Emerson Undersea

Abstract This chapter begins by considering the twenty-first-century reception of Emerson’s thinking about nature, and then proposes a new direction for understanding that thinking: the development and expansion of two key Emersonian ideas in the work of Rachel Carson, arguably the most important American environmental writer of the twentieth century. The chapter argues that Carson embraces the Emersonian ideas of abandonment and impersonality as essential to accurately perceiving nature and the complex place of humans within the more-than-human world. These ideas shape her formative writings about the ocean that paved the way for her groundbreaking bestseller, Silent Spring (1962). Carson’s overlooked uptake of Emersonian ideas provides new evidence of the value of reading Emerson at the Anthropocene. It illuminates an uncharted American Transcendentalist current of Carson’s environmental thinking. And it suggests that Emerson’s most exciting contributions to environmental thought may emerge from his less obviously “environmental” reflections on self, being, and perception.