Arctic permafrost is melting. It will trigger catastrophic global warming. We’re creating a northern Serengeti to stop that from happening.
Pleistocene Park is a proof of concept, a public demonstration, a landscape scale art project and a philosophy of rational co-existence between humans and nature.
Here in the most remote corner of Siberia my father, Sergey Zimov, and I are reviving the ice age “Mammoth Steppe” ecosystem. Re-wilding this vast area of the Arctic will not only create a northern Serengeti, but most importantly, today, is a vital tool to mitigate global climate change. As climate warms, permafrost here in the Arctic is starting to melt. It will soon unlock huge carbon stocks and trigger a catastrophic global warming feedback loop. Natural grasslands, maintained by numerous grazing animals, have the capacity to both slow climate warming and prevent permafrost from melting.
We’ve already starting transforming the land, with our real world prototype.
For the past 20 years my family has spent a big portion of our time and all available finances to create Pleistocene Park. Currently we have over 70 large herbivores in the Park, including cold adapted Yakutian horses, moose, musk ox, reindeer, and European bison. These animals have shown that it is possible to transform ecosystems and reestablish high productivity grasslands by reintroducing large herbivores.
We have fenced 20 square kilometers of land, built infrastructure and installed monitoring equipment. To bring animals to the Park we have mounted extreme expeditions ourselves. We traveled by small boat through the Arctic Ocean to Wrangel Island and from the Mongolian border with a 4×4 military transport truck, driving thousands of kilometers on frozen rivers through roadless wilderness.
tora42's nonsensne 