Love and Climate: the vital role love plays at a time of crisis
When I was invited to attend #OneGreenGov London on 22 January, it was an offer I couldn’t pass up. Many speakers and attendees came together on the day to talk through their ideas, experiences, and hopes for the future
So what’s the link between love and climate change?
For me, there are three immediate connections:
First, climate change is the defining issue of this decade and certainly the backdrop to all other changes. As such, it calls for a revolutionary shift in how we think and how we act. Valarie Kaur believes that all revolutionary change has love at its heart, and, if we can take love to be either a deep passion for something or a fierce protection of something, the link with what’s needed at a time of climate crisis is clear.
It’s also been said that…‘our capacity to change something is directly related to our capacity to love’ (a Greenpeace blog) because we only protect what we love. Our climate crisis surely invites us to see whether we can connect with enough love for our planet that we will do what(ever) it takes to protect it.
Finally, everything we love we will lose. This isn’t gloom-and-doom, or nihilistic thinking but a reality of our lives, a painful truth but one we need to accept if we are to live on life’s terms.
Francis Weller calls this the ‘first gate of grief’. For him the links between grief and love are clear because ‘it’s the broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love’.
Climate change is nothing if not about loss. It brings us directly in contact with what we love because it shows us all that we and the next generations have to lose. Perhaps it’s only through getting in much closer contact with our feelings of loss and grief that we will find what it takes to change.
Attendees at the #OneGreenGov conference discussed the role that love plays in fighting climate change, and the opportunities and challenges that presents. What do you love about our planet that you are willing to protect? What will you allow yourself to imagine losing — and will you allow yourself to feel the depth of that loss?
1. Love as ‘Radical Acceptance’
Many people see love as ‘acceptance’: for them, love means accepting all of someone, or yourself, not only the parts we like but also the aspects that we may not understand, dislike, find abhorrent even.
I now put ‘radical’ in front of acceptance because of what I see as the enormously challenging work it takes for most of us to do what’s described above. ‘Radical acceptance’ has its origins in Buddhist teachings and encourages us to welcome absolutely everything, to accept what is, and not hold out for what should be in ourselves, in others and in what life brings us.
This level of acceptance is what feels like love to me. And it certainly feels radical.
Our climate emergency requires love-as-radical-acceptance in three ways:
- First, it’s necessary and essential that we’re able to face the truth and look the facts of climate change in the eyes. Polar ice melting, rising sea levels, mass extinction of species as well as the possible prospects of mass migration, water and food shortages, civil unrest and war. It takes courage to even look at this information, let alone consider the implications. In fact, ‘it takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss’ and accept what the science is showing us. It takes love-as-radical-acceptance.
- Secondly, radical acceptance asks us to bring strangers and enemies into our moral circle, our circle of acceptance. This is very difficult. Can we do that with the climate change denier? Can we do that with the person who buys plastic bottles by the dozen each week? With the Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists who climbed onto the train at Canning Town or who prevent your journey to work? Or with Bolsonaro?
- Thirdly, it’s likely that climate change, at some point in the future, will bring us in close contact with people who are very different from us (mass migration) or with whom we may have to compete for scarce resources (food and medicine, water). Although there is evidence to show that humans are hard-wired for collaboration, at times of scarcity or fear my gut tells me there will be a strong urge to fight and compete. There is enormous potential for us to separate, put up barriers and exclude people from our moral circle, to see people as strangers and as enemies and dehumanize them.
So climate change presents us with the opportunity to practice radical acceptance and take a loving approach:
- to pull together and not pull apart,
- to build relationships with our neighbours or strangers,
- to collaborate with people where we might have previously competed,
- to see the person before we see the label,
- to develop our ‘will to embrace’ rather than to push away.
- To find it in us to love strangers and enemies.
What would love as radical acceptance mean for a public servant, or someone working in policy? What more could you to do learn more about the facts of climate change and the implications for people around the world?
Are you currently choosing to look away from the hard facts? Who are you choosing to hold outside of your circle of affection and concern? Who do you find it easy to ‘other’.
In relation to climate change what are your own ‘radical acceptance’ challenges?
2. Love as the most expansive version of a story
Love means we take the most generous and expansive version of events as possible.
At an individual level what does this mean? Maybe meeting hurtful or aggressive behaviour with compassion. Perhaps helping someone to see the bigger picture for themselves when they have become myopic, or a story of when they were at their best that they might have forgotten. Love is seeing a more expansive version of a story.
We need to bring a similar expansive perspective to climate change. I think it’s a form of love for us to learn to see the ‘extended consequences’ of our actions on other people. It’s loving, for example, to see the connections between our collective actions in the west and the impact those actions will have on the people of coastal floodplains in Bangladesh. It’s loving to take what Joanna Macy calls a ‘deep time’ approach and consider the question the Iroquois are said to regularly ask…‘what impact will this decision have 7 generations from now?’ an important counterpoint to our current tendency of looking at only what’s right in front of us.
It’s a form of love to recognise that we are all interconnected in some way and that we — that’s all of us whether animal or plant life — are all needed to keep our delicate ecosystem in balance. That means that what happens to trees in Brazil, say, has an impact on our own, personal, daily lives.
