The Population Bomb

'Silent Spring', written by Rachel Carson and published in 1962, is widely credited with having launched the environmental movement. Serialised in The New Yorker, it caused a furore. The first chapter presents a fictionalised portrait of the devastating effects that chemicals could have on a thriving farming community "Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death."?
But what has been happening to environmental thinking since Silent Spring?

Here, five key figures in the world of environmentalism deliver essays on Silent Spring and some of the important works that followed it.

In episode two, population biologist Charles Godfray of Oxford University, tackles 'The Population Bomb', published in 1968, a text that warned of mass starvation to come in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation.