Beyond optimism and pessimism: Meliorism, hope, and the good Anthropocene

The “Good Anthropocene” is often cast either as a feasible utopia or dismissed as a tale of salvation that masks ecological harm. This paper advances an alternative: the Good Anthropocene as an imaginary grounded in the American pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey. Its core traits are meliorism and hope. Meliorism rejects historical optimism and pessimism. It affirms the possibility of incremental improvement- under adverse or favorable conditions. Hope means rational faith: confidence that compromised situations can be improved through specific commitments and willingness to revise assumptions. Drawing on environmental political theory, recent policy debates, and the ongoing discussion in The Anthropocene Review , the paper offers an alternative account of the Good Anthropocene’s normative foundations and articulates the political work that meliorism and hope can perform. The result is a framework that is both normatively defensible and politically actionable. It offers a resource for navigating planetary change amid ecological disruption and geopolitical volatility.