Love in a Time of Loss

“[T]hat is the question we all face in a time of climate change. What do you love too much to lose? Who and what will you carry to safety?”—Robin Wall Kimmerer[1]

We are living through a time of loss, though putting it that way is far too passive to capture the violence that is actively destroying so much: democratic institutions and the norms meant to safeguard them, rights and protections that recently felt secure, communities constituted in part by immigrants, and much more. Looming over and compounding these losses are the accelerating crises of climate change and biodiversity collapse. The emerging losses are stunning: species that have been on earth far longer than humans, low-lying lands that are home to millions, glaciers and ice sheets, ways of living in place that have lasted generations.  

Considering these massive ecological losses, the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer asks a profound question: what do you love too much to lose? As global leaders and their corporate funders—in the U.S. perhaps most of all—continue to refuse meaningful action on climate and biodiversity, we must increasingly recognize that not all losses can be avoided. In her book, Kimmerer asks us to reflect on what we love too much to let go. The question follows a story in which she flees a fire with what she loves most of all: her daughters. What, she asks, will we carry from the fire of climate change and biodiversity collapse? Following Kimmerer, I want to reflect further on what it means to love the many goods under threat in this ecological moment. 

Loving our local lands and ecologies as common goods will be increasingly important as more and more humans and nonhumans are displaced by climate destabilization and find themselves in need of new lands and ecologies to share.  

Kimmerer is right to ask us to attend to love in this time of loss. Love is a powerful force that resists what threatens the beloved. Love, moreover, can be painful to maintain when losses are great. We must attend to love because we must continue to cultivate it. Yet we must also recognize the risks and ambiguities that attend the turn to love. Love is, after all, often strongest for what is one’s own, what is private or local. Environmental efforts to save what we love are frequently implicated in NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”). When those of us with social power love our local lands and ecologies too much to lose them, we too often protect them by forcing polluting industries into the lands and ecologies of the already poor and dispossessed, compounding injustices based on race and class. Even more insidious loves are on display as the ultrarich build bunkers for themselves and their loved ones to shelter from the coming fire, even as they continue to profit off the forces causing the fire. 

Kimmerer is well aware that love can go wrong. She speaks, for example, of overharvesting as “lov[ing] to extinction.”[2] But how do we save what we love without perpetuating injustice and extinction? I have no simple solution, but we do find a deep well of reflection on the social and political complexities of  love in the Christian tradition. There is perhaps no treatment of love that has done more to shape Christian ethics than that of Augustine. 

For the Sake of God

Augustine argued that virtue is a matter of rightly ordered love. We are constituted by our loves, and the challenge is to order our loves well, loving most what most deserves love and least what least deserves love. And rightly ordered love is about more than just the magnitude of our various loves. It also includes another kind of order: loving some things for the sake of others. Augustine famously—and, for some, infamously—claims that we are to love all created things, ourselves included, for the sake of God. I understand why the idea of loving created things for the sake of God makes some uneasy. It sounds like created things are being instrumentalized, reduced to a mere means to an end.

Care is no doubt needed here, but I want to highlight two things about Augustine’s view of love that I think we should retain. First, by arguing that every love ought to be for the sake of God, Augustine helps us see that love for God is not essentially the same as all other loves except greater, as if love for God is in competition with love for the manifold goods of creation. Love for God, rather, is a dimension of all loves. Only by ordering all loves to God as their ultimate end can we rightly love created things, ourselves included, as what they are: fellow creatures. 

Second, Augustine develops the important insight that God, the ultimate object of love, is a common good—indeed, we might say, the most common good. Augustine sometimes seems to imply that we should love God for our own happiness, as if God is a good to possess for our satisfaction. At his best, though, Augustine is clear that we should love God not only as our highest good but also as the highest and universally shared good of all created things. The fact that God is the highest good of all created things is, at least in part, why it makes sense to love all things for the sake of God.

Safely Through the Fire

Together, these two insights suggest that loving created things rightly means loving them for the sake of God and thus as ordered toward the common, not the private. This is the kind of rightly ordered love we need as we fight to save what we love. When we seek to carry species and rivers and forests safely through the fire, we must do so not to enjoy them in private enclaves but to enjoy them in common with communities of human and nonhuman others. Loving our local lands and ecologies as common goods will be increasingly important as more and more humans and nonhumans are displaced by climate destabilization and find themselves in need of new lands and ecologies to share.  

When our love for the local is oriented to the common, then there can be great power in local projects, ranging from ecological restoration to tree planting to municipal climate legislation. In the fight against climate change and ecological degradation, many of us have good reasons to focus on the local at this moment. Most obviously, action at the national level is extremely difficult: the U.S. federal government (supported by the fossil fuel industry and other interests) is currently the most powerful opponent of climate action in this country. And while we will ultimately need the federal government in the fight for environmental and climate justice, we should also remember how much can be done without it. 

Just Getting Started

In New Haven, where I live, the Urban Resource Initiative has planted over 10,000 trees in the city, a crucial protection in the face of rising heat; the youth-led New Haven Climate Movement keeps constant pressure on the city about local emissions and environmental justice; Save the Sound promotes ecological restoration, land protection, and climate adaptation around Long Island Sound. And that is just the beginning. These are small battles on a global stage, but as David Miller writes, approximately 70 percent of fossil fuel emissions can be traced back to cities.[3] Even as many U.S. cities are facing their own attacks from the federal government, they remain much more tractable forces in the fight for environmental and climate justice. 

Our loves are often strongest for what is proximate. This is a feature of our creaturely finitude, not something to reject. Yet we must also learn to order our proximate loves to God and thus learn to love goods as common, to love them together with others. As we fight to carry what we love through this fire, let us do so not just for ourselves and our local communities but for all of our human and nonhuman kin, those with whom we share these goods now and those with whom we can and must learn to share them in the years to come as we seek to live justly in a rapidly warming world. 

Ryan Darr ’19 Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Environment at Yale Divinity School. His research interests include environmental ethics, multispecies justice, structural injustice, ethical theory, and the history of religious and philosophical ethics. In addition to his Yale Ph.D. in religious studies, he has a B.S. degree in mathematics from Huntington University and an M.T.S. from Notre Dame. He is the author of The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism (Chicago, 2023).