We at 3WayKiss wish to sincerely thank you for your attention to this. We are delighted to offer Gaia on Kindle, the recently released digital edition of Gaia and the New Politics of Love. Regarded as an avatar of ecosexual theory, this controversial book is a Silver Winner in Cosmology and New Science for the 2010 Nautilus Awards. Now you can start reading it in less than a minute, and without the waste of a single twig! If that weren’t ecosexual enough, you can also get a fabulous Gift when you make your purchase on September 26th. This Sunday has been announced world wide as the push-up date to bring the title up into the digital best-seller list.
When people like you decide what a best seller looks, feels, reads like, we can transform the publishing industry into one that really reflects the creative intelligence of readers. When you decide to participate in this push, you also create better book-contract opportunities for writers whose creative intelligence resonates with your ideas, ideals. This book has been described both as a ‘disgrace’ and as a ‘masterpiece.’ It has made waves of differing opinions in its own niche communities. The author has issued a ‘clarification statement’ in response to these. Don’t you wish to know what this is all about immediately? Well . . . . yes, you do, but please mark your calendar for the 26th and on that day click on the book-cover image.
We at 3WayKiss wish to thank you from a deep place in our heart. We are a non-profit based in Puerto Rico devoted to the mission of “educating the public world wide about the arts of loving and their infinite forms of expression that our species make piece with our gracious hostess, the third planet Gaia.” We could not be more thrilled to reach out with this special offer to you!
If you are not familiar with digital book reading, this is a good time to start. Download the free software Kindle for PC, or another free software for mobile devices. What a great, ‘right livelihood’ way to read. No more paper, no more trees! No more storing, dusting, shipping, logging around those heavy, expensive print books. All the intensity, complexity, reliability, in-depth knowledge a book can offer, for the feather weight of a digital file stored on your hard disk!
Teaching Gaia in Greece
With Regina Reinhardt and Robyn Ochs in London for BiReCon
Annie Sprinkle – Wedding to the Moon
What a relief for those of us aspiring to a light footprint. And how consonant with the whole idea of Gaia as the basis for a new, ecosexual politics of love! Start building your digital library on the 26th!
The author’s summer has been fabulous with new travels and experiences, including seminars on The Wisdom of Love in the San Francisco Bay Area with such avatars of Polyamory as Deborah Taj Anapol and Dossie Easton; teaching compersion, polyamory, and Gaia theory in Washington State and Greece; coaching participants ready to design the amorous life of their dreams; visiting oracle shrines in Greece and naturist villages in France, and keynoting at BiReCon the Bisexuality Research Conference in England.
Now she’s ready for more, with participation in Annie and Beth’s Wedding to the Moon ecosexual performance and symposium in LA, October 23-24, with workshops and readings planned for the 16 and the 19, more workshops on Managing Jealousy in November in Puerto Rico, and more events to be announced.
As a reward for participating in the push-up day for Gaia on Kindle, you get a fabulous ecosexual Gift: Bring your proof of purchase to any of her events and you’ll get a discount of up to $ 20 on the door charge. That’s more than double the purchase price for Gaia on Kindle!More details on events will be announced soon. Stay tuned for the Newsletter with Calendar of Events. You can also follow us on our blog, PolyPlanetGAIA, and learn a lot more about Gaia and ecosexual theories, practices, possibilities. Become a follower here. You can follow us on Facebook, become a fan of Gaiahere,or simply friend Serena Anderlini
With deep appreciation for your interest and business, we at 3WayKiss remain yours truly, in devotion and ecosexual friendship.
Namaste,
Serena Anderlini @ 3WayKiss
author of Gaia and the New Politics of Love, a Silver Winner for Cosmology and New Science for the 2010 Nautilus Book Awards, and many other fabulous books
Professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez
In talking about poly lovestyles, the question of ‘children’ often comes up. “It’s ok as long as only adults are involved, but what about children? Can they be ‘exposed’ to such things and still grow up to be sane and happy people?” Find out all about this and more in this clip. Hear the wisdom of poly grandmothers with two generations of descendants who are happy to have them be part of the family and respect them for who they are!
