Excerpts from The Little Green Book by Ron Neilson

In his book, The Little Green Handbook, Ron Nielson lists “seven groups of critical global trends and events… that have four common features:

1. They are associated with a hastened deterioration of the environment, both physical and social.

2. They show that, for the first time in human history, we are approaching and crossing global limited: the ecological limits of our planet…. and the limits of human-induced damage to the planet.

3. They are happening in a relatively short time. They began about 200 years ago….

4. They docus on an even shorter time: the second or third quarter of the 21st century. They show that we are likely to experience dramatic changes, with the possibility of a global collapse of life-supporting systems."

So what are the seven groups of critical global trends and events listed in the book?

1. The population explosion
2. Diminishing land resources
3. Diminishing water resources
4. The destruction of the atmosphere
5. The approaching energy crisis
6. Social decline
7. Conflicts and increasing killer power

For those of you who like statistics and charts to back up a writer's points, this book is full of them. For those who aren't fond of charts, you will still get the bleak picture even without looking at statistical charts.

The book contains the following quotation from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower about the effects of war and the costs of war on society at large:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hopsitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatending war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”