Blueprint for a Green Planet: Your Practical Guide to Restoring the World's Environment

by John Seymour, Ian Penney, Herbert Girardet

Seymour and Girardet's book is a good beginning place for people who want to learn more about environmental problems and how they can tread less lightly upon the Earth. The text is clearly written at a level the average person can understand and a large number of drawings illustrate well the various systems and cycles they discuss. One of my favorites is the four-page spread (58-61) showing how food gets from the farm to our tables. One suspects that if more people followed the book's Six Principles for Good Housekeeping (18), the world would be in much better shape.

Readers must read critically, however. Several times I found the authors overstating their case. One wonders, for example, if more widespread paper recycling programs would really make this industry, "hugely profitable, and the scourge of paper litter would vanish." (90) I was simiarly skeptical of their discussion of the Borana tribe, a people who "live almost entirely on milk--with a little meat from time to time" but do not suffer from heart disease usually associated with a high fat diet. (70-1). These and similar exaggerations, perhaps made with best intentions, are dangerous ammunition for opponents who wish to discredit environmentalists.

http://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Green...

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1987

About the author

John Seymour was an idealist - he had a vision of a better world where people aren't alienated from their labours. As a young man, he travelled all over Africa and fought in Burma in World War II. Returning penniless to England, he lived in a trolley bus and on a Dutch sailing barge before settling on a five-acre smallholding in Suffolk to lead a self-sufficient life. He continued this lifestyle with his companion Angela Ashe on the banks of the River Barrow in County Wexford, Ireland. The two had built up the smallholding from scratch over 19 years. In his last years John, Angela and William Sutherland had been running courses in self-sufficiency from their home at Killowen, New Ross. The courses were taken by students from all over the world, who come to Killowen to learn about his lifestyle and philosophies at first hand.

He was the author of over 40 books, including the best-selling The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, and he had made numerous films and radio programmes. Most of his later writing and public campaigning had been devoted to country matters, self-sufficiency and the environment.

In the last 18 months, he was back on his beloved Pembrokeshire farm with his daughter Ann, telling stories to his grandchildren and writing rhyming poetry, with an acerbic wit that was his last weapon against what he saw as our destructive era.