Here’s another clip from the Double Book Launch on 6/22. Enjoy and let us know what you think. And for more info on it all, don’t forget to order your copy of Gaia and the New Politics of Love!
What is a nuclear family? How did this type of family come into being? Whose interests does this invention serve? When did it become prevalent and why? What is ‘nuclear’ about it? Why do some people think it’s the only possible type of family and/or the most advanced one? What are new ways to think about ‘family’ that better serve the future of our species?
All of this stuff came up when Taj and yours truly were reading at Open Secret Bookstore, at the Double Book Launch we held on June 22. We promised more details about it, and here we are!
People often ask me about families, and how they became nuclear. In fact, many even seem to think that families have always been nuclear, that there’s never been another model for what a family is supposed to look like, or even that there is something inherently ‘natural’ to families being of this kind.
But what is ‘nuclear’ about families, really? Are these kinds of families supposed to explode, like atoms? Are they an invention of the nuclear age? Do they look like atoms, and if so, which ones? Carbon? Oxygen? Hydrogen? Uranium? Perhaps they’ve got some nuclear energy inside, in which case they should be handled carefully, right? If they are enriched, they can become even more unstable, and that can start the process of atomic fission, where they splinter into little particles. In this case, they fall under George W’s special category, ‘nukular,’ remember? The famous word that egregious president could not pronounce?
In any event, and jokes aside, the nuclear family, explosive or not, is a very recent invention. If we consider the infinite ways in which life has become organized in order to nurture itself through time on the face of our multifarious hostess Gaia, including all of human cultures and the cultures of other species, we find out that in the history of what we may call ‘family,’ the nuclear family is really a split second. Just a blink of the eye. And not the happiest or most interesting one.
The clip explains when and why the nuclear family became prevalent. What kind of paradigm it is part of, and why this paradigm no longer serves life in general, or human life in particular. Nothing wrong with nuclear families. They serve a purpose. But to move into a Gaian future, the whole idea of what constitutes family must be placed in a much wider horizon.
Check it out!
Yours truly hopes you enjoy the video. Please help us imagine what the video does not say. What families can we invent to met our needs? Suggestions are welcome!
Families are about love, right? So a new politics of love is also a new politics about families, right? If you’re not sure what’s political about families, find out all about it in Gaia and the New Politics of Love.
Friends keep telling me that people don’t understand what I mean. “She uses strange words,” they say, or at least, “she uses words in a strange way. Why does she do that? What does she really mean?”
“That’s the point,” I think to myself, very shy, very humbled, very timid, “making up new words, new phrases, using words that are unfamiliar, making familiar words sound new.”
That’s the power of words, the power of literature, if you will. What I was trained in. (Arhhhhhg, what a mistake to presume one can relinquish some ignorance!)
“These people,” I think, “they really want it easy. Not only I learned their language so I can speak to them. But then if I use words of their language that for one reason or another sound queasy, they become suspicious of me. There’s no way to do right by them!”
“What’s this fear?” Fear of words. One cannot be afraid of words. Words are NOT things. They only represent things. Or do they? Can words also MAKE things? Can they CHANGE things? Can they affect, transform, reinterpret, create REALITY?
Of course they can. All poets are keenly aware of this. Otherwise why would they spend time playing with words?
So, a case in point is this video clip. From The Wisdom of Love, a double book launch Deborah Taj Anapol and me held at Open Secret Bookstore on June 22, 2010. It’s a bit late to post. I know. Took a long time to figure, with us being a team of wise, wise, wise people. So ancient is our wisdom that we’re not all that familiar with latest tech stuff for social media. But we get it eventually. And for this clip, we owe courtesy to Steve Hoffman of Oakaland, California, who shot, cut, and reduced for us.
So, what’s the fun with words here? Well, “RESOURCES.” People in ecology, in environmental science talk about ‘resources,’ right? “Limited resources.” “Sources of energy that are ‘renewable’,” as in wind, solar, hydro: ways to create power that generate themselves again every day, that are commonly owned/shared. That don’t involve pollution or extinction of the source when it’s most needed. See what’s happening with the oil spill. Easy oil is almost gone now. And we’re ever more dependent on it. While it’s also turning our amiable hostess Gaia into an oven. Ouch! I’m cooking! I’m being cooked!
