On limit and love in times of environmental crises

Abstract This intervention explores whether ‘love’ offers a politically viable concept in times of environmental crises, despite the rationality of ‘limits’ dominating current moral narratives. Urban political ecology highlights that, in a capitalist society, landed property and material affordances are rigged against the have‐nots; the latter are deprived not only of their aspirations, but also of their basic right to assert an embodied, material existence. How can we speak of love, or actively affirm our lives, in such an environment where any pursuit of ‘abundance’ essentially constitutes a social fabrication that eviscerates ‘the other’? Drawing on James Baldwin's and C.S. Peirce's agent‐centred perspective on love, I argue that it is the difficulty, or the difficult processes, of practising love that demand scholarly attention. Tragic conditions give minor gestures—attention and care while staying with the real—their humanistic meaning. In turn, the ideals such as love or abundance find their meaning and value by being put into practice, especially in the circumstances that undermine and negate their possibility. Through anthropological accounts of everyday life‐making practices ‘in waste’, the intervention shows how geographies of love can contribute to the formation of new critical political subjects cognisant of the challenges posed by environmental crises.