In 1962, Rachel Carson, American marine biologist and conservationist, published her influential book, Silent Spring. The title refers to the eerie silence of a spring where sounds of life from birds, insects, and even children are eradicated due to the long-lasting and devastating effects of commonly used chemical insecticides and pesticides. Silent Spring is credited with raising awareness of the effects of human activity on the nonhuman world and the detrimental impacts on both human and nonhuman life of technological interventions that alter nature for convenience and profit. Lida Maxwell’s new book on Rachel Carson does not bother trying to convince readers that the legacy of Carson’s work is profoundly important. Noting that most accounts of the impacts of Silent Spring are heteronormative, Maxwell attends instead to what conventional accounts of the book fail to notice. What draws Maxwell’s attention and is key to her astounding insights about why Carson and her work matter now is the queer love Rachel Carson shared with a woman named Dorothy Freeman.

Freeman initiated a meeting with Rachel Carson in 1952 upon learning that Carson was building a house near her and her husband Stanley’s summer home in Southport, Maine. The Freemans had read Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951) and were keen to meet her. The three embarked together on a tide-pooling outing in Southport in the summer of 1953, after which Rachel’s and Dorothy’s several years of long correspondence and their mutual love began. Maxwell tells us that when Carson met Freeman, she was completing The Edge of the Sea (1955) and that her writing became more “vibrant, passionate, and urgent” (p. 4) because of this new relationship. “Maybe the easiest way for me to write a chapter of my book would be to type ‘Dear Dorothy’ on the first page!” (p. 4), Carson wrote to Freeman just a few months after their initial outing.

By using the word “queer” to describe Carson’s and Freeman’s love, Maxwell does not simply mean same-sex desire. In fact, we do not know if Carson and Freeman had a sexual relationship, and sex was not discussed in their letters. Remarking that she thinks “everyone has queer feelings within them,” Maxwell defines “queer” as “intimate feelings and experiences that are not comprehensible in the ideology of straight love, or that are pathologized or portrayed as disgusting or bad or embarrassing” (p. 13). While straight love is something that happens “to us” and helps us “find happiness in the world as it is” (p. 31), queer love—as Maxwell interprets it through Carson’s and Freeman’s letters—is expansive and worldly. Because the world had no existing categories to contain it, Carson’s and Freeman’s “experience of beautiful, un-narratable love led them to create a new script for living and begin to actually live differently” (p. 32). Their shared appreciation of the song of a bird called the veery, a species of thrush whose complex, exquisite, ethereal song is described on bird watching sites as liquid notes that spiral down the musical scale, is said by Maxwell to be the “voice of their love” (p. 5). This love of the natural world was what nurtured their queer love and helped them desire a new and better future.

Maxwell traces this instance of queer love by reading, interpreting, and quoting from the extensive correspondence between the two women; by visiting Southport, Maine, where Carson purchased a cottage near the Freemans; by listening for the song of the veeries with her own partner; and by putting Carson into conversation with figures such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Hannah Arendt. Maxwell insists that queer love is central to Carson’s own orientation to her work and her commitment to appreciating and preserving the vibrancy of multispecies diversity. Even more important for Maxwell, a pedagogy of queer love can nurture our sense of futurity and imagination beyond the capitalist exploitation of our delicate and beautiful world.