So then, resources is the issue, right? Why can’t we BE the resources we seek? Sounds Oedipal? It is! What happens if we begin to think of ourselves as the resources we need? What if we begin to practice BEING resources for each other?
A whole lot! Big shift in thinking. Now we don’t need a lot of resources. We need to interpret each other AS resources. And what can we trade that is, as Stan Dale would say, “free”? We can trade LOVE, or ‘amor,’ or ‘amore,’ or ‘amour’ as those hopelessly Romantic, romance language people would say.
Then we see that being POLYAMOROUS, being capable, by nurture, by nature (who knows?) of trading these AMOROUS RESOURCES with a whole bunch of people is NOT a dangerous perversion, is NOT a problem, is NOT a liability, is NOT a sign of being promiscuous or a misfit. IT IS ACTUALLY A VIRTUE!!!
Yes, you heard me. BEING POLY IS ACTUALLY A VIRTUE! It should be rewarded as a free recycling system, as a national forest deep-ecology biodiversity sustaining nurturing ecosystem. It should be cause for being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace!
“But wait a minute,” you must be saying, “is this for real?” “Sounds like a trick to justify some wicked perversion.”
Well, I leave the final judgment to you. It’s on the video. Somebody in the audience at Open Secret asked “what’s the connection between Gaia the living planet and open love, open relating?”
That’s how I explained it!
Go ahead and listen . . . .
Then, if you like what you hear, you can get more info from the source of my wisdom, Gaia and the New Politics of Love. This book was inspired by one who IS the pleasure he seeks. Watch out for the book’s new digital edition, coming soon. Meanwhile, get your paper version and start practicing love’s wisdom.
There will be more posts and clips. The momentous series of events we held in Norther California in June-early July will be unfolding digitally as we post clips and snippets, with comments.
Congratulations ! I am delighted to inform you that our Second Team of judges has selected the 2010 Nautilus Silver Award winners, and North Atlantic Books has a winning title.
Your Silver Winner is:
·Gaia and the New Politics of Loveby Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio –
007 Cosmology/New Science
All Silver Winning titles have now moved to the third and final phase of judging where the Gold Winner for each category will be selected. Gold Winners will be announced and posted on our website, www.nautilusbookawards.com, on Wednesday morning, May 26th, and also at the BookExpo America in New York.
All Winners are eligible to receive 12 complimentary custom-designed metallic Silver Winner’s seals.
If you want to receive these seals, please email us the best address to send them to you.
All Silver Winners will be contacted by email in a few days
and offered the opportunity to purchase additional seals.
We have attached a .jpg of the Nautilus Awards Silver Winner’s seal for you to use on your website, for subsequent printings of your book, or for PRand marketing.
2010 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winners will receive Award Certificates, and these books will be:
Announced and exhibited in our 2010 Nautilus Book Awards Showcase at the publishing industry’s premier event, BookExpo America, held this year in the JacobJavitsCenter in New York.
Announced in a Press Release which will be widely distributed at the BEA, and sent directly to our select list of media.
Exhibited for ONE YEAR in a special display on our website, www.nautilusbookawards.com,with a photograph and write-up of the book.
Announced in the June issue of EVOLVE! Magazine and distributed to 45,000 consumers through hundreds of bookstores. This will be a 5- page, full-color article with a photograph of each of the Gold-winning titles.
Silver Winners will be offered the opportunity to exhibit their books at a greatly reduced rate in our booth at the BookExpo America in New York. More information about this will follow.
We will continue to update you on the progress of our judges. If you have any questions or need any more information, please contact me at marilyn@marilynmcguire.com
Please know how much we appreciate your entering the 2010 Nautilus Book Awards.
We agree with Dr. Jean Houston, who says of the Nautilus Winning titles, “These books are creating a curriculum for those folks out there who are longing for a new story.”
At first glance, sex and the environment don’t make obvious bedfellows. How can the answer to our environmental problems – global warming, access to fresh water, ecological sustainability, and the use of fossil fuels – possibly be found between the satin sheets of lovers? According to a growing number of greenies, free love may just save the world. In her newest book, Gaia: The New Politics of Love, author Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio attempts to lay the groundwork for this premise.
