Environmentalism

The Last Animal uses the issues of climate change and global devastation as a vehicle for some of its more personal and emotional thematic explorations, connecting the horrors of the Anthropocene with the trials of one particular family. Ausubel devotes much of her novel to exploring the existential anxiety that afflicts both Eve and Vera as they attempt to find sensible ways to navigate the knowledge that their generation may be the last to walk the earth. Meanwhile, through the figure of Pearl the mammoth, Ausubel implicitly associates the global grief of climate devastation with the personal grief that Eve, Jane, and Vera feel over the loss of Sal.

The plot of The Last Animal kicks into gear around specifically climate-oriented scientific research, as the Drakes travel to Siberia in order to research the reintroduction of megafauna to the taiga as part of an effort to...