During the month of February, it seems appropriate to focus on the topic of love. Love comes in all shapes, sizes, and languages – five languages, in fact.

Based on the work of Dr. Gary Chapman, who has several connections to North Carolina in his education and career journey, the 5 Love Languages© identify a person’s emotional communication preferences based on a series of questions. These five defined Love Languages are:

• Words of Affirmation
• Acts of Service
• Receiving Gifts
• Quality Time
• Physical Touch.

Now, I’m not here to find your love language(s) today. If you have some free time, you can play around with the questionnaire here. Instead, I want to reflect on how we can apply these five communication methods to understanding and protecting our natural resources.

Quality of Time

This may be the easiest, and certainly the most visible, of how we show our love to our environment. We spend hours on hiking trails, seeking scenic views, exercise, or sights of rare species. We plunk vessels into and onto bodies of water, whether to fish, swim, or canoe. We pitch tents, whether on a family vacation or to get away from the hum and buzz of everyday life. It may even be as simple as sitting under the shade of a tree during our work days, taking in a deep breath and allowing ourselves a moment to reflect on our surroundings.

Acts of Service

How many of you have volunteered your time to clean up a street near your home or restoring a trail? How many of you have spoken up on behalf of building a new park or a law that would affect your water supply? While our acts of service may not always be as apparent to others, you each make a contribution back to our environment when you ensure that it remains safe and protected. The service can be direct, such as in picking up trash. But, it can also be more indirect, such as by helping a homeowner bring more energy-efficient technology into their space. The advantage for them is a reduction in their overall energy costs. For our environment, it means less reliance on fossil fuels and less pollution filtering into our air and water.

Physical Touch

Call it primal. Call it restorative. However you want to define it, the physical interaction with our environment is often a reciprocal gift for us and our senses. One of the first images that comes to my mind is planting: the soft earth, squishing between your fingers; digging into the soil and dropping the seeds or bulbs to draw food and flowers out into the open.

This is just a sliver of the ways we can show our love through physical touch. Name an outdoor activity – rock climbing! Mountain biking! Kayaking! All of these involve us putting (wait for it) boots on the ground. Well, maybe on pedals or in pools of water. We gather hard-earned dust on ourselves as we interact with the woods, the trails, the sand around us.

Receiving Gifts

There may be some irony in wrapping up a gift and delivering it to nature (is that my tree you’re using in that paper?) So, what other gifts do we give to our environment? We give it our respect. That may look like spending time in its natural glory, to advocating for policies that keep pollution from harming it (and us).

Another gift we give our world is through education. We teach our children and our grandchildren to honor the land, to pause and take in the views. We teach them to look up and identify the constellations twinkling in the night sky. We show them what bait to use and how to cast their lines to catch their first fish. We show them that food isn’t born in a grocery store. It takes an entire ecosystem – and hard labor – to grow those crisp apples, hearty sweet potatoes, and lip-smacking corn on the cob.

Words of Affirmation

This might be the trickiest language to apply directly to our environment. If you talk to Mother Nature, you might be deemed crazy rather than someone simply showing your love. I like to think that gifts of verbal affirmation to our environment come in the form of speaking up on its behalf. We fight for policies at the General Assembly that protect our coast, our mountains, and our wetlands. We defend against the tide of corporate polluters who put profits over clean air and water. We urge our decision-makers to root their decisions in scientific evidence, not what some industry lobbyist whispered to them in the halls of the legislature. We provide a voice to a voiceless entity because we care deeply about preserving what makes North Carolina such a beautiful place to live, work, and play.

After looking at this list, which of the five love languages have you shown our environment over the last month? We want to know! You can email me at katie@nclcv.org, send us a tweet to @NCLCV, find us on Facebook, or comment below.