Maybe Love Will Save Us

(But It's Probably Not Enough)

The lady with the guitar in New Orleans was breaking my heart. I was at a small bar with my husband a few miles outside of the French Quarter. It was a quiet Monday night, and everyone else at the bar seemed to know each other. Someone had cooked red beans and rice and put the dish on a pool table, free for anyone to take a bowl.

The folk singer, Dayna Kurtz, was singing about the love of her adopted city, how the streets all sounded like a song she wanted to sing when she first moved to New Orleans. I was smitten with New Orleans myself, enjoying walking on the old-world, narrow streets, delighted by the musicians biking through the streets with guitars strapped to their backs. New Orleans is an easy city to be smitten with, especially for a lover of old-world urbanism and good music. Especially for someone with a strong appetite for delicious food.

The song was Dear Rachel Carson. It was a letter written to the author of Silent Spring on an anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Rachel Carson wrote about the disquieting silence that is the result of the loss of songbirds. Dayna Kurtz felt that if we lost New Orleans to climate change, there would be a similar silence in our culture. We’d lose the soul of America. The heartbreaking line:

If we lose New Orleans, we’ll lose everything

I hope we don’t lose New Orleans. I hope I will always be able to take the train down from Chicago to visit the city. I hope I can always feel rejuvenated by this city that isn’t like anywhere else in the country, this city bursting with charm, soul, and the sound of horns playing jazz in the street.

Different people have different motivations for caring about climate change. For some, it’s fear and anxiety about the extreme weather that the climate crisis will bring. For some, it’s a love of places threatened by climate change that might inspire action.

It might be the love of a sea-side city. The canals of Amsterdam or Venice. It might be the jazz of New Orleans. Maybe it’s the love of fresh powder on a ski hill.

For me, it was the forest just outside the house where I used to live, out West on the slopes of the North Cascade Mountains. The forest was by no means pristine. It was State Land and prescribed for selective logging every forty years. The forest had just recently been logged, and I was having a hard time adjusting to its new sparseness. The loggers left massive slash piles of unwanted tree trunks and branches. Beloved single-track trail that wound through flowers were gone, bulldozed over without any concern for the delight the path brought walkers and mountain bikers.

But even in its diminished state, the forest was a source of solace for me. The forest floor was covered with a blanket of flowers in the spring: lupines, arnica, shooting stars. Owls made their night sounds as the sun went down. In the winter, I could cross country ski up and down rolling hills, the resulting dopamine guaranteeing an uplift in my mood.

In 2021, the Pacific Northwest saw its record-breaking heat dome. I watched the forecast with morbid fascination. Our summers were typically hot, but nothing like this. There was a high of 114 and no end in sight of triple-digit temperatures. The lows didn’t fall below 70 at night, in a place where nighttime cooling made air conditioning unnecessary. Climate change made this heat dome 150 times more likely to form.

At the start of the heat dome, on my regular commute through the forest’s two-track gravel road, I whispered to the forest that I would protect it. I promised that I would do everything I could to stop the changes to the climate that would threaten the forest. I would fight for the forest. I would restructure my job to make sure I was doing good work that would benefit the climate. I would live simply. I would not be afraid to talk about climate change with others.

A few weeks later, the hot and dry conditions led to a forest fire breaking out. My husband and I had to evacuate our home. In a whirlwind, we packed our most cherished belongings, a trial by fire for what we cared about most. We spent two stressful weeks in a vacant cabin that baked in the sun all day. We weren’t able to open the windows for fresh air due to the acrid smell of wildfire smoke that shrouded the land.

The fire fighters managed to contain the fire before it reached our house. Our evacuation order was lifted, but we no longer live out West, in part because of the threat of extreme forest fires. We no longer live in the place that felt most like home for us. I miss it terribly.

I have tried to keep my promise to the forest, but it is hard to keep that memory of the emotional connection I felt for my beloved forest when it was most at risk. Even though I miss the forest terribly, I realize that my love for it has faded. I do what I can to fight for the climate, but I am certainly not doing enough. I have not restructured my job to work to stop climate change. It is sadly easy to forget the forest when I am in the middle of taking an indulgent shower and don’t want to turn the hot water off.

Love may inspire action to protect the climate, but I doubt that love alone is enough.

I know a man who watched a nature documentary about places that will be threatened by climate change. Emotional, this man vowed to see all these places while they were still there. Without irony, this man took a plane to another continent to see a glacier.

This is not the sort of love that will save us.

This is a childish love. A teenager falling in love for the first time, their brains high on chemicals, reckless and uninhibited, spending too much money on meals out and flowers, trying to impress the object of infatuation. An adolescent sort of attraction that is on hyper drive.  

A love of the world where we only take from it will not save us.

The love that might save us is a mature love. We need the love of a long, strong marriage. A love that is built on years of understanding. A love not only for the beloved’s wonderfulness but one that also accepts the beloved’s flaws as well. A love that encourages the beloved to be their best possible self but does not require a change as a condition for love.

I fell in love with the man who is now my husband in Chicago in springtime. It was my first and only time in love and my brain was flooded with those strong love chemicals. I was high for a month, taking risks I normally was too shy to take, walking around the city with a big grin on my face for no reason other than the fact that I was in love.

I know this won’t score me any romantic points, but I must admit that the highs of falling in love don’t last. The months where I nearly always had a foolish grin on my face are gone. There is a lot of business in marriage. When we first met, we only had to plan exciting dates and decide just how much we wanted to see each other. Now there is mail to sort. Appliance repairs to discuss. Big plans to make.

I am still smitten with my husband, grateful to have such a wonderful partner in life, but in place of our initial, wild infatuation, we have a love that has strengthened with the years. My husband made me lunch the other day so I could repair our compost box. I make sure that he will have a lunch packed when he has a busy day at work. We nourish each other. We support each other as best as we can. Even when it’s hard. Even when it requires some sacrifice.

Falling in love is effortless, an emotion that swells through the body, leaving the lovers almost powerless.

Falling in love is the magic of a seed sprouting.

A long love requires work. A long love is a garden that constantly needs to be tended to.

We need to not just love the world at its most spectacular, its epic mountaintops or white-sand beaches. We need to love all of the world. The flat prairie on a cloudy day. The fields that feed us. Even a mosquito-filled bog. We need to love it all.

Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote a beautiful essay on the connection with the Earth that gardeners develop. In “Epiphany in the Beans,” Ms. Kimmerer reflected how when a gardener cares for their small plot of the Earth, the Earth rewards the gardener with nourishment. The epiphany Ms. Kimmerer had in her garden was that when we love the land, “The land loves us back.”

This is the sort of love that might save us. A love that is not one-sided, a love where we take in the beauty and resources of the world but give nothing back. We need a love where we have the restraint to protect our home. Where we make sacrifices. Even when it’s hard.

And if we do this, the land will love us back.

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Before I fell in love, I had only thought of climate change in terms of fear. I focused on the pain and suffering that many would endure as a result of the climate crisis. I felt a moral duty to prevent this pain and suffering.

After I fell in love, I thought about climate change differently. Suddenly, I was less motivated by the fear side of the equation, and instead I was motivated to protect the world we have. I wanted a climate that was healthy, that would allow humans to flourish, because I wanted everyone to have the chance at falling in love. I was realizing how beautiful it could be to be alive, to be a human, to be in love.

I hope kids on low-lying islands don’t lose their home due to sea-level rise, not only so they can avoid the pain and suffering of having to migrate to a new home, but so they have the opportunity to be able to live their lives on their homeland and experience all the wonderful parts of being human where they were born. So they get the chance to fall in love with someone. So they get to love this world and feel the world love them back.