ABSTRACT
In international conservation and environmentalist imaginaries, extinction is often cast as an “edge” off which species rapidly or gradually fall. Concomitantly, humanity is depicted as morally responsible for drawing species back from that brink. This chapter seeks to disrupt, but also rework, such edgy conservation imaginaries and the models of responsibility to which they give rise. Focusing on a small population of “ghost orangutans” that have – inexplicably – continued living in a plantation landscape in Borneo, I consider how extinction’s edges can not only be fallen off, but also dulled, lived with, or transformed. Thinking with this peculiar spectral situation, however, also provokes questions about what responsibility implies in an age of mass extinction.
