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Excerpt:

This book and the work of Richard St Barbe Baker, the “Man of the Trees”, and the plans for constructive villages as the basis of a new world wide civilisation to which Mahatma Gandhi devoted his last years, inspired this booklet.

It presents the grave crises that threaten the continuation of life and claims that regeneration of the world’s forests could do much to resolve them.

With sufficient research, carefully selected and nurtured trees can be grown in most habitable regions of the world to meet, with the help of properly directed science and technology, nearly all the material needs of humans and, at the same time, restore and maintain environmental health.

Properly managed forests, with adjacent integrated forest industries, could be the regional centres of rings of self­reliant village communities. Modern communication technology would prevent isolation and facilitate global cooperation. Such developments would both require and foster fundamental changes in human values and habits and lead to an era of abundance, peace and spiritual evolution.

These ideas, only very briefly presented here, are visionary but also eminently practical given the necessary awareness and willingness to discard old habits that are no longer relevant. The present materialist, competitive, violent civilisation which has spread rapidly throughout the world is not sustainable. We need above all the vision and hope of a practically based alternative.