Moving Between Hope and Pessimism: Failure, Death and “Fuck-lt” Free

Why are we failing the environment and our ethico-ontological relationships? I engage Anthropocene studies scholars (for example, Chakrabarty), geologists, environmental-ontologists (for example, Arianne François Conty) to understand human arguments for a hopeful future. While some argue hope, we are continually reminded, by the very scholars giving us hope, that we are failing. I argue an ontological repositioning as a means of saying “fuck-it” in the face of death in order to accept human failure as a positive movement out of the shadow of the nihilistic eternal recurrence of hope. Turning to Arthur Kroker and Heidegger, we can understand why hope as a product of the will can never be anything but a “will of will:” aimlessness. Jairus Grove’s work on political pessimism gives us a frame of reference for turning to do otherwise. I derive this project from Thom van Dooren’s question: “Should we rape the Whooping Cranes to save them from extinction?”