When it comes to climate parables, we tend to like best the ones starring animals, who are mute when we do not project our voices onto them, and who are dying, at our own hands—half of them extinct, E. O. Wilson estimates, by 2100. Even as we face crippling impacts from climate on human life, we still look to those animals, in part because what John Ruskin memorably called the “pathetic fallacy” still holds: it can be curiously easier to empathize with them, perhaps because we would rather not reckon with our own responsibility, but instead simply feel their pain, at least briefly. In the face
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