The Ecology of Love (or, “I love you. Let’s not destroy the world.”)
In the shadow of Valentine’s Day, perhaps we should take a moment or two to reflect on the shadow aspects of love. Valentine’s Day has become another day filled with junk, and now this day of love has come to involve a measure of ecological disaster. What does all of this reveal about love—what does it reveal about the ecology of love and the love of ecology?
Valentine’s Day as we know it involves an added level of extraction and consumption (beyond our daily average), and thus an added level of ecological degradation. Like a lot of holidays, Valentine’s Day will produce extra levels of expenditure. Relatively little of that expenditure will go to enriching ecologies, and the vast majority of it will go to depleting them.
Generally speaking, it seems far too much of the spending on love goes toward extracting, usually from places where we don’t live. Whether for Valentine’s Day, for birthdays and anniversaries, or just for a date, we might have a special meal, with ingredients from all over the world. We might buy chocolate for our beloved, or give them minerals and metals in various forms—usually jewelry or tech (because nothing says “I love you” like a new phone).
But, if we listen, we can hear love speaking back to us. We can hear the world speaking back to us. Responsiveness to love demands that we listen.
Giving the gift of love—in the form of jewelry, tech, or other common expressions of love—means giving the gift of conflict to someone far away. What an odd thought.
Recently, news came out that certain well-known brands of chocolate have high levels of heavy metal content. The reaction has included anger toward the companies—which makes sense in so far as corporations help constitute the pattern of insanity that has us all trapped. But people have decided to sue the corporations, and in the process we all might avoid responsiveness to love.
The deeper question here isn’t really why certain corporations sold us chocolate with exceptionally high levels of lead—because the answer to that is disturbingly simple: Capitalism doesn’t function on the basis of promoting love, promoting our well-being, or promoting the vitality and integrity of the world we share; rather, capitalism functions for the sake of creating more capital, by any means.
The deeper questioning might go like this: How did we get such high levels of lead in the chocolate to begin with? What might be wrong with our relationship to chocolate? How is it that chocolate might demonstrate our lack of responsiveness to love?
Can we begin to receive the heavy metals in our chocolate as a call to love? We can’t consider ourselves fully responsive to those we love if we don’t cultivate a responsiveness to the ecologies our beloved ones appreciate or depend on.
Producing chocolate in accord with the current system will tend to degrade ecologies and keep us in an abstract and alienated relationships with the community of life. It will alter watersheds and hydrological cycles, it will alter soils and landscapes. When we grow any plant under the current regime, in general that regime will try to restrict how much we reflect what a duty of care to that plant might entail. We don’t get to reflect on what it would mean to love that plant, or to grow that plant as an act of love for those we care about, and those who depend on us even if we don’t know them. Under the dominant cultural regime, we may not have a proper way to relate to the plant we grow commercially as an expression of the sacred.
All of this comes together in such a way that we often express our love for someone by doing things that, functionally speaking, express a disregard for the larger community of life—a lack of love for, a lack of responsiveness to, countless sentient beings and living, loving ecologies. The way we express love arises in such a way that it has to express aggression at the same time—aggression, extraction, participation in injustice and inequality, and so on. And that’s ridiculous.
This has nothing to do with wokeness. It has to do with understanding the nature of reality, and trying to become more mature. Mature beings don’t live like this, and mature love shouldn’t look like this.
When we uncover this kind of problem, our conscience pleads with us to become responsive. Responsiveness is indigenous to the soul. It shouldn’t be the case that expressing love for each other means the degradation of ecologies or the ongoing practices of war and aggression.
The psychologist James Hillman reflected on some of these issues in dialogue with writer Michael Ventura, in their book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse:
Hillman: Romantic love keeps the world dead. It insists, “Only you, only you, only you—you are my heart’s desire. Forsaking all others.” And here the “others” doesn’t mean just other people, it means all others. No significant others can be had anywhere. Your car is out.
