Review Detail

“Symbiotic styles of love are good for the planet and not just for those who practice them.”

Fair warning that this book is not easy reading, but if you can wrap your intellect around the academic style, the author’s departure from mainstream politics of thought will keep you turning the pages. Author Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio takes a renewed look at the body of Gaia, linking human intimacy with global ecology, and positing a new way to think about health and love.
Gaia and the Politics of Love was written with “the intention of figuring out the connections between the arts of healing and the arts of loving.” Love, the author suggests, has been criminalized as a disease, and she invokes science to begin making the case for love as the “cure,” saying: “[E]rotic activity is ubiquitous among the cells that constitute Gaia’s body, including bacteria, Earth’s most ancient lifeforms, who like other microorganism, have “orgiastic sex lives…unrelated to reproduction.” The remedy is that love can be taught as a healing art, representing and galvanizing a political shift in consciousness that will transform Gaia and humanity into the happy, cheerful, and love-full beings that we are.
Gaia and the Politics of Love is an original speculative theory that has deep roots in ecofeminism and polyamory; I predict that there will be many offshoots from this idea that may not be as scholarly (and therefore more approachable), but will nevertheless to some degree move us closer toward a sustainable ecology of love.