what has been destroyed wrongfully or something like that. I mean, I'm thinking about the Z Mos. And for the Soviets, it was more like we can harness nature's treasures to improve human well-being, and we can do it in a sustainable way, and we can do it better than the capitalists who are all just about exploiting nature and people. Well, we will conquer nature and exploit it wisely.
Pey-Yi Chu:And so to me, the the similarity comes with that, you know, and you talk about this in your book, a kind of hubris. And on the one hand, maybe one can empathize with that and be like, okay. I mean, there's this desire to make the world better in some way. But on the other hand, we can be critical of that because it inflates the ability of humans and doesn't recognize all the things that are beyond human control. And then maybe, you know, what got us into this predicament of anthropogenic climate change to begin with was this assumption that, you know, we could control everything, and that maybe it's time for a different way of thinking about things, which, you know, I you you've talked about in your book as well.
Pey-Yi Chu:I mean, the way you critique the concept of the Anthropocene. So we've got post Soviet Russian scientists trying to introduce musk ox and goats into Northeastern Russia. And then we have in your book, people like George Church at Harvard and Hwang Woo Suk of Soham Biotech in Korea working with DNA taken from mammoths preserved in permafrost to try to de extinct the woolly mammoth. So the hope is either to clone a mammoth or create some kind of mammoth elephant hybrid using, mammoth DNA. And so this is the other maybe even more sensational project that's connected to permafrost.
Pey-Yi Chu:Here too, you know, could you talk about, like, what do you think is motivating this kind of work? And what ethical questions do you think are at stake in this this project of de extinction?
Charlotte Wrigley:I think this was the kind of, the thing that got me interested in, doing this whole project, just learning about the extinction. I was just my mind was blown. And I started to kind of notice a pattern. There's a lot of people, mainly men, who wanted to be kind of pioneering scientists, for personal glory. I mean, I talk about Hwang Woo Sook, in Korea, his kind of fall from grace, that happened when he lied about cloning human embryos.
Charlotte Wrigley:He was, disgraced by the scientific community. But then he kind of popped up again a few years later with this pet cloning business, again, which is mind blowing. Barbara Streisand is a client. She's got three cloned dogs from this guy. But he also wanted to clone a mammoth, essentially.
Charlotte Wrigley:So he started going to Yakutsk. He started making, connections with the university there, and they were finding a lot of mammoth carcasses due to the flowing permafrost, and they were bringing them back doing, you know, experiments on them. And Hwang Hoosuk has has kind of been taking DNA from these mammoths to try and to try and clone it. This is probably not going to work. The DNA, even as well preserved in permafrost as it can be, is probably still too degraded to be usable for cloning.
Charlotte Wrigley:So the more likely outcome is, this hybridization strategy that George Church and others are kind of following, which is where you take elephant embryos, and kind of plug the genome of a mammoth into that. You kind of create, this this kind of hybrid creature, and this has its kind of roots. There's a company called Colossal that has been funded by Silicon Valley. You only need to look at their Instagram page just to see how kind of slick the whole operation is. They've got amazing graphics.
Charlotte Wrigley:They do kind of Q and As, and there's a lot of Internet outreach attempts to go viral, that sort of thing, which is, again, is fascinating. Apparently, mammoths are coming from colossal in 2028. That is the new date, so we'll see about that. Of course, de extinction raises a lot of ethical issues because you are probably going to need to use living elephant wombs, to gestate whatever, hybrid mammoth you're wanting to create. Elephants gestate their young for two years, so this is an incredibly thorny ethical issue to kind of take away an elephant's potential to have her own babies, possibly a lot of embryo infant deaths, that are coming out of that because the science is still very, very experimental.
Charlotte Wrigley:And, this is a kind of playing God argument that comes up a lot. We shouldn't be meddling with nature. So this is the kind of issues that I see emerging from this. And I wanted to use de extinction as a way to think through ideas around death and extinction because the whole concept of de extinction is a reversal of these things. But it's not that simple.
Charlotte Wrigley:And I wanted to think about how de extinction is tied to coldness and and keeping cellular material intact. And the permafrost, of course, has done this quite well, for centuries. But we're now facing a heating planet, thawing of the permafrost, and this is not only producing mammoth carcasses with potentially viable DNA, but also this kind of need to create coldness to address the heating up of the planet. And this is often by human measures, such as, air con systems, but also freezers. And we're seeing a rise in cryobanks that safeguard genetic material.
