Who Killed Rachel Carson?

(Reading Time: 4 minutes, at 68F)

A warm 55 degrees if there can be such a thing—and there can be in the Rocky Mountains this time of year—just as there can be a cool 70 degrees as there was yesterday in Cody when a chinook hit an unsuspecting bicyclist who wished he’d been wearing a windbreaker.

To paraphrase Karl Marx, the evolution of man, in all history, is characterized by man’s struggle with nature and that once this struggle is ‘solved’, the pre-history of man will come to a close and true history will begin. I wonder what would Marx ‘do’ with climate change, if history as he defined it, really is one of man’s makings, man being his own creator, giving birth to himself in the ‘process’ of history. So it would seem, as the Anthropocene* Age now seems to be upon us, that Karl Marx who always was relevant is relevant once again.

 I write this just after searching the New non-fiction shelves at the Cody Public Library (CPL) for something new to read, and seeing that the number of books regarding climate change now far exceed the number of books on minor celebrities, cookbooks, self-improvement primers, and the memoirs of failed politicians. 

This was not always the case. I know, having once conducted a survey of public libraries in Wyoming and Montana (most of them, like the CPL, underwritten by Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American philanthropist, 1835-1919, and not Dale Carnegie as so often believed, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People). As I so often found very little of interest to read in a library’s general collection I devised a sort of litmus test for a public library’s intellectual trustworthiness: upon entering library, whether it was in Red Lodge, Montana or Graybull, Wyoming, I would head straight to the shelves to see if they had any work of Freud’s, Karl Marx, and/or Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. If the library did have at least one of them, I considered it worthy; if not, it wasn’t.

Cody Public Library has a decent Freud collection, and Carson’s Silent Spring (Dewey Decimal System 363.7384) but no Karl Marx. The CPL does however have an outstanding collection of feature films and legendary tv shows on DVD and Blue-Ray. Yesterday I borrowed David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a tv series that first aired on national tv in 1990 that I’d heard a lot about at the time—who didn’t?—but had never watched myself.

Last night I watched episodes 1-4. The mystery isn’t, Who Killed Laura Palmer? The mystery is how David Lynch was able to convince ABC execs into financing and airing the thing.

*Anthropocene—a theoretical Epoch measured from the beginning of the time when human impact upon the Earth’s ecosystems—such as global warming & climate change—was detected.