Bi Book Review by Hudi Shorr will appear inBisexuality and Spirituality, a special-topics issues of The Journal of Bisexuality, edited by Loraine Hutchins pre-published with permission
Gaia and The New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet
Serena Anderlini D’Onofrio,
North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, 2009
Reviewed by Yuhudis (Hudi) Schorr
Our world is in crisis amidst wars.
Military wars are robbing mothers’ of their children, and people of their land. Political wars are pitting the people of our nation against one another, forcing them to take positions that may make the boundaries between those who have and those who cannot afford to have, more clear and defined than ever before.
Religious wars are abundant around the globe, attempting to justify the denial of basic rights of freedom as the word of God. The Earth has been catapulted into a state of chaos; the wars that we are waging upon her have taken their toll. Never before have we witnessed such levels of increased poverty and environmental degradation. In our time, the human species has acquired the capability to destroy both human life and the biosphere that hosts it.
Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet is a masterpiece by Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio that offers us a chance to transform crises into opportunity. Using science and nature as her backdrop, Anderlini-D’Onofrio constructs a new politics of Gaian symbiosis that affirms love as the force with which we must affect change in our universe, if we, as a species, are to survive our current state of environmental and political chaos.
In three sequential and interconnected parts Anderlini-D’Onofrio outlines a practical strategy to combat the toxic forces we have inflicted upon our planet. Using feminist ecological epistemology she offers an entirely new way of thinking about love, based upon teachings learned from bisexual and polyamorous communities that can offer a fresh perspective with which we can begin to repair the damage done to the biota that currently sustains us. If we are to survive the trauma to the Earth that we have caused, we must rethink our current conceptions of what that Earth is and the forces that we use to negotiate our way through it. We must expand beyond our currently limited definitions of love and family in order to include entire communities and the ecosphere that we inhabit. If we continue on our path of obsessive consumption of resources without regard to the harm we are causing, the biota will transform and survive, while our species will become one of the many extinct species that have at one point inhabited her live body.
Anderlini-D’Onofrio ominously warms us: if we continue to mistake Gaia for an assemblage of useable resources, we will kill ourselves, not her. It is now more than ever that we need her messages of warning, and instructions of repair.
I. Gaia in Feminist Science
Anderlini-D’Onofrio begins by placing her Gaian philosophy within a framework of feminist ecology. Ecofeminism postulates that Gaia, the Earth, has a life of its own. It has a consciousness like an animated, self-regulating organism. In ecofeminism, subject and object are largely the same, and control is replaced by more symbiotic dialogue and collaboration. This feminist epistemology effectively defeats the logic of either/or, and embraces a more inclusive logic of both/and. In this way, feminist ecologies debunk the myth of distinction between that which is “human” and that which is “nature”. A Gaian philosophy implies giving up our sense of entitlement as a species deluded to thinking that the biota is a resource to be exploited by us.
“If we humans can come back to viewing ourselves as a resource among other resources with no special entitlement to occupying the position of subject in opposition to a “natural world” that becomes objectified as existing for the sole purpose of meeting our needs, then we can find again forms of coexistence with each other and the planet that hosts our lives.” (Intro, xxii)
Symbiotic reason indicates that while there are no mere resources, every cell in Gaia’s body can function as a resource for another cell. Symbiosis is the practice of sharing bodies in which both symbionts, the host and the guest, benefit. We only have to look to nature to see examples all around us: the cow who hosts the bacteria in order to make her food, the womb that hosts the fetus to nurture its survival. All parts of the equation are beneficiaries of the give and take relationship, without losing their individual identities in the process. We: humans, animals, minerals, the very Earth herself are all part of the greater whole of Gaia, the process of life. The pain we inflict on nature is in fact pain we experience as a species, the growth we experience as individuals affects the world at large. A symbiotic logic requires us to view this bigger picture, and begins to develop lines of communication between the now disparate pieces that make up Gaia in order to find a more symbiotic harmony amongst them.