Ventura: If romantic love keeps the world dead, then romantic love is an ecology problem?
Hillman: Right. It never asks, “What are the people saying?”—and by “the people” I don’t mean just the tribe, I mean the banana tree and your Chevy and the sea. They will get jealous, and you know you can die from jealousy. Jealousy plots revenge. The world is taking revenge. Or maybe the world is dying from jealousy, jealous that humans with their huge heart capacity for love and their genital juices only give this to each other. How insanely selfish.
Ventura: And what about this? Technological man treats the earth kind of like a wife beater or rapist treats women: his Eros is so twisted that the only physical relationship he can have with the planet is violence. That would go a long way toward explaining his insistence on violating the planet. But you were about to say—
Hillman: If romantic love is an ecology problem, it’s also a political problem. It’s antisocial. It doesn’t let my love into the community.
Ventura: Are we now promoting free love, like the communes of the sixties or the old free sects and religions?
Hillman: No, I’m not setting out rules for a new practice. I’m not saying, “Let’s construct a new society based on loving old cars and banana trees. Follow your fetish!”
Ventura: I don’t know—in the context of all this, “Follow your fetish” might not be the worst thing in the world to say.
Hillman: I’m still being a psychologist, I’m still saying, “Look at your personal love feelings, your romantic hang-up, your obsessive desire, not as something particularly wrong with you—or as something right with you either that shows what a powerful child of Eros you are—but look at it as a function of a Cartesian society. There will never be a solution to your pangs by just setting up a commune or preaching free love. The only solution can come when the world is reanimated, when we recognize how alive everything is, and how desirable.” Maybe that’s what consumerism and advertising are really all about, unconsciously, compulsively: a way to rekindle our desire for the world. (183-4)
To say our relationships are ecological—that love is ecological—means, among other things, that when we go on dates, for instance, we may habitually use up resources in an act of taking without the traditional gifting in mutuality that characterizes healthy Nature-Culture, a healthy nonduality of Nature and Culture which we could practice and bring to realization by means of proper education (i.e., love is a philosophical/spiritual matter, a matter of proper education).
We have created a tragic gap between the practical and the ideal, in the process limiting the love and magic of the world, and making it possible for us to express love by degrading ecologies. How has our responsiveness to love gone so awry?
I feel like a terribly romantic person, and I would like to be able to express the passion of romance without degrading ecologies. Why is it so hard for a greater number of us to discover and create together more elegant yet simple, graceful yet passionate ways of relating to each other?
What we do now seems gratuitous, as if we have to consume in excess to convince ourselves that love is happening. Since nothing happens in the dominant culture, we have to put on a great show, a great distraction, to mimic the feeling of real happening.
Some of us cannot simply be with each other, and we have no time for a community to truly come together and make a celebration. So we industrialize love, and we manufacture our romance, substituting having more in place of being more—or in various ways conflating or commingling the two (which, technically, takes away from the being more).
People will spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding, and have dozens or even hundreds of guests fly thousands of miles to attend. If we could catalogue the excess of this year’s Valentine’s Day alone, we might find ourselves speechless. We should perhaps feel incredible shame for consuming the scale of resources we do in the name of “love”—romantic love, familial and brotherly love, religious love, and so on (e.g., Valentine’s Day, the Fourth of July, or Christmas).
An whole style of thought or style of consciousness arises as we pursue the conscious purpose, the ego-centric purpose, of “being together”. We are already in this style of activity, lived by it, lived by archetypes we pretend to understand, however we may reflect on it after the fact with rational and rationalizing notions. Our conquest consciousness arrives in our relationships before we do, and all we can manage in many cases is rationalization.
The ecological dimension of romance is not merely a matter of extraction, consumption, and degradation in the name of “love,” but the practice and realization of a way of knowing and being, a way of living and loving, a pattern of thought, a style of consciousness that involves mindlessness and distraction—a way of knowing ourselves, our beloved, and our world rooted in delusion rather than rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty.
