Revisit: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2020
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Presenter Rana Mitter is joined by guests Tony Juniper, Emily Shuckburgh, Dieter Helm and Kapka Kassabova to discuss Rachel Carson’s passionate book, Silent Spring, first published in 1962 and said to be the work which launched the environmental movement. Recorded at the 2019 Hay Festival.
Tony Juniper is a campaigner, sustainability adviser and writer of work including Saving Planet Earth and How many lightbulbs does it take to change a planet? Emily Shuckburgh is a climate scientist and mathematician at the British Antarctic Survey and the co-author (with the Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper) of the Ladybird Book on Climate Change. Dieter Helm is an economist specialising in utilities, regulation and the environment. His recent books include Burn Out: the Endgame for Fossil Fuels, The Carbon Crunch, Nature in the Balance and Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet. Kapka Kassabova is a novelist, poet and journalist whose work includes Border,, Someone else’s life and Villa Pacifica. You can hear her talking to Free Thinking about winning the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding here https://bbc.in/2TsFZ51
You might be interested in our episode Soil Stories which hears from agroecologist Jules Pretty and geologist Andrew Scott amongst others https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08fj505
You can find a collection of all the discussions of Landmarks of culture as a playlist on the Free Thinking website / and available to download as BBC Arts&Ideas podcasts https://bbc.in/2Jw9y5Q
Producer: Fiona McLean
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:36.8 | Hello, and thanks for listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:40.5 | I'm Rana Mitter, and with April 22nd being Earth Day, |
| 0:44.1 | what better book to read than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring? |
| 0:48.2 | Here's the conversation about it that I recorded at last year's Hay Festival. |
| 0:53.8 | Thank you. at last year's Hay Festival. |
| 1:03.1 | It's a lovely day here in Hay-on-Wye. |
| 1:07.2 | The sun is shining on the fields not far from this BBC tent, |
| 1:11.8 | a reminder that over 70% of the UK's land area is managed by farmers. |
| 1:17.4 | At first glance, the landscape round here couldn't be further from this rather chilling line from John Keats. The sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. But in 1962, a writer |
| 1:26.0 | used exactly those words as an epigraph for her book. |
| 1:29.7 | Her name was Rachel Carson, and the book was Silent Spring, |
| 1:33.9 | which has become perhaps the single most important book ever written |
| 1:37.7 | about the ecological devastation that humans are unleashing on our planet. |
| 1:43.1 | Her book was controversial, but it was also a bestseller. |
| 1:46.4 | Before her death in 1964, nearly a million copies had been sold. To talk about the impact of |
| 1:52.6 | Silent Spring and its legacy in thinking about the environment today, I've got a range of guests here |
| 1:58.1 | of whom Silent is the last thing I could call them. |
| 2:01.9 | Tony Juniper is the new chair of Natural England. |
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