A Blueprint for Survival
ISBN 978-0140522952 | | |
A Blueprint for Survival was an influential environmentalist text that drew attention to the urgency and magnitude of environmental problems.
First published as a special edition of The Ecologist in January 1972, it was later published in book form and went on to sell over 750,000 copies.[1]
The Blueprint was signed by over thirty of the leading scientists of the day—including
It recommended that people live in small, decentralised and largely de-industrialised communities. Some of the reasons given for this were that:
- it is too difficult to enforce moral behaviour in a large community
- agricultural and business practices are more likely to be ecologically sound in smaller communities
- people feel more fulfilled in smaller communities
- reducing an area's population reduces the environmental impact[4]
The authors used tribal societies as their model which, it was claimed, were characterised by their small, human-scale communities, low-impact technologies, successful population controls, sustainable resource management, holistic and ecologically integrated worldviews, and a high degree of social cohesion, physical health, psychological well-being and spiritual fulfilment of their members.[5][6][7]
In popular culture
In Enys Men, a 2022 British experimental horror film set in 1973, a wildlife volunteer making daily observations of rare flowers on an uninhabited Cornish island is frequently shown reading A Blueprint for Survival. The book cover includes a quote from the Sunday Times stating that "nothing seems quite the same any more", which nods to the film's ambiguous narrative and chronology.
See also
- Limits to Growth
- Transition Towns
References
- ^ About the Ecologist, www.theecologist.org
- ^ Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain by Meredith Veldman. Cambridge University Press, 1994. p230
- ^ "A Blueprint for Survival, The Ecologist Vol. 2, No. 1. Preface". Archived from the original on 2009-09-07. Retrieved 2008-04-10.
- ISBN 1-57607-000-X.
- ^ "A Blueprint for Survival, The Ecologist Vol. 2, No. 1". Archived from the original on 2009-08-31. Retrieved 2009-08-30.
- ^ The Stable Society by Edward Goldsmith. The Wadebridge Press, 1978.
- ^ The Way: an ecological worldview by Edward Goldsmith, University of Georgia Press, 1998.
External links
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