Ecology of Love

An Ecology of Love

‘The Earth is currently suffering from a shortage of our love’, writes biophilsopher and marine biologist, Andreas Weber, in Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology.

What is an ecological eros?

Why do we invite relational entanglements with the world around us? What is an Ecological Eros, and what does it mean to queer, to eroticise, to make ecologically intregrous, love? How is death, within an ecological frame, a transition? In this conversation, advaya dives into the world of matter and desire, and rewilding mythologies, with writers Sophie Strand and Andreas Weber.

Becoming Edible

Love is transformation. Love is death. Love is breathing. Love is decomposition. Love is making ourselves into something edible. In this essay, Hannah Hooper reflects on becoming edible.

What happens in a moment of perception?

“The world, it seems, longs to receive gifts and to offer new things itself. A new cosmos opens up here; the world of an ethics of the gift.” A world of abundance, and responsibility, opens up when we examine what happens within a moment of perception. What if we saw perception as the gift, and perception as the gifting, in the circle of the gift?

Queering biology

Why do we invite relational entanglements with the world around us? What is an Ecological Eros, and what does it mean to queer, to eroticise, to make ecologically intregrous, love? How is death, within an ecological frame, a transition? In this Facebook live session hosted by advaya, we dive into the world of matter and desire, and rewilding mythologies, with writers Sophie Strand and Andreas Weber, curators of our courses Rewilding Mythology and Ecology of Love, respectively.

Eros in life and death

In this conversation hosted by Hannah Close from advaya, Andreas Weber elaborates on his theories and thoughts around erotic ecology, an ecology of love, what we've gotten wrong about "love", stringing together his fresh analyses on love, life, death, identity, and everything in between, on an autumnal day. For more on these topics, read Andreas' book, Matter and Desire, and enrol for his course, co-curated by Hannah Close, Ecology of Love.

A cosmos of mutual attraction

We are born into a profound curiosity for life marked by a desire to explore, experience and relate. The ever-unfolding world that a newborn baby hears, touches, puts into their mouth and looks at is deeply enchanting. As the child grows, this inquisitiveness transforms into an even more vivid curiosity for the world, particularly towards fellow living beings. Adults, too, love ‘nature’ in the vast majority, they feel drawn to its aliveness. We can observe two things through this: first, our primary experience of life is not neutral, but is instead a process of being magnetically pulled towards the world, towards others, towards relating. Life is a desire to meet life. And second, this yearning for encounter is marked by bliss, by the essential joy of being alive. This experience is not exclusive to humans. Although the natural sciences have previously described the physical world as a collection of inert objects, through the lens of attraction, we see a pervading desire even on the most fundamental level of matter. For example, hydrogen particles desire to be as close to oxygen particles as possible, a fruitful relationship that yields water, the element of life. The Earth and the Moon also enjoy a tender relationship, with the tides being our planet's yearning movement towards its celestial companion, creating an abundance of marine life as a consequence. If we no longer experience our cosmos from the perspective of cause-and-effect alone, we'll sense agency wherever we go, and feel held by a loving Earth among the vast swathes of space.

Living through eros and touch

We experience attraction to the world through our senses, through our organismic, animal bodies. The sensuous experience of being living flesh among other living flesh determines much of how we relate with the world. Our profound desire to relate is felt in our bodies and realised through the contact between bodies, in gentle touch, wild embrace, violent rupture and bacchanalian feasts. For too long Western culture has tried to understand and dominate the world from a detached, rational view. This is a delusion. Our bodies know better. Our bodies know that to be alive is to be in an erotic relationship with other living bodies and ultimately with the world itself. Western society has regrettably forgotten about this profound Eros of existence, as much of it has been branded as ‘sexual’ by Christian institutions, only to reemerge as hollow hedonistic gratification within an estranged civilisation. The original Eros embraces the sexual, but is much larger: it is the desire to become a self through the other. Eroticism inhabits the space inbetween, the relational field, the separations which paradoxically draw us together. This is the yearning of all life, to dwell in and simultaneously traverse this domain of profound enlivenment. This desire is always a desire of the flesh. Ecosystems, as the realms of living relationships in which life feeds more life, are incarnations of Eros: they are embodied love processes. Eros, then, is the poetic logic of life visible in every ecosystem. We are attracted to ‘nature’ because it charges us with the realisation of our erotic desire for life. In an erotic ecology, to live means to love.

Learning to love again

Our embodied experience gives us clear instructions on how the bliss of being can be maintained and expanded through relating: be (and become) yourself by allowing others to be (and become) themselves. This is the way of the poppy, the oriole, the flowering meadow, and also the way ancestral cultures organise their responsibility for the stewardship of life. Unfortunately this is not how the West understands and practices love. Our culture has divorced its understanding of love from the ways of the Earth. Consequently, our most personal experience of love, romance, follows a completely different trajectory, and all too often leaves the participants in it empty, suffering and separated. While the erotic idea of love works in second person mode, through the other and their enrichment, romantic love works in first person mode. This goes back to Plato, who introduced the powerful myth of the love partner as the ‘lost half’ of the self. Modern love theories understand love as something to be acquired and ultimately contained, not as a practice. The lover is an object required to fill what is missing in the self. This denies the erotic idea of the self developed in the previous session: a self is that which is, paradoxically and poetically, able to relate because it is able to create itself through relating. Contemporary Western romance preaches a narrow version of love in which we must own, change, and control the other so that they satiate our egoic thirst for superficial validation. This is anathema to life itself. Without allowing ourselves to be ourselves and others to be others, we cannot relate with true compassion, care, and integrity. Personal love can only be fertile if it is part of a broader ecological love, that which desires to give life as well as receive it.

Ecology of Love

Module 1A Cosmos of Mutual Attraction

Module 2Erotic Entanglements: Living through Eros & Touch

Module 3Romantic Mythologies: Learning to Love Again

Module 4Queering Ecology: Erotic Transformation & Identity

Module 5Death: Becoming Edible as an Act of Love

Module 6Towards an Ecology of Love