Paper short abstract:

This paper stages a thought experiment with material from India and the UK, in which "unrequited love" replaces "ecological grief" to illustrate how the socioculturally configured category of unrequited love can become a basis for romantic ecological action without appeals to hope or expectations.

Paper long abstract:

"Ecological grief" has become a go-to concept when people try to articulate what it feels like, viscerally and emotionally, to live amidst an unprecedented degradation of ecosystems, the irreversible harm known as the Sixth Mass Extinction, and extreme climate shifts that humans may not survive. As a stance for inhabiting what many perceive as an increasingly unlivable world, however, ecological grief has significant limitations. Its psychological orientation misses much of the sociality involved in attempts to render any world livable. Its emphasis on a grief without transformational properties, a grief that cannot be "worked through" in a "dying world," may encourage political paralysis, rather than leading to necessary reparative practices. One suggestion has been to balance grief with hope in discussions of environmental issues. But as a culturally configured affect, hope, too, has its critics, not least within anthropology. In place of an oscillation between ecological hope and grief, this essay stages a thought experiment that draws on the history of anthropology's creative entanglement with romanticism. Suppose that when gazing linearly and chronologically toward an imagined future, we were to approach that future with a politics of unrequited love. (Unrequited, because no future, however much desired, can guarantee to usher species safely "forward" in time or to offer ecological conditions that will enhance their lives, much less to love them back.) Material from India and the UK illustrates how unrequited love can become a basis for romantic ecological action that is meaningful without entertaining naive hopes or expectations.