Futility and environmentalism: Affective repertoires and the imposition of limits

Drawing on debates concerning crisis-laden horizons and the affective modes and narrative templates of environmentalism, this paper examines claims about how the feel of the affective present might or should be organised. To do so, it focuses on the appearance of futility in seabird research and conservation to consider what it reveals about injunctions to act and jarring encounters with crisis. Caught between futility’s capacity to both enliven and flatten, the paper examines the contentious nature of futility’s public utterance and its persuasive expression, to ask what futility does to the grip of ideas and claims about how things ought to be done. Taking leave from debates on how to stave off paralysis in an era of extinction and loss, the paper focuses on what it feels like to dwell in a refigured present in which futility becomes a corporeal condition. In doing so, the paper reflects on how limits can impose themselves in ways that are not addressed in debates over what constitutes good or bad affect or appropriate forms of address. It finishes by raising questions about what happens when researchers become responsible for stoking negative affect.