Queer Ecologies Book Club Reads: Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love

THIS BOOK CLUB HAS BEEN EXTENDED AND WILL GO THROUGH OCTOBER 2026. Check back in the fall to see if it will continue in 2027!
This group will meet regularly in-person at Charis on the first Thursday of each month at 7pm.
About the book club:
Queer Ecologies is an emerging field that illuminates queerness in the natural world. Through a mix of non-fiction, speculative fiction, and poetry, the Queer Ecologies Book Club introduces readers to the queer, non-binary, and downright bizarre beings found all over planet Earth. Simultaneously, we consider what it means to live queerly on and practice care for this rapidly transforming planet we call home. The Queer Ecologies Book Club centers queer, trans, and gender expansive people, ideas, experiences, and ways of being, but is open to all community members. Participants are encouraged to read the month’s book before our gatherings. However, doing so is not required - come as you are, regardless of how much you’ve read! Participants are expected to treat each other with respect in all group conversations and interactions. This book club is facilitated by Charis bookseller & queer ecologist, Yarrow Koning.
About our July book:
Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell
After the success of her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson settled in Southport, Maine. The married couple Dorothy and Stanley Freeman had a cottage nearby, and the trio quickly became friends. Their extensive and evocative correspondence shows that Dorothy and Rachel did something more: they fell in love.
In this moving new book, Lida Maxwell explores their letters to reveal how Carson's masterpiece, Silent Spring, grew from the love these women shared for their wild surroundings and, vitally and increasingly, for each other. Carson had already demonstrated a profound environmental awareness by the time she purchased her home in Maine; Maxwell proposes that it took her love for Dorothy to open up a more powerful space for critique. As their love unsettled their heteronormative ideas of bourgeois life, it enabled Carson to develop an increasingly critical view of capitalism and its effects on nonhuman nature and human lives alike, and it was this evolution that made the advocacy of Silent Spring possible.
In Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, Silent Spring's expos of the dangerous and loveless exhaustion of nature for capitalism's ends is set in bold relief against the lovers' correspondence, in which we see the path toward a more loving use of nature and a transformative political desire that, Maxwell argues, should inform our approach to contemporary environmental crises.