Can Woolly Mammoths Save the World?: Luke Griswold-Tergis at TEDxConstitutionDrive

Luke Griswold-Tergis is a filmmaker based part time in San Francisco and part time in Haines, Alaska. His first film, Smokin' Fish, played at film festivals around the world and broadcast nationally on PBS. He is currently working on a series of films that examine the human relationship with the rest of the world. The first is about Russian Scientist Sergey Zimov and his unusual "Pleistocene Park" experiment. In a remote corner of Siberia Zimov has single handedly began recreating, or in his words "restoring" the Mammoth Steppe, a vanished ice age grassland ecosystem that once extended from Spain to Canada and was populated and maintained by massive Serengeti-like herds of large, wooly, free roaming undulates — including the namesake mammoths. Zimov believes that, in addition to it's self evident virtues, restoring this ecosystem on a large (continental) scale could stabilize melting permafrost, a ticking "carbon bomb" and global warming feedback loop that threatens to create a worst case scenario of climate change far in excess of current worst case scenarios. When not making documentaries Luke spends his time thinking about sailboats, bicycles, arugula, the apocalypse, and re-engineering the espresso making ritual.
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