An "Erotic" Approach to the Climate Crisis | Dr. Andreas Weber

1. Love as Active Practice

Understand and practice love as an action, specifically as taking an active interest in the aliveness of another and actively helping others realize themselves as alive. This perspective helps describe how ecosystems work, where species mutually enable each other’s lives, and is a profound understanding of giving life.

2. Cultivate Love for Nature

Shift your view of nature from an instrumental perspective (using it for benefit) to a love relationship. This counteracts the detached view that has led to the climate crisis and allows for a more integrated, fecund relationship with the living world.

3. Embrace Sensual Ecology

Broaden your understanding of ’erotic’ beyond just sexual to encompass a wider sense of being touched by what is meaningful and moving, including your sensual relationship with the world. This broader view is a primary condition of existence and crucial for understanding our condition on this fragile planet.

4. Organize Life Around Love

Structure your life around the practice of love, actively being interested in the aliveness of those around you, both human and non-human. This addresses the profound paradox of individual existence within a coherent whole, moving towards codependent origination.

5. Keep Yourself Edible

Strive to ‘keep yourself edible’ in both a real and metaphorical sense, meaning to be available to nourish the whole and make a gift out of yourself. This aligns with the understanding that we need to feed the whole and that one of our most profound needs is to be truly cooperative.

6. Embrace Cooperative Nature

Recognize and embrace your inherent need to be truly cooperative with the whole of the breathing earth, not just other humans. This understanding is built into our nature as living beings and makes people’s eyes shine, leading to a more fulfilling existence.

7. Listen to True Needs

Listen deeply and realistically to your true needs and feelings, rather than pushing them away. Often, true needs are not egoistic and are aligned with the needs of the collective, fostering cooperation rather than pushing others away.

8. Accept Existence’s Paradox

Accept the paradox of existence, recognizing that individual life is part of a larger whole and will ultimately dissolve back into it. This acceptance is necessary for stepping into tangible, sensible, desirable, feeling reality, even though it involves the discomfort of mortality.

9. Renounce Individual Dominance

Renounce the desire to ‘skyrocket’ above others in terms of wealth or status, and instead operate in a space where interests overlap. This allows for cooperation to be fun and leads to collective success, fostering a world that renews itself and remains fertile.

10. Systematic Nature Connection

Be systematic and go deep with connecting to nature, rather than just being vaguely aware of its benefits. This approach is a route to increased happiness, calm, connection, and awe.

11. Shift Focus in Nature

Slightly shift your focus to notice and appreciate aspects of nature you might usually overlook or have not paid attention to. This simple shift can open up profound experiences of connection and mutuality.

12. Sensory Engagement with Nature

Actively engage your senses with nature through simple actions like touching leaves, trees, leaning with a tree, lying in grass, or putting your feet into a brook. This creates a direct, sensual connection and allows you to experience the profound mutuality of shared breath and existence.

13. Recognize Mutual Transformation

Recognize and experience the continuous mutual transformation between yourself and nature, such as breathing out what trees breathe in and vice versa. This reveals your true nature and is part of the broader erotic spectrum of existence.

14. Present and Benevolent Nature

When in nature, sit with it in a present and benevolent state of mind, focusing your attention on its beauty and meaning. This act of conscious presence and benevolent connection is a way of helping the other beings and the living web you are part of, rather than just consuming.

15. Meditate with Nature

Engage in meditative practice in togetherness with non-human beings, connecting with them through your mind, feelings, and dreams. This is a profound spiritual practice that is good for the cosmos as a whole, especially during its current dying process.

16. Garden as Encounter Space

View and manage your garden as a place of encounter with other existences, fostering their flourishing rather than just imposing human order. This changes the relationship from control to mutual care, making it a practice of love for the life-giving potential of the biosphere.

17. Cultivate Outcome-Independent Hope

Cultivate hope by focusing on what makes sense and is the right thing to do, irrespective of the ultimate outcome. This attitude is beneficial and needed, allowing one to act in alignment with purpose even in dire circumstances.

18. Be Present with Planetary Dying

Be present with the planet’s dying process, entering deeper into the world through this experience of loss and grief. This situation requires being with life, like hospice work, and can reveal the inner working and desire of the world, making it more accessible.

19. Find Joy in Love’s Practice

Find cheer and joy by recognizing the startling beauty of the practice of love inherent in ecology and ecosystems, and the capacity of the whole to give beauty and joy. This perspective offers confidence in the transcendent power of love, which is unable to be destroyed, regardless of current planetary challenges.