Book Review: This Relationship Shaped Rachel Carson’s Environmental Ethos

On a summer night in the mid-1950s, two women lay side by side on Dogfish Head, a headland on Maine’s rugged coast where a river meets the ocean. They caught the dazzling stars, the dirty filaments of the Milky Way, the occasional flash of a meteor. One woman was Rachel Carson, who would become famous for her book Silent Spring and the galvanization of the modern ecological movement; the other, Dorothy Freeman, was Carson’s married neighbor. The two met when they met on Southport Island, Maine in 1953, and remained close until 1964, when Carson died of cancer. It was Freeman who scattered Carson’s ashes.

About supporting science journalism

If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism subscribing. By purchasing a subscription, you’re helping to ensure a future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world.

The scene in Dogfish Head sounds romantic, and Lida Maxwell’s new book, Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Lovehe says it really was. Maxwell, a professor of political science and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Boston University, explores the intimate connection between Carson and Freeman, drawn in part from personal letters. The book’s message is that the relationship has a lesson for our modern climate crisis, especially for those of us willing to find meaning outside of our culture’s dominant narratives.

The correspondence is representative. Carson confesses his strong feelings after only a few letters (“Because I love you! Now I could tell you some of the reasons I could go on, but that would take quite some time, and I think the simple fact covers it all…” ). They both call each other “darling” and “darling”. During the intervals they spend physically apart, they express what can be read as a strange yearning, as Freeman writes, “How I wish I could curl up next to you on a studio couch to watch and talk by a fire. and forward”.

There is also reference to hundreds of letters that we will never read because the two women burned them, perhaps in the same hearth. As Martha Freeman, Dorothy’s granddaughter, told Maxwell, “Rachel and Dorothy were initially cautious about the romantic tone and terminology of their correspondence.”

Was Carson a lesbian? The answer has long been a source of speculation. It is impossible to know; he is not known to have publicly identified himself as such. For Maxwell, however, this question is meaningless: “Whether or not their love was ‘homosexual’, to use the language of the time, it was certainly strange. It took them out of conventional forms of marriage and family, and allowed them to find happiness where society told them they shouldn’t: in loving each other and the non-human natural world.

Queer love is a rejection of what Maxwell calls the “ideology of straight love,” or the pursuit of the “good life” through marriage, buying and decorating a house, having and raising children, and participating in a tapestry of consumer culture. everything running Because Carson and Freeman’s love was so strange, Maxwell says, they had no template for analyzing it. Instead, they created a new language, expressed through a shared love of nature: the song of the veery, the tide pools of Maine, the woods between houses. That way of creating connection and meaning, Maxwell says, is what he did at Carson Silent Spring possible—he went from a writer who captured the wonder of nature to one who advocated saving it.

How does this apply to the climate crisis? “Perhaps self-evidently,” Maxwell writes, “the ideology of straight love’s close association with consumption is also bad for our climate, because it ties our intimate happiness to unsustainable ways of living.” To truly achieve meaningful climate policy, he continues, we will need to expand our “visceral imagination of what the good life can be.” The queer version embraces a “vibrant multispecies world” where we seek “desire and pleasure outside the ideologies of capitalism and straight love.” These specific points made throughout the book are sometimes repetitive and can feel didactic.

Some readers, especially straight readers, may bristle at all this. After all, many people who don’t identify as queer opt out of consumerism and combating climate change. Straight people can ignore the heteronormative story; queer people are not against it. But the point of the book is not that we have to do individual actions, it is about larger structures and narratives. As a queer woman who spent a decade in a heteronormative marriage, I know how seductive the call of that particular “good life” can be; I also know the liberation of building something new. Max well’s book offers lessons for all readers about recognizing and then escaping the structures that ensnare us.

Carson and Freeman found their way to their strange, romantic and enduring love. Even when they were apart, they imagined themselves together. As Freeman writes in one of these spells: “You and I have walked headlong in the moonlight. Do you remember the night we lay in that beautiful light? I told you it was alabaster. you did it How happy we were then.”