The first chapter, “Queer Love in Southport,” introduces us to Carson’s and Freeman’s story and its significance. In Chapter 2, called “Wondrous Revelation,” Maxwell situates the meaning of queer love within literatures on wonder as a political affect. “Loving Use,” Chapter 3, reclaims use to describe love as a way of amplifying support for each other rather than non-instrumental giving. Chapter 4, “Environmental Desire,” reconfigures our current orientation to climate politics from a fear of collapse to a desire for what is possible. The final chapter, “Heteronormativity is a Climate Issue,” emphasizes a connection made throughout the book—that heteronormative desire is a consumptive desire for a bourgeois, deadening, and normative way of life. Queer love, by contrast, offers something more, something transformative. “Wonderous revelation” (the identification and pursuance of one’s “real” desires) occurs for Carson and Freeman when they together share “world-opening” possibilities, “mysterious beauty” (p. 34), “clear-eyed visions,” and “true instinct” (p. 35) for what is truly beautiful—that is, the fragility, multiplicity, and connection to nonhuman nature, or “nature’s queerness” (p. 35). This is an experience of pleasure that Carson and Freeman sometimes in their letters call “starry” (p. 38), taking them “towards collective concerns and politics” (p. 41). Queer love, Maxwell concludes, is a “pedagogy for the climate crisis” (p. 129).

Because this is a book about Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, the queer love pedagogy Maxwell celebrates is grounded in a relationship between two people (or sometimes three, if Stanley is included). Another duo Maxwell points to is parent and child. Carson published an essay in the July 1956 issue of Woman’s Home Companion called “Help Your Child to Wonder” and later produced as a short book called The Sense of Wonder (1965). In the piece, Carson says that to encourage children to experience and enjoy the surprises of nature, adults should forego conventional teaching. Rather than naming birds, animals, or planets, it is better to follow the child’s (inborn, Carson says) sense of curiosity, directing them to simply notice and revel in the delights and mysteries of ghost crabs, the full moon, clouds, stars, and wind. Queer love pedagogy insists that nature offers spaces of transformation, both personal and political. Maxwell says Carson and Freeman “achieved their love through the dynamic, wondrous intensifications and pleasures created through interactions between humans, place, feelings, and birds” (p. 42, my emphasis).

Maxwell’s book is situated in and informed by broad and deep bodies of literature in feminist, queer, and affect theory, but these conversations, names, and texts make only limited appearances in notes or brief in-text references. In her chapter on “Loving Use,” I appreciate the short discussion of feminist critiques of “the love plot,” as well as learning how Maxwell distinguishes her queer theory from the queer theory of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. But this reader would have benefitted from more context on whether and how the remarkably positive feelings inspired by queer love are different (in substance and in form) or manifest differently than the ugly, negative, or disorienting feelings currently coursing through individual bodies and populations. Or, how are queer love feelings different from feelings discovered and discussed in feminist practices of consciousness-raising (CR)? Feelings unearthed in CR are potentially similar in political impact (or at least, political intention) to the feelings of queer love Maxwell celebrates, but the formal contexts, the relationships between participants, and the kinds of feelings generated are all quite different. CR gathers individuals (usually strangers, neighbors, random others who respond to “calls” to attend) into group settings to search and examine difficult and disorienting feelings that arise from normative habits and behaviors that, to some, feel false or wrong. What often comes up in these settings are feelings of shame, unhappiness, ambivalence, frustration, and anger. These feelings are then discussed (interpreted, redirected, and even judged) in the context of a political conversation focused on women’s liberation.

In a conversation she stages between Carson and James Baldwin, Maxwell acknowledges that “queer people need help in creating the kind of love that leads them to redemption rather than shame” (p. 51). The “help” in CR comes from other participants in a political conversation. The “help” Maxwell identifies comes from nonhuman nature, and the ones receiving the help are not those who are strangers to each other but those who are chosen (in queer love) or familial (adult caretakers and child or children) groups of two or three. Maxwell’s phrasing referenced earlier—Carson and Freedom “achieved their love” (p. 42, my emphasis)—prompts me to ask whether the point is the (intimate) queer love, the political pedagogy, or both. The answer for Maxwell is certainly both, but/and the example is unique. As she acknowledges, Carson’s and Freeman’s love was “its own species” (p. 43) and became instrumental to Carson’s ability to pen Silent Spring. This example, and Maxwell’s insightful interpretation and account of it, is a brilliant instance of a queer love nurtured within the queerness of nonhuman nature. But I wonder: is it more than a shooting star?