The Transformative Power of Queer Love
**The below blog post uses the term ‘queer’ as an inclusive, umbrella term to describe the LGBTQIA+ community. The authors and editors of this blog post identify as queer; we recognize the complicated history of this word and are not using it as a pejorative epithet.
It was June 4, 1963, when Rachel Carson testified to a Congressional subcommittee on the devastating effects of chemical pesticides on wildlife and human health. The previous September, she published her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, igniting a national movement to protect the planet with such force and energy that no single person has been able to replicate it since. Rachel was uncomfortable seated on the hard wooden bench. At just 56 years of age, she had just survived a radical mastectomy to remove the cancer metastasizing in her body.
She spoke powerfully to the subcommittee, and without hesitation, “Man’s endeavors to control nature by his powers to alter and to destroy would inevitably evolve into a war against himself, a war he would lose unless he came to terms with nature.”
Long before Rachel testified before Congress, she was a writer and naturalist, spending her spare time wandering the rocky shores outside her cottage home in Southport, Maine, her fingers laced with the hand of the woman she loved most in the world: Dorothy Freeman. Rachel Carson, the mother of the modern environmental movement was queer, spending more than a decade of her life loving a woman.
Dorothy and Rachel met after Dorothy wrote to Rachel during Christmas of 1952 about how much she admired Rachel’s immensely successful book; The Sea Around Us. After exchanging a few letters, the pair met in the summer of 1953 on a tide-pooling expedition. To both Dorothy and Rachel, it was instantly clear that their connection was special. Before Dorothy left Maine for the winter, Rachel knocked on her door to leave her with a kiss and a love letter. The first time Rachel expressed her love to Dorothy she wrote, “I love you! Now I could go on and tell you some of the reasons why I do, but that would take quite a while, and I think the simple fact covers everything.”
Dorothy and Rachel exchanged letters nearly every day while apart. As their relationship developed, both knew such love was more than unconventional and unorthodox; it was potentially dangerous. Despite the risks of a mid-20th-century world hostile to love and identities outside of rigid gender norms, they continued loving each other anyway.
Quiet moments watching the migration of Monarch butterflies or sitting still to hear the song of the Veery Thrush elicited a version of themselves that they could only find in each other’s company. Rachel’s writing became infused with poetic lyricism and yearning, becoming a sapphic elegy to the natural world, grieving the loss of beauty and mystery. Rachel’s love for Dorothy formed the emotional core of her writing. Rachel writes how Dorothy inspires her by stating that ‘maybe the easiest way for me to write a chapter of my book would be to type ‘Dear Dorothy’ on the first page!’.
Encouraged by Dorothy, Rachel published Silent Spring after years of careful scientific observations about the destruction of wildlife at the hands of chemical pesticides. Published amid Cold War anti-nuclear vigilance, Rachel’s work gave a voice to a sentiment that millions of people had felt in their bones, a growing disillusionment with the gilded shine of modernity and uninhibited technological progress.
She faced a mountain of vitriol from the chemical industry, which attacked her appearance, speculated about her private life, and dismissed her intellect. Monsanto, a chemical company, spent nearly $250,000 ($1 million today) in advertisements to discredit her by calling her a ‘spinster’, a ‘fanatic’, and a ‘hysterical cat-lady’. Even today, efforts to discredit her monumental work continue.
While she was alive, she was publicly humiliated by some of the most powerful people in the country, only weathering a storm of hatred, threats, and violence through Dorothy’s companionship, and after she passed, the well-financed campaign to discredit her became a model for industry PACs to silence opposition from debates around clean energy to carbon emissions.
Rachel decided to take up one last book about the ocean. Rachel writes; “We live in an age of rising seas… In our own lifetime, we are witnessing a startling alteration of climate.” Unfortunately, Rachel never finished that book on the swelling of the seas. Less than two years after publishing Silent Spring, Rachel developed incurable breast cancer, but her dedication to Dorothy and the planet did not cease. In the months before she passed, Rachel sat on that hard wooden bench and testified before Congress, calling for more government regulation to protect the planet. She went on CBS Reports to express her perspective on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. She defended her work and answered her critics in a speech given before the Audubon Society. And in tandem with her advocacy, Rachel spent hours writing enough letters to Dorothy so that Dorothy would never have to go long without receiving a posthumous letter from her beloved Rachel.
A few days before she died, Rachel burned the letters from Dorothy. Perhaps Rachel wanted to protect Dorothy from the scorn, scandal, and vitriol of a world casting opinions onto a once private life abruptly exposed to those who would not respect or understand the love that they shared. Before she passed, she wrote once more to Dorothy, “Never forget, dear one, how deeply I have loved you all these years.” Rachel Carson died on April 14, 1964 in her home in Silver Spring, Maryland. In the decades since, there has yet to be a body of work as compelling or galvanizing as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, despite the increasing urgency of our modern environmental and climate emergency.
Rachel and Dorothy shared the kind of love that is not just a footnote; rather it was the foundation. Without Dorothy, it is unlikely that we would have a Silent Spring or the Rachel Carson that we now owe so much to. I am often caught wondering how many other extraordinary individuals have had their progress and contributions hindered by the lack of safety, compassion, and love that we as humans need to be our most authentic and natural selves. In fact, members of the queer community are also likely to experience the effects of climate change more profoundly than those who are not queer. A recent study from the Journal of Climate Change and Health finds that because members of the LGBTQ+ community are more likely to be unhoused, experience poverty, and marginalization, they are likely to experience the effects of climate change more profoundly. In emergencies like natural disasters, LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be refused and rejected by aid providers because faith-based organizations are often the predominant providers of disaster relief.
What a tragedy it is that so many minds have spent more time worrying about their safety because of who they love or who they are, rather than imagining a better future for us all. How many other queer environmentalists are afraid to write authentically of their love for the environment because their language of love is queer? How much progress and transformation have we missed out on because our world is too often violent, cruel, and unaccepting of those whose identities fall outside of norms?
The acceptance of love being love, regardless of the form love takes, is integral to our progress toward protecting the very ground we stand on. Environmentalists like Rachel should not be afraid that their most private relationships and identities will be used against them when global threats like climate change jeopardize our planet’s future. Radical acceptance of love has the power to transform not only ourselves but the world. After all, nothing comes naturally to us quite like love does.
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