Love, Lust & Planet Earth

About this time of year many of us celebrate St. Valentine's Day rituals of Love through cards, gifts, chocolates, dates and more. We might also ask the perennial question, what even is ‘Love’? Readers might wonder: what does Love have to do with the kinds of things we do at Garden Juju Collective? In the background we could listen to 1993 hits “What is Love?” by Haddaway and Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” Or the 50-year old classics, "Love" by John Lennon or “Silly Love Songs” by Paul McCartney and the Wings.

Breaking from our nostalgia, we confront our 2026 reality…political and climate breakdown, genocide/war, financial pressure, ecological grief, emotional burnout, despair, rage, numbness…. In the face of this, Love is not fluffy or escapist but urgent—a survival skill in unstable times.

We design, do and teach eco-gardening, regenerative and urban agriculture, growing organic food and food forests, conservation, ecopsychology and rewilding. We also created the game Adapt that supports proactive, conscious design for individuals, communities, and ecosystems. To us these are all about Love. 

Writer and activist bell hooks, in About Love: New Visions, draws from Erich Fromm & M. Scott Peck, defining Love as, 

“...the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose love.”

In a productivity culture such as ours, love requires daily practices of care, intentionality and honest reflective awareness. Loving the planet stands as a prerequisite for non-extractive relationships with people, and Earth, the more-than-human.

The ‘Garden-’ing part of our business name, for us refers to cultivation, which we extend to relationships, landscapes, people, communities, as opposed to exploitation—the dominant mode of much of this current world. With ‘Juju’ as energy and ‘Collective’, we are all about cultivating collective energies.

Loving relationships are the antithesis of exploitation (of land, bodies, labour, attention). Through gardening, we repair not just food production but collective responsibility offering what loving land actually requires: patience, reciprocity, and time.

We reflect on our deeper motivations for this work that’s generally very demanding, and financial rewards are often not great. We explore, through real-life projects and scenarios, how to put sustainable and regenerative ideas, visions and values into practice. No set of skills is more necessary for human survival. Beyond this, we do what we do for joy and for the love of it. Think butterflies, roses, organic tomatoes, fresh picked fruits, rich soil, spring sun on skin, teams of people in fields, Elder trees, landscapes shimmering with life, and so much more. 

Love Isn’t So Simple

Both Esther Perel and James Hillman warn against sentimentality, staleness and obligation. Hillman says, “Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom.” Imagination is essential for new relational models in these chaotic times, we are loving while facing trauma (individually and collectively).

How does Love feel? It can be the best and the worst. Felt embodied Love can include touch, excitement, warmth, passion, desire, awe, rapture, harmony, ecstasy, goosebumps, stomach butterflies, magical, heartfelt, communion, and also confusion, doubt, anger, guilt, irritation, resentment, jealousy, hurt, loss and longing. 

Love is a word that is both easy and difficult to use. There are so many forms of Love relationships - romantic, sexual, friendship, brother/sister, parent/child, companionship, domesticated, unhealthy, domination, hetero/same sex, violent, insipid, performative, repressed, dishonest, narcissistic, cruel, ambiguous, on/off, utilitarian, unrequited, patriarchal, fantastic, self, puritanical, unruly, queer, one-sided, twisted, adulterous, kinky, pretend, forbidden, patriotic, a cause, polyamorous, pan. In all sorts of combinations…. 

Greek philosophy says there are 8 Loves. Gary Chapman describes 5 Love Languages. Biology tells us that there are sets of complex and powerful Love hormones, pheromones and chemicals pulling and pushing us around. 

Love is love. Queer love, polyamory, and anti-patriarchal, decolonising approaches move slowly from marginal to being accepted and celebrated in some places; in others these can mean the death penalty especially if you are a woman, or gay and/or both. Love can feel like, and be, death. 

Love Actually

A crucial point made by Robert Johnstone is that Romantic Love is relatively recent, as a way of organising relationships, families and society. Before that many marriages were arranged, unions of resources, family politics and abilities to raise children. 

In The Course of Love, Alain de Botton describes how this kind of relationship starts in almost obsessive pleasure and then continues on when/if certain stages and events are successfully navigated. Needs and dreams piled into one high-stakes relationship. Individual and collective trauma shadows lurking….

Meanwhile Back on Planet Earth

Meanwhile back on planet Earth it’s all gotten really weird. According to Johnstone, when romantic love became widespread, this was associated with a withdrawal from the love of the wider living world. Over hundreds of years the human gaze (was) turned inwards and the stories, myths, rituals, enchanted spirits, skills, medicines, foraged foods and so on, that mediated our relations with all the rest of the living world, were largely lost.

Now it’s a zone of collective madness and sadness. On one hand, in the west there is an epidemic of loneliness and digital hyper-connection paradox with appalling personal, health, and financial costs. Even sexuality, touch, intimacy, and community are on the decline. Books like The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, and Last Child in the Woods show that people are withdrawing even further from nature, woods, farms, and even gardens—children and adults are losing sensory, embodied relationships with nature. The disconnection from Earth mirrors the relational breakdown between humans. 

Planetary Polyamory

Thich Nhat Hahn suggests we “fall back in love with the Earth” and Ben Okri believes that “Our love must save the world.” And we agree. What if we imagine all life, not as “behaving matter”, but as chains of interfolded heartfulness? Imagine that Elder trees, woods, rivers are lonely for us?

Fidelity to life moves beyond exclusive, possessive love models—loving forests, rivers, soils, species without ownership. Planetary Polyamory is loving more than one being, place, ecosystem; this love opens us to ecological belonging. 

Loving the Earth is loving ourselves (and vice versa). We can re-attune through practices of observation, slowness, reciprocity. Let’s farm, garden, hang out, explore, cultivate, protect and celebrate. Love is extending ourselves to create conditions for, and with, all these beings to thrive! To express their, and our, livingness—wild and free! 

Being in Lust

Bridging the ethos of love with the energy of lust, let’s cultivate pleasure, delight, and curiosity as regenerative forces. Moving beyond guilt-based environmentalism to stay embodied, joyful, and alive even when facing polycrises.

Back to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love got to do with It?” The answer is—everything. But let’s get over sentimental and performative love. Let’s finish on Iggy Pop’s 1977 hit “Lust for Life”. Let’s fall in Love all over again, and also consider Being in Lust (delight, eagerness, enthusiasm) with the Earth too, so it stays grounded, embodied and abundant. Let’s move on from disembodied human-only narcissism to explore and practice all kinds of ecopsychological Planetary Polyamory.

“…I got a lust for life

A lust for life

Lust for life

Lust for life

Lust for life”