Symbiotic reason is more apt than individual reason to understand life as an interrelated web in which each individual is a small node that exists thanks to others’ presence. The author points to the behavior of growth among trees and roots. Our ecosystem contains two kinds of intricate growth processes amongst vegetation. There are the arborescent plants: treelike growths organized as individual trees that sprout from a seed and grow vertically by sinking their roots deeply in the soil, and the rhizomes, such as gingerroots and potatoes which operate as subterranean root networks that grow sideways, store resources within the soil, and intermittently sprout interrelated plants across the terrain where the rhizome is present. A tree species may have strong individuals who grow to be taller and more powerful than any plant sprouting from a rhizome, but the rhizome in itself is more resilient to adversity and ecological changes due to their numerous points of entry. For Anderlini-D’Onofrio, the rhizome can represent the Gaian principle of evolution by symbiogenesis, the symbiotic process by which a species acquires the genes of its symbionts into its own DNA. This process is more horizontal. Anderlini-D’Onofrio argues that all life is symbiotic because biology shows that without exchanges between interrelated beings, there would be no life at all. It is within this reasoning that she has developed her new politics of love.
II. Politics of Love
Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s politics of love is new way of looking at love that draws from ancient teachings of a sacred feminine to postmodern understandings of health. Our current notions of health are monopolized by allopathic discourse that views health as the absence of disease and medicine a war against its attacks. It ignores the fact that perhaps disease is not a foreign attack on the body, rather a part of the body itself, crying out for repair. Holistic discourse on the other hand realizes a symbiotic alignment of an ecosystem’s dynamic parts. Disease is viewed as a message from the body that demands a change in its ecology. Gaian awareness compels us to shift our current paradigms of health from an overwhelming allopathic discourse to more holistic notions of health, all the while invoking symbiotic reasoning to encourage dialogue between the allopathic and holistic health collectives.
The AIDS crisis played a massive role in positioning love on the side of disease. Through criminalizing loving communities, a rhetoric of fear was born, which produced a social energy that linked erotic expression with fear. A new politics of love seeks to reverse this trend by transforming its negative social energy into a positive one that reconnects erotic expression with safety and well-being. Hypothesizing Gaia helps the world shed needless fears from current dogmas of love as a crime or a disease.
In a holistic perspective, players are encouraged to enhance the health practices that strengthen their immunity and hence their health. This follows the Gaian principle that the health of Gaia’s body is proportionate to the health of each of her cells. Conventional allopathic medicine tends to attack the symptoms that express the body’s problem, and may neglect to seriously investigate its causes (63). As Anderlini-D’Onofrio posits: if an individual is a cell in a super organism, his/her disease cannot be a foreign agent, for all agents are part of the larger entity of which that individual is an element. Disease in the elements of a super organism is a force that manifests a crisis in its life. Disease is thus read as a message that can help the living ecosystem deal with the crisis and reconfigure itself (71).
The AIDS epidemic can be read as a crisis within Gaia, and as such, a signal for systemic change. Excessive emphasis on allopathic hypotheses in sexual health has kept the world stuck in a mode of fear. Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s Gaia hypothesis postulates that the planet Earth is a web of interconnected organisms with a life of its own, a postmodern perspective that reverberates with indigenous, ecofeminist, pre-modern, and symbiotic cultural elements (102). In Gaian post modernity, “sex” is an erotic expression, the joy of taking and giving, and the orgiastic revitalizing pleasures of bacteria. It is the art of loving that lives in the wider space of the arts of healing, and as an art, is shy of any normativity (110). Western masculinity emphasizes control over intimacy. It acts like a cultural imperative that dominates modern philosophical discourse reflected in Western modernity’s obsession with the mastery of nature. The idea that humans can master nature is but a myth of modernity. The reality is that humans cannot master nature, and there is no reason why they should (113).
Reconfigured as ecological erotic orientations, the love styles that correspond to former perversions are found to have a positive effect on Gaia’s health for various reasons: They multiply the possibilities of love; they help expand the boundaries of the loving arts; and they contribute to establishing regimes of love that help in the sharing of resources and the creation of sustainable emotional communities (123-4). Love is free, and it can be multiplied at will. Anderlini-D’Onofrio defines it as “a renewable resource that saves one from the trappings of useless consumerism” (125). The healing arts emphasize practices of the body that redeem people from modernity’s secular materialism. They are effective in empowering people and communities to heal themselves by creating a more symbiotic understanding of us as individuals, without losing the connectivity to each other and our Mother Gaia. As Anderlini-D’Onofrio so eloquently writes, “this may not instantly resolve all global problems, but the perspective it puts things in vastly improves the prospects for healthy global ecologies” (127).
