Forget climate change...we could be crushed by cloned mammoths
Global warming — you know what really causes it? ben Fogle discovered the truth on a remote scientific research station in Siberia. The real culprits are those flipping trees.
Not all trees, of course: all the ones planted for the Mail’s be a Tree angel campaign are helping to save the world. The undesirable ones are apparently in pine forests over the arctic steppes where woolly mammoths once roamed.
New Lives In The Wild (C5) took ben to the remote north- east of Russia, to meet mad scientist Nikita Zimov and his family.
Nikita showed ben underground caves dug out of the frozen subsoil or permafrost. Trillions of tons of carbon and methane are locked up in this permafrost, Nikita explained . . . but it is melting, thanks partly to the trees. They trap heat and channel it underground.
ben made the mistake of wondering aloud whether this was a bad thing. Nikita’s eyes boggled. He looked like Richard attenborough in Jurassic Park, learning that someone has left the gate open and let the velociraptors out again.
The entire episode had overtones of that classic dinosaur movie, not least because Nikita and his dad Sergey intend to clone woolly mammoths, which have been extinct for thousands of years.
They dubbed their prehistoric nature reserve ‘ Pleistocene [scientific name for the Ice age] Park’, in homage to the film.
If all goes to plan, legions of mammoths will uproot the pesky trees and disastrous climate change will be averted. Should things go wrong, though, we’ll all be trampled to death by herds of long-haired hippy elephants.
Most of ben’s interviewees on this always provocative travelogue are getting to grips with life beyond civilisation. occasionally, he meets an old timer, a hermit who dropped out decades ago.
but the Zimovs are different: Sergey first took Nikita to live in the back of beyond 35 years ago, when the boy was just two. This isn’t a ‘new life in the wild’: it’s the only life he’s ever known.
It’s instilled some unconventional ways. Clearing away some debris, Nikita found a couple of mammoth bones and, to make space, hurled them in the lake. Mammoth bones sell on ebay for £2,000 or more, but Nikita clearly didn’t care.
His dad was less exuberant. arriving home from a science conference, Sergey gave ben a stare of blazing resentment that could have burned holes in permafrost. Then he snapped at the amiable presenter to stop walking on the grass. Those woolly mammoths had better do as they are told.
Global warming was doing the trawlermen of Newlyn a favour on Cornwall: This Fishing Life (bbC2). Shoals of anchovies had swum north, into british waters. Fishing crews that had spent months hunting for sardines, which sell so cheaply there’s barely any profit to be made, went racing out to find Senor anchovy.
We might know the fish only as strange brown slivers on pizza
Napoli, looking like lost eyebrows. but a good catch sells for a fortune — worth a month’s income to the fisherman.
aerial drone shots gave a fascinating perspective on a technique called ring netting. We gazed down with a seagull’s eye view as the boats raced in circles around the shoals, trying to lasso them.
It was very different to the methods of the 1950s, glimpsed at the start on a Pathe news reel. back then, deep sea fishing was mostly a matter of ferocious facial hair and a briar pipe.
Hats off to skipper David Pascoe, who defiantly missed the start of the sardine season and went on holiday — a Med cruise.