A review of “Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love”

Lida Maxwell’s book emerges as a timely pedagogical resource to fight climate change that is aligned with queer’s emancipatory project of conceiving the world beyond capitalist and heteronormative strictures on utility, love, and desire. By exploring the environmentalist ethos of queer lovers Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell convincingly demonstrates that queer love constitutes a site of agency for achieving a more vibrant world, one in which “intimate feelings are not contained only in the self; they always also involve nonhuman nature, other people, and other material features of the world around us” (13).