III. The Arts of Loving
In this part of her book, Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio articulates why she feels that bisexual and polyamorous communities provide the framework to actualize a Gaian awareness of living. Bi/Poly communities generate areas of stability of erotic awareness and emotional sustainability that free the imagination from needless fears and create the emotional and ecological abundance that Gaia needs (152). Because of their heavy reliance on touch, connectedness, non-violence, and a subtle knowledge and practice of intimacy, the styles of love invented by poly and bi people promote the activation of the hormonal cycle of Oxytocin (137). Oxytocin is the hormone responsible for states of emotional calm and connectedness that often fills the aural and inner spaces of bi and poly societies. Oxytocin becomes a social lubricant within these communities where playfulness is key. It is the gentle playfulness produced by these arts of loving that enable emotional negotiations and agreements that would otherwise be impossible in an environment without it.
The styles of love practiced in bi and poly communities help build the trust necessary to overcome fears and are often intentionally designed to break down people’s defensive identities, body armors and egos, so that all players can enjoy the free circulations of amorous energies. It is this symbiotic reason that transforms scarcity into abundance.
Consumer society can be visualized as an extensive orgy inasmuch as it is organized as a continuum orgiastic display of material temptations that induce desire for things we often don’t need or want (163). Anderlini-D’Onofrio writes that the combined practices of bi and poly love have the power to allow individual players to become part of the “flow of the orgy”, to consciously navigate its flow and become consensually immersed into the movement of the symbiotic energy generated by our aural, astral, and physical bodies at play (163). This results in sustainability, balance, and renewability of resources for all involved, and it maximizes a player’s ability to give and receive love. She writes:
“As players learn to navigate this emotional/erotic space, the dialogue between the emotional and erotic realms enables them to maximize the love energy they can share. This sharing of emotional resources generates symbiotic energy fields between players, and enables the creation of emotional sustainability that result in symbiotic plateaus of enhanced awareness. These plateaus involve crises that manifest at certain points in the network, and whose collective management can productively turn them into opportunities for deeper levels of symbiosis. This growth and change can move the entire network on a higher level of awareness that enables more focused and productive experiments in the management of shared emotional resources and the symbioses therefore. The network thus functions like a sustainable ecosystem for all of these interpersonal energies. It generates the sustainability, balance, and renewability of resources for all involved” (165).
Applied on a global scale, this turns scarcity into abundance, fear into hope, and hatred into love. This transformation happens when we players lose our intense sense of entitlement to the resources that surround us in our ecosphere. The tools of this transformation can be found in the schools of bisexual and polyamorous philosophy where intentional communities are formed by people who consciously choose to live by a shared utopian vision, motivated by Gaian principles. They share an expansive sense of love and sexual expression that involves consensual sharing of emotional and erotic resources and can be learned at their schools (154).
Anderlini-D’Onofrio proposes a journey to these schools to learn the tools of the loving arts, regardless of one’s orientation or identity. These philosophies of both/and/all include and cherish all points in every continuum. They celebrate our diversities and encourage us to recognize each other and harmonize ourselves with Earth’s symbiotic ecosystem. If we can take from them the ability to think of love as an art whose forms of expressions is infinite, then perhaps we can incorporate those healing and loving arts to stave off ecological catastrophes caused by our irresponsible behavior as a species.
Imagine A Better World
We must begin to imagine a world that is better than the current one we inhabit, where wars are beings waged, and fear is abundant. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio has directed us upon a path that might open our imagination to new and thrilling ideas that, if we allow ourselves to be open enough to consider them, can restore our planet to a place of homeostatic symbiosis; a world where we both give and take from what and whom is around us instead of stripping all of their available resources and leaving desolation in our wake.Gaia and the New Politics of Love offers us a glimpse as to what a world without animosity, soaked in selfish consumption might look like: a place where differences and individuals thrive together while dedicating themselves to the health of Gaia, that which came before us and will sustain herself after we pass.
