This essay takes as its starting point a childhood photograph of the baiji, also known as the Yangtze River dolphin declared functionally extinct in 2006, to develop a politics of "ghost species": near-extinct animals that persist as blurry sightings, collective dreams, and degraded images long after their disappearance.

Drawing on Jacques Derrida's theory of the revenant, Roland Barthes's philosophy of photography, and environmental humanities scholarship, the essay argues that ghost species haunt visual culture as a consequence of unmourned, unjust deaths. Rather than asking these ghosts to perform the labour of conservation for us, it proposes that we become advocates for ecological ghosts. That is, learning not only to see them, but to be seen by them.

Attending to the politics of grievability, the essay asks which lives are rendered visible after extinction, and which remain anonymous. It closes by imagining a form of spectral justice: one in which the gaze of more-than-human others compels us to remain turned toward a damaged world.