In such a regime, the responsiveness of love rarely includes, for instance, keeping rivers healthy, or simply going to the river and sitting together quietly yet joyfully, awake and attentive in mutual presence—our life and the life of the river, the life of countless sentient beings. That should seem exceedingly odd: Our practice of love in the dominant culture doesn’t include a practice of responsiveness to the fuller ecologies that constitute our beloved ones. It’s like saying we don’t love what we are, holistically understood.
Instead of this holistic orientation to love, we get caught in distraction and abstraction. In increasingly confused (and at times desperate) attempts to feel good, and to restore wholeness, we go further and further into the pattern of insanity, such that if we aren’t consuming more resources than we need to, something feels off, and we think we need to do more—“go out” more, “go on vacation” more, and so on—anything but revolt against the system that keeps us tired and fragmented, lonely in the midst of others, too distracted to be truly together except in fleeting moments.
We find love itself co-opted into this insane feedback loop: The more we degrade ecologies, the more we need to degrade ecologies.
We must keep in mind that this holds for what we call science too—including the science of love. In the name of “knowledge,” “love of knowledge,” “love of wisdom,” or the “neuroscience of relationships,” we degrade ecologies (we can’t build and operate all those fMRI machines without massive ecological disruption). Our science is a function of a way of life, a style of consciousness.
Science may arrive at seemingly important insights (perhaps in spite of itself), just as we may arrive at seeming happiness (often in spite of ourselves) when we fall in love. But, since all of this activity takes place in “The Matrix” (in the cave of conquest consciousness, or however we want to designate our delusion), then everything we see, do, think, and say becomes part of the practice and realization of delusion, with degrading effects on ecologies, effects that manifest as suffering in countless sentient beings. We thus see that any encumbered experience of love carries a tremendous moral burden.
How could we change things? What are we missing in our responsiveness to love—even in our current relationships?
If we reflect with care, many of us may admit that we have more mindlessness, coarseness, impatience, and even varying degrees of aggression in our love relationships than we should tolerate. We know we’re capable of more love—more strength to love, more spaciousness to love, more clarity and creativity, more dignity and grace, more honesty and humor, more patience, openness, and presence.
We can admit together that we fall short of our own potential, and part of it has to do with understanding that love is a practice—a practice of relational beings, ecological beings. It requires a holistic practice of life, and most of us don’t have a sufficient practice in place—not because we don’t want one or can’t live up to one, but precisely the opposite: A holistic philosophy of life would empower us to grow by leaps and bounds—individually and collectively—and so the culture does everything it can to keep such practices at bay. We have no widely taught philosophy of love to guide us, and so we must content ourselves with the advice of well-meaning social scientists (who may indeed help us stay married . . . while our love continues to degrade the world).
Love as a practice—love as integral to our philosophy of life—means more that taking turns vacuuming, doing the dishes, or preparing meals. It’s that we need some kind of holistic ecology of practice. We need to know what it would mean to train our minds and our hearts, and our bodies and our world to have the characteristics that love demands from us, because we have to cultivate those characteristics. And we can.
This seems like extraordinarily good news—the Gospel of Love: Love is a nonlocal trainable skill, and the wisdom traditions offer holistic training to realize our fullest potential for love. Just as we come out of the womb with the capacity to speak a language, if nobody speaks to us, we won’t ever speak. If we do speak, it will depend on how other people speak to us.
It’s not just that we will speak Japanese if others speak Japanese to us, and Greek if people speak Greek to us. Just as importantly, if people speak to us with warmth and kindness, if they speak with curiosity and sincerity, if they speak with humor and insight, then we will learn to speak like that as well.
The training of love we can discuss another time. For this moment, in the shadow of Valentine’s Day, it’s just good to know such training exists, and to recognize how profoundly healing and mutually empowering it may be. We can find countless gifts in the shadows of our love, gifts we can liberate and share for the benefit of all beings—including those we already know and love.