Perhaps with this new model emphasizing non-violent, loving sustainability we might do our part in ending the wars and restoring Gaia to her harmonic balance, thus ushering in the new era of planetary peace and health, based on mutual respect and love, that our world surely needs today.
At first glance, sex and the environment don’t make obvious bedfellows. How can the answer to our environmental problems – global warming, access to fresh water, ecological sustainability, and the use of fossil fuels, etc – possibly be found in the satin sheets of lovers? According to a growing number of greenies, free love may just save the planet.
Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet In her newest book, Gaia: The New Politics of Love (North Atlantic Books), author Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, attempts to lay the groundwork for this premise. And if you can get past any initial squeamishness, there is value in her message: Specifically, behaviors typical between lovers in open-relationships, also known as polyamory, may indeed be the secret to protecting Mother Earth from her errant, environmentally challenged children. That would be most of us.
Feminist humanities professor Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio has woven together fact and theory from widely disparate fields to present a strong case for the value of polyamory and other non-normative sexualoving expressions to save humanity from extinction. She views polyamory as a school for love which teaches a way of feeling and thinking which is crucial for our survival as we enter the 21st Century. I’m so glad she wrote this book because now I don’t have to! People have been asking me for years to elaborate more on what I meant when I said in my 1992 book, Love Without Limits, that polyamory is good for the planet. Serena has done a masterful job of fully explaining exactly what this statement means.
One of the central themes of her Gaia and the New Politics of Love, is the utility of the hypothesis originally put forth in scientific terms by James Lovelock and widely adopted by eco-feminist philosophers, neo-pagans and others, that Planet Earth or Gaia is not mere inert matter but has a consciousness like an animated, self-regulating organism. This point of view has been pervasive among indigenous people the world over for millennia and is the basis for all nature based spirituality. Anderlini-D’Onofrio traces the development of modern religious and scientific thought which view Earth as an inert object. This world view happens to correlate with both the rise of monogamous marriage as the only legitimate sexual expression, and as many observers have noted, with the increasingly life threatening destruction of our environment.
The value of accepting the Gaia hypothesis, she asserts, is that it moves us away from a course of irreversible environmental destruction and human suffering and toward greater justice and eco-social sustainability. In her words, “Hypothesizing Gaia in our era is like hypothesizing heliocentrism in Galileo’s. It helps the world shed needless fears from current dogmas, like the idea that love is a crime or a disease, or that we need to fight preventative wars against terrifying enemies, and it gets us to look reality in the face.”
Another major theme for Anderlini-D’Onofrio is the concept of symbiotic reason. She defines symbiosis as a way of sharing bodies in which both host and guest benefit. In biology this refers to phenomenon such as beneficial bacteria found in the digestive tract of many species. We might also apply the term to the presence of humans and other species living in the body of Gaia. Symbiosis classically describes the relationship between a pregnant woman and her fetus. In Freudian psychoanalytic thought, the term symbiotic refers to pathologically dependent maternal relationships carried beyond the appropriate developmental stage. Instead, Anderlini-D’Onofrio argues for a new understanding of symbiosis as “the wellspring of a mode of reasoning that appreciates the sharing of bodies as resources for fun and pleasure and does not diagnose it as unhealthy or perverse.” Symbiotic reason is not only crucial to sustainability, she says, it’s closely related to the practice of polyamorous love.
Patriarchal values have placed independence and logic above symbiosis or interdependence and direct bodily awareness with disastrous results. Rational science has been revealed as lacking the objectivity on which its alleged superiority is based. Symbiotic reason, which leads us to think in terms of the whole, rather than isolated parts, is the cure according to Anderlini-D’Onofrio and countless other contemporary thinkers. As she expresses it:
“I believe that the political problem of today is a problem of love because only hatred and fear can cause people to construct enemies that do not exist while they ignore the most serious and impending issues. I propose holism as an ecologically sound approach to biopolitical issues that heals the thought system that causes anxiety, rather than attacking the enemies this system constructs. Love is therefore the problem that is also the solution of modernity’s diseases and the absurd position these diseases put us humans in. In homeopathic terms, love is the disease that is the cure. Indeed, if as humans aware of being mere cells in Gaia’s organism we could love as selflessly as the two unicellular organisms who die to merge into one larger symbiotic being, we could perhaps cure ourselves of modernity’s diseases.”
