The wolves of Yellowstone National Park are perhaps the most recognizable conservation success story in America. Native wolves were exterminated in the park by the 1920s — shot and poisoned as part of official park policy. After decades of conservation campaigns, they were reintroduced in 1995. Since then, they have become a poster child for a sometimes controversial brand of nature conservation called “rewilding” that puts the emphasis on handing the reins over to nature.

But does the return of the wolves represent a true return to “nature”? Some experts argue that the term “rewilding” has been diluted beyond its original intent.

Émile Torres spends a lot of their time thinking about the end of the world as we know it — and how to avoid it. To some, this kind of theorizing and strategizing might seem like a grand exercise in anxiety spiraling or perhaps even hubris. But for Torres, studying the last of things, in their case, the last of humanity, is their life’s work. It is essential, they argue, to consider how we might end.

“Existential ethics,” they explain, “is my term for questions about whether our extinction would be right or wrong to bring about if it happened.”

This might not seem like the best way to think about the future of human life on Earth. In fact, it is pretty fatalistic on the surface. But take a beat and Torres’ philosophy of the future is less nihilistic than it might seem. Instead, it might offer a blueprint for a better way to think about the future that doesn’t neatly fall into the big competing thought camps of climate doom, human or machine-led annihilation, or more optimistic longtermism.