On April 7, Colossal Biosciences, a biotech company founded in Dallas in 2021 with the goal of “de-extincting” animals, announced it had brought back the dire wolf, a creature last seen in these parts around 10,000 years ago. That same day, the U.S. Department of the Interior sent a proposal to the White House to weaken the Endangered Species Act by removing a single, vital word – “harm” – from the definition of what you can’t do to an endangered species.
And two days later, during a livestreamed town hall on Wednesday, April 9, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, told department employees, now concerned about threatened weakening of the ESA, to just “pick your favorite species and call up Colossal,” explicitly tying the company’s latest success to a change that employees and other conservation experts fear would make it easier for companies or governments to degrade or destroy habitats.