Anderlini-D’Onofrio takes this line of thought a step further by emphasizing the mutual sharing of oxytocin mediated bonding in symbiotic styles of love, which, by her definition, include polyamory. Oxytocin is a hormone well known for its role in bonding a breastfeeding mother to her newborn infant. More recently, the action of oxytocin in promoting bonding of sexual partners, at least temporarily, has been highlighted. Oxytocin produces feelings of calm, love, and connection. Could it be the antidote to the anxieties of modern life still driven by the adrenaline driven fight or flight syndrome? At the risk of over-simplifying, this is the famous slogan of the 1960’s peace movement, “Make love, not war” in terms of neurotransmitters.
Polyamorous people, Anderlini-D’Onofrio asserts, have developed practices that allow the establishment of gradual levels of intimacy, including playful touch, cuddling, snuggling, spooning, and inclusive sexual play. “Because of their heavy reliance on touch, connectedness, nonviolence, and a subtle knowledge and practice of intimacy, the styles of love invented by bi and poly people promote the activation of the hormonal cycle of oxytocin.” Of course, these practices are not limited to the polyamorous, but they are often avoided, particularly in group settings, by those who are fearful of temptations to stray from their monogamous vows.
Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD will be presenting workshops based on Gaia and the New Politics of Love in Puerto Rico and other locations. Her book will be presented at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, on February 11th, 2010. Contact her at serena.anderlini@gmail.com for further information.
Deborah Taj Anapol, Ph.D. is the author of Polyamory: The New Love without Limits and The Seven Natural Laws of Love. Her new book, Polyamory in the 21st Century, will be published in 2010. Dr. Anapol coaches singles and partners on sex and relationship issues by phone and has led relationship and sacred sexuality seminars all over the world – next one is March 11-14, 2010 in Bermuda. Email her at taj@lovewithoutlimits.com or visit her in cyberspace at www.lovewithoutlimits.com
GAIA & the NEW POLITICS of LOVE: NOTES for a POLY PLANET
by Sasha Lessin, PhD
You must read Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s GAIA & the NEW POLITICS of LOVE.
This electrifying work will be seen as a turning point, on the order of The Aquarian Conspiracy, The Greening of America, The Earth in Balance, as a seminal turning point in the paradigm with which we as a species face our existence on Earth.
Gaia and the New Politics of Love presents a meticulous philosophical and critical review of Western thought that bridges the dichotomies–energy-matter, competition-symbiosis, war-peace, male-female, postmodern-neomodern, abundance-scarcity, allopathic-holistic, WASP-colored, indigenous-techno, human-nonhuman, hope-fear, subject-object, sacred-practical, mind-body and love-hate–that have led us to the brink of extinction. Anderlini’s analysis points the way to center ourselves among these dichotomies, to embrace these apparent opposites that, processed discerningly, can enhance one another. In the discerning centering she proposes we find a path that can save our species and the planetary ecosystem from destruction.
Anderlini identifies LOVE as the overall panacea for humanity’s crises. Love, she shows, can be expanded from application of the methods developed in the polyamorous and bisexual communities. These communities, she demonstrates, have developed ways to engage in safe, consensual, mutually-enhancing, respectful ways of relating and celebrating personal choice as well as common welfare that evolve individuals and groups to ever-more inclusive and loving behaviors. She advocates the generalization to these evolving psychotechnologies and the ethos they imply to all humanity for its survival and contribution to the planet.
I cannot too highly recommend this book. It’ll change the way you and all who read it view our world and its possibilities.
Sasha (Alex) Lessin, PhD (UCLA)
Co-Chair, World Peace, Tantra and World Polyamory Associations
Sign up for the World Polaymory Association – June 25-27, 2010 Conference where Serena, the author of Gaia and the New Politics of Love will give a keynote on her vision of how polyamory can help humanity can make peace with our hostess planet.
, will be published in 2010. Dr. Anapol coaches singles and partners on sex and relationship issues by phone and has led relationship and sacred sexuality seminars all over the world – next one is March 11-14, 2010 in Bermuda. Email her at 