Charlotte Wrigley:The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a famous example, the San Diego Frozen Zoo, just ways to kind of keep cellular material on ice. And this is where, essentially, the premise of de extinction comes from, that life can now be found in the cryobank. And I use the work of Joanna Braden and Emma Cowell working on a concept of cryopolitics, which reworks the Foucault, make, live, and let die, reworks it into not being allowed to die through the freezer. And it's this idea that life is no longer kind of found within the individual, but now within cellular material, and and that freezer can therefore maintain life, across generations. It raised a lot of really interesting questions for me.
Charlotte Wrigley:Can we say that life continues in the cryobank even if the owner of the cell, in this case, the mammoth, has been long dead? I find the word de extinction to be a misnomer as well. What you're doing with the mammoth, if it is hybridization, it's essentially creating a new species that will look like a mammoth that is not a de extinction in the kind of way that you would it's not a resurrection, in the kind of way that we would normally think about it. It is a creation of something else.
Pey-Yi Chu:It's interesting. You you mentioned that projects of de extinction was something that fascinated you. And, of course, this concept of extinction and de extinction are both really important in your book. I mean, the subtitle of the book is permafrost and extinction in the Russian Arctic. And so, you know, part of what your book is doing is you're trying to challenge this conventional understanding of extinction as something that's definite, conclusive, final, it's unidirectional.
Pey-Yi Chu:You You know, it's instantaneous, something that almost happens like suddenly. And to challenge this idea of extinction, you use this concept of discontinuity, right, which is inspired by the nature of permafrost itself, which you've been talking about as heterogeneous and very variable and not just kind of solid and stable, but very, you know, discontinuous. So on the one hand, that's kind of what your book is doing, is kind of challenging the notion of extinction, with this idea of discontinuity. But then, you know, we're also taking this very critical stance on de extinction, right, which would seem to fit exactly this, right, to say that, look, extinction is not final. We can play around with the boundary between life and non life.
Pey-Yi Chu:We can capitalize on this, like, non definitive, non conclusive, non final, nonlinear aspect of extinction to, you know, bring back or create new, mammoth like beings. So how do we understand, you know, this kind of tension in the book? Is challenging the finality of extinction you know, doesn't it just open the door to these kinds of projects? Or is there a way where, like, thinking of extinction as not final can be kind of generative in a different way?
Charlotte Wrigley:Yeah. Great question. And I think what I wanted to do throughout the book was challenge assumed centrality of the human, the, living in the Anthropocene kind of suggests that humans are now the top geological agents. They can affect pretty much every process on the planet. And as you've mentioned several times, this centrality can, often manifest itself as hubris, imagining not only that we can affect these processes, but also that we should.
Charlotte Wrigley:I use the quotes by Stewart Brand, who is a big proponent of de extinction. His company, Revive and Restore, has a lot of money tied up in the de extinction of the mammoth amongst other creatures. But he has a very famous quote, which is, we are as gods, so we have to get good at it. So it's this idea that humans have now become gods, and instead of retreating and perhaps having a lighter touch on the planet or reimagining ways we can do things better. It is to kind of double down on that mastery to control the planet for the benefit of I imagine Stuart Brown wants it to be the for the benefit of everyone, but in reality, it's very unlikely that this will be the case.
Charlotte Wrigley:And this is kind of how I see the extinction. It's a way to extend or to cement control over extinction. And this is through, the lens of capitalism, colonialism, mastery that are the kind of reasons that we are in this mess in the first place. So instead, I wanted to use the permafrost to rethink and challenge these normative definitions of extinction because precisely because it evades this assumption that humans can control it or even know it fully. And again, your book just demonstrates this unknowability really, really well.
Charlotte Wrigley:And de extinction is touted as a fix to the end of extinction, by reversing its finality and linearity. Whereas what I found with permafrost, was a way to rethink extinction as messier, as a kind of more generative occurrence that doesn't necessarily have a beginning or an end, but is instead a kind of process of making and remaking and unmaking. And I have a quote from my book that I can read out that kind of articulates this. So my aim has not been to offer some universal definition of permafrost extinction. Indeed, permafrost is often not even called permafrost at all.
Charlotte Wrigley:But rather to point to the blurring of boundaries between life and non life and to what emerges or retreats within such fuzzy spaces. It is through universalizing that permafrost becomes lifeless, a splodge on a map or a set of statistics on a graph. Its inscription through a narrative of isolation and remoteness renders it a realm of the placeless. I'm loath to call permafrost tundra because not all permafrost is tundra and not all tundra is permafrost. Permafrost retreats, decays, becomes something else through freeze and thaw, producing discontinuous effects that are rooted in place and identity.
