Extinct Species Should Stay Extinct

The Center for Humans and Nature and The Hastings Center have partnered on a series called, How far should we go to bring back lost species? from which this article comes. See more here.

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For a species that’s been dead for a century, the passenger pigeon is having a pretty good year. A flurry of new books, features, and a major documentary has been roughly timed to commemorate the death of “Martha,” the last surviving member of the species that drew her final breath in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. It’s a kind of national elegy for a bird that no one alive today remembers ever seeing, certainly not in the wild, where it was last spotted around the time shovels first broke ground on the New York subway system.

The bird was a cheap and easily procured source of meat in the 18th and 19th centuries due to its astonishing abundance (once numbering in the billions) and its unfortunate tendency to travel in massive flocks. Its fate was sealed...