Writing this book for me was painful and the reasons for that pain venture into a story that might not be, as scholar Christina Sharpe (2016) has written, mine to tell. Yet whose story belongs to who is very difficult for an ethnographer. What we experience, what we notice is always social and thus belongs to every participant, every witness in that shared moment—however fragmented or particular one’s perspective is.

Based on more than a year of meticulous, shrewd observation at two wildlife rehabilitation centres in Sarawak, Parreñas gives us an intimate and embodied glimpse into one way this transformation is unfolding: in an anxious scramble to prevent orangutan extinction in two postage-stamp sized, dubious refugia, while leaving all the structures causing that extinction intact.

"Decolonizing Extinction", by Juno Salazar Parreñas, is a powerful, thought-provoking, and touching account of the quotidian nature of mass extinction. I found it both heartbreaking and lovely. I think this affective response is the central argument of the book.

Parreñas' approach to the study of human-animal relations is unsettling because it is non-teleological and asks us to leave open the notion of what “decolonization” looks and feels like. It is precisely for this reason that it is so relevant to unthinking the many constitutive binaries of colonial modernity.

Over the years of thinking about the entanglement of harm and care in more-than-human spaces, three key themes have preoccupied me: a) the relationship between the individual (organism) and the collective (species, ecosystem, population); b) the links between the socio-political context and embodied, everyday encounters, i.e., between structure and agency; and c) in a related vein, the relationship between care and justice. "Decolonizing Extinction" by Juno Salazar Parreñas tackles all three themes head on through an ethnography of orangutan rehabilitation and conservation in Borneo.

Juno Salazar Parreñas offers an intimate, holistic, and provocative study of wildlife workers and semi-wild orangutans at rehabilitation centres on Borneo. In "Decolonizing Extinction", she foregrounds the work of care to explore the everyday social relations, grounded in mutual vulnerability and arrested autonomy, as well as experiences of loss and pain.

Juno Parreñas’s "Decolonizing Extinction" is a beautifully written book, in which she uses a case study of orangutan rehabilitation on Borneo to weave together many complex analytic threads: gender, race, and labor; care, violence, and freedom; liberalism and neoliberalism; the geological past, the colonial present, and the prospect of a different future.