Fifty years after the publication of the seminal Silent Spring, Conor Mark Jameson reflects on Rachel Carson's legacy and asks the question - are we still silencing the spring?

"Based on a symposium on the topics posed in Rachel Carson'sSilent spring, held in Philadelphia, August 1984".

Basic Environmental Toxicology provides a thorough, systematic introduction to environmental toxicology and addresses many of the effects of pollutants on humans, animals, and the environment. Readers are introduced to the fundamentals of toxicology and ecotoxicology, the effects of different types of toxicants, and how toxicants affect different compartments of the environment. Fundamental aspects of environmental health, occupational health, detection of pollutants, and risk assessment are discussed. The book is excellent for anyone involved in risk assessment or risk management, toxicologists, state and local public health officials, environmental engineers, industrial managers, consultants, and students taking environmental toxicology courses.

Historical snapshots of the Love Canal area -- Gender at Love Canal -- Race at Love Canal -- Class at Love Canal -- Historical implications of gender, race, and class at Love Canal

Even at the start of the new millennium the American Sixties continue to fascinate many scholars as one of the pivotal decades of the 20th Century. During those years the United States seemed to be strifing for new frontiers at home and abroad, driven by a generation of eager and idealistic young Americans: Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, Pop-Art, Flower Power, Postmodernism, Woodstock, the landing on the moon. Everything seemed possible. But the decade that had begun with the hopeful words of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. ended with the bloody nightmare of the Vietnam War, summers of violence in Northern black ghettos, and a rising tide of conservatism. To explore some of these contradictions, this collection of essays takes a fresh look at American's most turbulent years from a multidisciplinary perspective. Dealing with the Arts and Media, Literature and Society as well as History and Politics, the contributions offer a broad approach to a contemporary understanding of the Sixties and their legacy.

As recently as fifty years ago, the billowing industrial smokestack was a proud symbol of progress and power; today it is an image of unbridled corporate irresponsibility. This change in public attitudes reflects a shift in social values as rapid and profound as any in American history. Its effects are so far-reaching that scarcely anyone imagines there was ever an alternative view of the relationship between human beings and nature. Yet for all the time and energy devoted to discussion of environmentalism as a social and political movement, no one has questioned its existence as a coherent philosophy or given an account of how it first emerged in public consciousness. Most people would assume that the environmental idea, and the powerful political movement it inspired, must have emerged in response to self-evident environmental problems such as air and water pollution, acid rain, the human destruction of natural habitats, and the resulting extinction of endangered species. But as Charles T. Rubin shows in The Green Crusade, environmental problems are far from being a matter of common sense. He points out that while such situations almost certainly existed in the past, they were defined in different terms - implying different kinds of social and political solutions. Rubin tells the story of this massive yet strangely unnoticed transformation of public perception and social morality by focusing on the small group of influential writers and thinkers - Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, E. E Schumacher, and others - whose enormously popular writings gave birth to the environmental movement as we know it. Cutting through their pretense of presenting "common sense" ideas based onsound scientific conclusions, Rubin's thoughtful discussion of these writers' political ideas refutes their pretensions to scientific accuracy and reveals the radical foundations of their project. These environmental popularizers, Rubin argues, have spent the last thirty years playing on the hopes and fears of the public in order to advance a political agenda that goes well beyond the protection of nature and envisions a total transformation of human society. Nor would this social transformation be benign, in Rubin's view. For these utopian reformers, if they had their way, would willingly adopt totalitarian means to save us (as they see it) from ourselves, and Rubin argues that as "red" totalitarianism declines, the aspirations of our radical reformers may become increasingly "green".

American scientist and author Rachel Carson is said to have sparked the modern day environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962. She made vivid the prospect of life without birdsong. But has her warning been heeded? Fifty years on, Conor Mark Jameson reflects on the growth of environmentalism since Silent Spring was published. His revealing and engaging tale plots milestone events in conservation, popular culture and political history in the British Isles and beyond, tracing a path through the half century since 'zero hour', 1962. Around this he weaves his own observations and touching personal experiences, seeking to answer the question: what happened to the birds, and birdsong, and why does it matter?