I don’t quite know how to say this…but I was wrong.

A few months back I wrote a column entitled “Last of Their Kind,” which told the heartbreaking stories of the Sea Mink, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Each of these animals called Atlantic Canada home and each was driven to extinction for their meat, their feathers or their fur.

The last Sea Mink was killed on Campobello Island, New Brunswick in 1894. The last pair of Great Auks saw their end on June 3, 1844 on Iceland. The last passenger pigeon, a species once numbering in the billions, died in captivity on September 1, 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. Her name was Martha.

Of all the columns I’ve written for the Endangered Perspective, that one stuck with me most. Those three species haunted me with the finality of their extinctions. I introduced them to the reader as “animals you will never meet.”

Well, I was wrong…and I’ve never been so happy to admit it.

An organization in the United States called the Long Now Foundation has a project they're calling Revive & Restore. They are, quite simply, bringing extinct species back from the dead. First on their list – the passenger pigeon.

The details of this de-extinction, as they call it, are complicated, so I won’t bore you with them. It’s enough to say they’ve collected great quantities of passenger pigeon DNA from museum specimens across North America and, using band-tailed pigeons as surrogate parents, they will soon hatch and raise genuine passenger pigeon chicks for breeding in captivity. Later, they will be reintroduced into the wild.

I contacted the president of the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brands, and he told me they’re on track to revive the passenger pigeon from extinction by 2022. This is an animal I said you would “never meet.” Apparently, you just might get the chance.

Brands told me the oldest recoverable DNA ever found came from an Alaskan horse fossil 700,000 years old, so dinosaurs are beyond the reach of this technology. We won’t see our own version of Jurassic Park. But if the Long Now Foundation succeeds in reviving the passenger pigeon, countless other species could be added to the list. Brands said the Great Auk is one of them. I didn’t ask about the Sea Mink.

When discussing the potential of this technology with friends and family, some have questioned if we even should bring back extinct species. Do we have the right to tamper with nature in such a way? Although these are important questions to ask ourselves, I’d like to offer an answer. We already have tampered with nature, unforgivably so, by driving these species to extinction originally. We’ve entered an era of environmental destruction that calls for more than conservation – it calls for revival.

There is nothing more important than preventing a species’ extinction in the first place, but this technology could allow us to atone for some very old mistakes. The ecological niches left vacant by the species we destroyed could once again be filled and Atlantic Canada could reclaim some of its lost beauty. The Passenger Pigeon, the Great Auk and the Sea Mink could once again be our coastal neighbours.