Rachel Carson, Environmental Rights, and the Publicity of Aesthetic Judgments

This essay considers how Rachel Carson’s writing adapts the political framework and literary conventions of a liberal public sphere. This framework is most conspicuously evident in Carson’s use of the vocabulary of rights; however, the legacy of public sphere discourse also appears in her attempts to dilate the conceptual borders for what would be considered public. Her representations of the world and ecological interdependence expand the very idea of publicity. In turn, her work is also important to a new development in the postwar era: the idea of environmental rights. Through lyrical evocations of the natural world and an insistence on aesthetic appreciation, Carson imagines collective forms of affiliation with a nonhuman world characterized by what she calls a “sense of wonder.” This aesthetic sensibility animates Carson’s expansion of the moral-political language of rights.