Charlotte Wrigley:And these discontinuities are extinctions insofar as they produce other things and become something else. They are endings, and the spaces they leave behind are new beginnings.
Pey-Yi Chu:Yeah. Thank you. And, yeah, I love the way you kind of contrast the reality of of the discontinuity and the the changeability with this idea of homogeneity and and universality. So this kind of gets to my next question. And so, you know, you mentioned how my work looks at the unknowability of of permafrost.
Pey-Yi Chu:I mean, part of what I was trying to do was not just a knowability, but the indeterminacy of permafrost. That is like, there isn't just one way of knowing frozen Earth. And I mean, and permafrost is not the only name for the phenomenon that we've seen in history, and that other names tapped into other essences of frozen Earth that maybe we need to bring back. And so so this is kind of leads to my next question. So the question is about the term permafrost itself and how you know, what I showed in my book was that there were these colonial developmentalist militarist origins to the very word of permafrost and the very definition of permafrost as, you know, ground with a negative temperature for two or more years.
Pey-Yi Chu:Like, that was a very particular definition coming from a very particular expression and word that was continually challenged by other scientists who wanted to embrace exactly what you say, a more dynamic, a more heterogeneous and discontinuous view of permafrost. And so I guess my question is, does the very word permafrost kind of militate against recognizing the heterogeneity and discontinuity of frozen Earth? Like, so long as we use this term and this definition, we're kind of trapped in that in that framework, you know, that kind of gave rise to the very idea, you know, is it time to bring back or tap into or seek out other ways of calling this phenomenon? And, you know, it was Boden Eis and Eisboden in nineteenth century German and, you know, the cryolith zone, according to other Soviet scientists. And, you know, as long as we use this permafrost, are we kind of trapped in this very settler colonial framework?
Pey-Yi Chu:Do we need other names and terms for it, or is it just here to stay? Mhmm.
Charlotte Wrigley:Yeah. I thought long and hard about this question, because I I don't really know. And I think your book does an amazing job of deconstructing both the history and the name of permafrost in Soviet Union, which is what it is now officially called there in Russian, but also had a science in the translation of the word moved into the West and was kind of broken down in really interesting ways. Yeah. You revealed the fraught debate of how to think about permafrost longevity and its permanence and how these conversations were happening in The Soviet Union but were overridden for various reasons.
Charlotte Wrigley:But whether whether we need to talk about renaming, I am not sure because I kind of feel that this discussion can go alongside the discussion that is happening about the naming of the Anthropocene. I think we both agree that it is a bad name, that it kind of homogenizes the human experience and human, responsibility for environmental destruction. But it is kind of the name that is stuck. And whether we end up with it being an official geological epoch or not, the name has sparked conversation. It has sparked a lot of debate.
Charlotte Wrigley:It sparked a lot of scholarship around what it means to be human at a time of such ecological destruction. And I think that maybe permafrost naming can spark similar sorts of conversations, ours being one of them, around, this temporality, environmental destruction, the climate crisis. And I've seen I must have seen a hundred variations of the headline, permafrost is not so permanent after all. And, you know, I was kinda groan.
Pey-Yi Chu:It has never been permanent.
Charlotte Wrigley:But they but they kind of do at least challenge the notion of permafrost that is implicit in the name. And maybe a conversation can grow from that. But yeah. I mean, what do you think? Should we change the name?
Charlotte Wrigley:I'd love to know.
Pey-Yi Chu:I mean, I don't know. If I had a magic button that I could push and, like, we just change the name, I might consider. I don't know. I mean, I I I really appreciate what you said. If it sparks conversation, debate, if we can at least recognize the coloniality of the term and start there and then see what happens when we kind of challenge and push back against it.
Pey-Yi Chu:Yeah. Maybe that's somewhere to start because there isn't any point denying that history either. I mean, like, that history of colonization and and, you know, Soviet developmentalism and militarism in the Arctic. I mean, in a way, yeah, this term can serve as a reminder of all those historical phenomenon that we need to really kind of address at the root, I guess, instead of just changing the name and maybe at least recognizing the coloniality of the name is a first step. So building on this, this Anthropocene question and then, and, you know, we start off this conversation talking about the apocalyptic narrative surrounding permafrost.
