Silent Spring Revisited

Conor Mark Jameson quotes H G Wells’ A Short History of the World: Wells said that his intention was “…to meet the needs of the busy general reader ... who wishes to refresh and repair his faded or fragmentary conceptions of the great adventure of mankind.” Jameson says of Silent Spring Revisited: “I’m trying something similar now.”

The book attempts to summarise the development of the conservation movement since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published fifty years ago, and the gains and losses to the natural world in that time. Carson’s book opened the eyes of a generation to the destruction of nature and the threat to many bird species, as business and farming initiatives were allowed to go on unchecked in their search for profits.

He tackles his task with a year-by-year account, with conservation milestones and providing context with pop trivia and the main news stories for each year. An autobiographical strand gives a human aspect to the narrative, and there are a lot of fascinating details about the development of the RSPB and their battles with government.

As a ‘busy general reader’, I feel that the author succeeds, with a readable book which refreshed my memory of events like the ‘Great Storm’ or the numerous oil slicks that have washed our shores. I learned a lot and found it helpful to do a stocktake of the last fifty years. The autobiographical strand does become stronger as the book progresses, making this a highly personal interpretation rather than attempting to be an objective account. The cover, by Carry Akroyd, is striking and evocative.

Book reviewed by Heather Pymar