How does climate change force us, no matter our profession, to think about the most expansive version of the story? How do you work towards positive change in an issue that is so complex and expansive?
In what ways are you myopic? How are you keeping yourself there? How can you start to see the more extended consequences of your actions and mindset?
3. Anger as a form of love
Love is also about setting clear standards and holding people to account, being able to tell someone no; giving difficult feedback, saying that something is unacceptable and pushing back. In organisations this might go under the banner of speaking truth to power or ‘radical candour’, and also whistleblowing, maybe, as well as movements like #metoo. This is love as fierce protection of self and others.
This approach necessitates some anger. We tend to associate anger with violence or rage, aggression or conflict. We are taught as children that anger isn’t acceptable — which creates problems for us as adults if we find it difficult to express anger or boundaries healthily. However, anger can also be a form of love, and a powerful one at that. It’s not hard for me to make the link here to climate activism and action.
- First, anger is a way that we know that an injustice has been done, that something has been taken away from us or that someone has deprived us of something. It’s entirely fitting and appropriate that we would feel angry when we contemplate loss of biodiversity, or consider governments who have known about climate change for decades and done nothing. And so we may need to connect with our righteous anger — intentionally — because it’s powerful fuel for action, and our planet needs us to act.
- Then, I go to one of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) reasons for why we should take action on climate change. They say that as well as our moral obligation to protect those who are being directly impacted now by the impact of climate change — as well as future generations who almost certainly will be — we have a moral obligation to protect ourselves. To raise our voices, take action and protest in self protection. If governments aren’t protecting us from the climate crisis then we need to take a stand for ourselves.
- Also, let’s remember that anger is considered to be a ‘secondary emotion’ because we tend to resort to anger in order to protect ourselves from other feelings, usually loss and grief. These feelings are often too painful to let ourselves feel and so we find another less painful emotion instead. So anger may simply be telling us that we love something and we don’t want to lose it.
We can welcome our anger. It can put us in contact with our grief and sadness, if we give it the chance. So we can use our anger to help connect with our feelings about what’s happening to our world.
How can we use the feeling of anger to drive positive change in a loving and productive way? What boundaries have been crossed for you in relation to climate issues? What’s being taken away from you that you’re willing to fight for?
When did you last allow yourself to express a healthy anger? Where would it be loving to express anger in your life?
4. Love as hope and optimism
How do hope and optimism relate to climate change, when it can feel like a time of gloom and despair for many people? Some people are paying a high price for looking at the hard facts of climate change; the phenomenon of eco-grief is well reported, and there’s a growing body of academic literature on the damaging psychological effects on people who are facing the consequences of climate change.
But let’s look at what we mean by hope and optimism.
First, hope and optimism are not about denial. It isn’t about believing that it will all be ok. The opposite in fact. It’s about looking the stark facts in the eyes while also holding on to what inspires us and the possibility of something being different.
My 92 yr old dad defines hope as the belief that tomorrow could be better than today. Charles Eisenstein sees it as the ability to hold the best version of the story for someone when they can’t see it for themselves. Joanna Macy describes it as ‘knowing what we hope for and what we would love or like to take place’. This is an ‘active hope’ where we are participants bringing about what we hope for. Too often however, hope, optimism and dreams are taboo and under-discussed.
I think we diminish hope in order to protect ourselves from the disappointment of something longed-for not happening.
Love-as-hope-and-optimism means that we are able to see that there could be a different future. The climate collapse that seems inevitable could be averted. And if it can’t be, then active hope and optimism offers us a way to respond to the collapse.
For example the writer Margaret Wheatley believes we are at the end of western civilisation but we can still decide ‘who we choose to be’ and make sure we create ‘islands of sanity’ as our societies collapse. This is about allowing ourselves to dream and imagine a different future. It’s also about taking action towards that dream.
So here love is a verb. It’s about taking action. It requires that we do something in service of what we want to protect.
Gary Younge, the Guardian journalist in his powerful final column for the paper wasn’t talking about optimism per se but I think he’s describing Macy’s active hope when he says: …
‘things look bleak. The propensity for despair is strong but should not be indulged. Sing yourself up. Imagine a world in which you might thrive for which you have no evidence. And then fight for it’.
Should we work as policy makers and the public sector within the boundaries of what is currently possible, or should we dream of the better world that we hope to create? What world do you want to imagine? What do you hope for? What steps can you take towards making it a reality?
It’s clear that love is vital at a time of climate crisis and recovery.
At #OneGreenGov, we started to make the connections between love, the climate crisis and the public sector. The curious and open group I worked with were already aware of the possible societal implications of going beyond the carrying capacity of our planet, but this was probably the first time they had considered how vital it will be to connect with their compassion, empathy and love at this challenging time. It was clear that they could now see how, if we are to get through this, time with our humanity as intact as possible.
And so let me end with the wonderful Erich Fromm again:
‘Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not towards one object of love’.
I think that probably says it all.
Helena Clayton x
Find out more about my research and writing on love and leadership by subscribing to my monthly newsletter:
