World’s End

Ramona Ausubel’s The Last Animal begins by situating its characters in the Age of Extinction—a bleak but accurate name for our era. In September 2019, the Guardian launched a series with the same name to “report on our current catastrophic species loss and examine solutions to tackle the wildlife extinction crisis.” The project was meant to last a year, but it’s still going, and for good reason. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, some 28 percent of assessed species are threatened with extinction. Hundreds die off every year. These realities are so overwhelming that it can be difficult to conjure hope, let alone solutions.