O’Key, Review of Parreñas Extinction in the Postcolony Dominic O’Key Review of: Juno Salazar Parreñas, Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Experimental Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 288 pp.; 7 illus. $26.95 (pb). Dominic O’Key is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, UK. Email: d.okey@sheffield.ac.uk Book Review mailto:d.okey@sheffield.ac.uk The headline figures are stark. Since 1970, population sizes of wildlife have decreased by sixty percent. By the end of this century, half of all wild species are predicted to become ex- tinct. This is the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. But what does it look like on the ground? How does this dramatic process of eco- logical loss transform human-animal social relations? And how does anthropogenic extinction connect to capitalism and colonialism? Step forward Juno Salazar Parreñas’s Decolonizing Extinction, a vi- brant and ambitious contribution to the environmental humanities broadly and extinction studies specifically which interrogates how “colonial legacies and postcolonial institutions impact the way orang- utans live and die” (4). A work of history, ethnography and theoreti- cal intervention based on seventeen months of fieldwork in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, Decolonizing Extinction explores the complicated, precarious, and caring relationships between humans and endan- gered orangutans at two conservation sites. The first, Batu Wildlife Centre, is an enclosed nature reserve and sanctuary, built in 1975 and surrounded by a cement plant, housing developments, and agri- cultural farmland. A second site, Lundu, was opened in 1997 to safe- guard the growing orangutan population. Yet due to the partial pri- vatization of the forestry department (the date of this privatization goes curiously unspecified), both centres are run as public-private initiatives by the Forestry Corporation, relying on conservation tour- ism for funding and volunteer labour. As a participant-observer, Parreñas shadowed the two centres’ staff — caretakers, forest rangers, and volunteers — in their work to rehabilitate orangutans into semi-wild creatures. By telling their sto- ries in granular detail, Parreñas paints Batu and Lundu as instruc- tive sites for thinking through the Sixth Extinction. Instructive, first, because Batu and Lundu reveal how anthropogenic extinction con- nects to colonialism and capitalism. Sarawak is a semiautonomous state of Malaysia that is “treated as an internal colony” (2). With its partial postcolonial autonomy, and its vulnerability to deforestation, monocropping and oil palm plantations, Sarawak is a frontier for ex- tinction-driving industries. Instructive, second, because Batu and Copyright © 2022 Dominic O’Key This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 315–319. Doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13255 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13255 O’Key, Review of Parreñas | 317 Humanimalia 13.1 (2022) Lundu also point towards alternative futures. The work of orang utan rehabilitation is such a demanding form of cross-species labour, Par- reñas argues, that it develops new human–animal relations, that is, new ways of “experimentally living together, feeling obliged to oth- ers, without a sense of safety or control that requires violent domi- nation” (185). Parreñas draws these two threads together powerfully in her closely-observed study of the keeper Layang — his animal hus- bandry routines, his contempt for monocultural oil palm cultivation, and his ultimate death from pneumonia after rescuing endangered wildlife from Bakun Dam. Decolonizing Extinction is divided into three sections. Each deep- ens Parreñas’s investigation into extinction and conservation in the postcolony. In the first, she explores how people build relationships with members of a species famous for solitude. Tracking the devel- opment of conservation practices from the early experiments of the 1950s to the professionalized 2010s, Parreñas notes how a once dom- inant practice of “ape motherhood” — a way of instilling orangutan independence, developed by Barbara Harrisson — has recently been replaced with a decidedly more “tough love” (34) approach, a rejec- tion of “tender human–animal intimacy” (52) involving the physical punishment of unruly apes. In the second section, Parreñas considers the problem of “enclosure” from a multispecies perspective. By focusing on the forced copula- tion of orangutans in nature reserves, Parreñas develops an under- standing of how conservation “inflicts new forms of violence” (84) on female orangutans. Because the focus of conservation is on increas- ing the population size, rather than stopping deforestation, female orangutans are burdened with conservation’s reproductive futurism, and are thus regularly forced into sexual encounters they patently do not desire. At the same time, this section on enclosure also links indigenous and proletarian struggles to nonhuman extinctions, as Parreñas demonstrates how human and nonhuman communities have been jointly displaced by hydro-electric dam developments. The third section turns to the future. Here Parreñas analyses how extinction is prey to financial speculation. Sarawak’s conservation 318 | O’Key, Review of Parreñas Humanimalia 13.1 (2022) industry is funded by public-private partnerships. Thus the preser- vation of species becomes desirable only if it can offer a future re- turn on investments: orangutans become assets, and the Wildlife Centre becomes a commercialized hospice that profits from species scarcity. Under capitalism, then, the future of conservation is bleak: “I suspect,” Parreñas writes, “that orangutan survival will rely on in- stitutionalization, whether in wildlife centers or in zoos. This future seems especially likely when agricultural industries in Borneo con- tinue to convert biodiverse forests into mono-crop plantations” (177). Yet Decolonizing Extinction finds hope in the difficult, quotidian labour of multispecies work, in the “fleeting intimacies” (8) between human workers and endangered apes. By bringing feminist care eth- ics and animal studies into contact with extinction science and colo- nial history, Parreñas reaches her titular hypothesis: that the “every- day but extraordinary work of care that happens here in Sarawak’s two wildlife centers […] is an effort at decolonizing extinction” (6). Parreñas contends that the work of cross-species care contains a promise, a “serious reconsideration of the current norms and prac- tices around how we share this planet” (8). Meticulously researched, Decolonizing Extinction tells a powerful story of how colonial histories and postcolonial presents inform the Sixth Extinction. But with the stakes of extinction and climate collapse so high, it is striking that the book is ultimately so modest in its conclusions, and so hazy about what “decolonizing extinc- tion” actually looks like. Parreñas tries to escape such neat clari- fications and categorizations by insisting early on that “to decol- onize extinction is to resist definitively saying what should be or ought to be” (7). Yet at the same time she opts to follow posthu- manist, decolonial, and new materialist thinkers in her conception of decolonization as a “fundamental reorientation toward others, especially nonhuman others, in which we accept the risk of living together” (27). But this is a notion of decolonization that, while characterized as a risk, has been largely emptied of its historically oppositional militancy, recast as a personal position — a reorien- tation — rather than a collective struggle. O’Key, Review of Parreñas | 319 Humanimalia 13.1 (2022) Parreñas’s definition of extinction also needs scrutinizing. In the introduction she writes that, from a “multiscalar” perspective, ex- tinction as such, just like individual death, is an entirely natural “condition of planetary living” (9). Hence, for her, “the challenge of decolonizing extinction […] is not to end extinction, but to consider how else might it unfold for those who will perish and for those who will survive” (9). Yet this argument rests on the idea that the Sixth Extinction is a natural process, a mere continuation or intensification of the background extinction rate that undergirds biotic processes. In actual fact, the Sixth Extinction is a socially-produced mass ex- tinction, a crisis of capitalism that is not “inevitable” (9) as Parreñas implies, but the outcome of particular histories and interests that can actually be organized against. Extinction as such may be bio- logical, but the Sixth Extinction is historical. Parreñas makes no claims to solve or resolve extinction. Her focus throughout the book is limited, mostly productively so, to the ques- tion of how mass extinction transforms the ways humans and ani- mals live and die together. But if decolonizing extinction “is not an attempt to try to stop it” (9), then is our only option a form of man- aged decline, in which we care for endangered species as they slide into oblivion? This runs the risk of emphasizing a passive acquies- cence to capitalism’s extinctions rather than agitating for our collec- tive liberation from them. We can demand more, both conceptually and politically, from decolonization.