Dartmouth Events

Anthropology Colloquium: Pleistocene Park: Engineering Wilderness in a More-than-Human World with Dr. Anya Bernstein, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.

Pleistocene Park is a large-scale science experiment in Arctic Siberia in the form of a future-oriented rewilding project with the goal of mitigating climate change. The Park’s creators hypothesize that introducing large herbivores into the area will slow the thawing of permafrost. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the frame of the Park’s various genealogies, I trace the project’s underlying assumptions in equal measure to the history of Russian science and to the experience of the Park’s lead scientists of sociopolitical rupture following the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a case study, Pleistocene Park is especially suited to exploring issues of time and temporality, apocalypticism and redemption, extinction and eternity, in addition to particular visions of the natural and the human.

Anya Bernstein is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Her current book project, Pleistocene Park: Extinction and Eternity in the Russian Arctic, extends her previous work on technoscience and future scenarios in Russia to issues of climate change through chronicling the efforts of a transnational team of scientists to “resurrect” an extinct ecosystem in Arctic Siberia.