Pey-Yi Chu:Your book has critiqued it, and we've talked about, you know, critiques of that apocalyptic framing in this conversation. What would you say to those who say, you know, we need the discourse of apocalypse in order to mobilize people to take action on global warming, you know, that if we criticize this apocalyptic narrative, we're kind of just opening a door for people to accept the status quo, that we need to shake people out of their complacency and that apocalypse can maybe do that. What would you say to that? And then kind of more broadly, you know, how can we take this concept of discontinuity that you so, you know, beautifully fleshed out in the book and how to make it kind of apply to some kind of action or something concrete when it comes to strategies for responding to global warming.
Charlotte Wrigley:I mean, I've read a lot of scholarship from the people who are arguing that apocalypse is kind of necessary to, as you say, shake people out of complacency. I don't see any much real evidence of that happening. Ideas around apocalypse and human extinction are are not new. They've been happening for centuries. They're ways that humans have throughout history imagined periods of instability and change, often tangled up with kind of religious narratives.
Charlotte Wrigley:But, yeah, I don't see a huge amount of evidence that it creates meaningful action, especially when it's kind of framed in this global apocalyptic way, because I think it just makes people feel paralyzed. You know, like, what can I as one person do when such huge events are happening, beyond my control? It kind of more likely will produce a sort of doubling down, in the way that kind of Stewart Brand advocates for, which I've already said is a very kind of colonial capitalist mindset of mastery that climate crisis are addressed through techno fixes, such as geoengineering, sending mirrors into space to reflect the sun's radiation, and all of this stuff that seems quite terrifying to me. I I really wanted to get this across in the book that this kind of notion of apocalypse and extinction as global events is actually kind of quite problematic because, and I draw on the work of indigenous scholars that demonstrate how the apocalypse has already happened for millions of colonized people. And it is it's an ongoing process in in the area that I was doing my research in in the Saka Republic.
Charlotte Wrigley:And I kind of wanted to read a short passage that kind of demonstrates that. So introducing discontinuity into Anthropocene discourse recognizes that apocalypses can be small, apocalypses can be multiple, apocalypses can be historic or ongoing, apocalypses are political and contextualized by power. While the popular outreach from the likes of the Pleistocene Park and scientific media outlets acts as an attempt to connect people to a substance they have likely never come across, such a broad spotlight comes at the expense of more specific material entanglements. Emphasizing a singular earthly experience suggests a singular and shallow globe and a singular anthropos with the ability to control its destiny and save the world, in the words of the Pleistocene Park. So I kinda wanted to really emphasize what discontinuity can do, is kinda point to these more localized and heterogeneous instances of apocalypses and extinctions that are quite often beyond the human as well.
Charlotte Wrigley:We just need these different forms of knowledge making and action that don't necessarily correspond to the assumption of scientific truth, the scientific definition of permafrost, this notion of a global techno fix. And I don't have any kind of specific political strategies other than we just need to listen to the humans and the nonhumans that are living with permafrost. I just want to kind of read another passage that that illustrates this. There must be a way out of this destructive cycle, a way that allows for the differences that characterize the multiple planetary scales, temporalities, and ontologies that make up permafrost worlds and beyond. I would argue that for the cycle to be broken, the continuous threat of life must be destroyed.
Charlotte Wrigley:While this may seem like a radical concept, it can be unpacked in such a way that discontinuity is allowed to enter any fraught discussion around survival in the Anthropocene. I'm not advocating for the extinction of the human species, nor am I promoting discontinuity as a panacea for the violence meted out by the world of the powerful. Rather, discontinuity is open to surprise. It disrupts the valorization of the nuclear family and makes discontinuous spaces for a queer heterogeneity. The discontinuity of permafrost so feared by the powerful can be a blueprint both for new futures in which attempts at mastery are resisted and for a new dynamic material engagement in which we become more mindful of earthly agency.
Charlotte Wrigley:This involves refusing any fantasies of immortality or redemption through resurrection. Instead, the task is to practice discontinuity as well as recognize it through disrupting and protesting the hegemonic linearity of the powerful. Through this emerges a commitment to a sort of giving up on life, not in a way that accelerates the demise of humans on the planet, but rather in a way that works to discontinue the continual birthing of the kinds of power structures that underpin the Anthropocene.
Pey-Yi Chu:Thank you. One of my favorite passages of the book. Well, Charlotte, I think it's been really great to talk to you about your book on this podcast, and I hope everyone listening will go out and buy and read the book, because it has even more details about all the people and all the observations that you made, not just in Pichirsky and Pleistocene Park, but also in Yakutsk. If you've gone to London, and really you've kind of traveled the world. So with that, I think I'll say thank you for the pleasure of this conversation.
Charlotte Wrigley:Thank you so much, Pei.
Pey-Yi Chu:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.