Read from the introduction of Green Plans: Blueprint for a Sustainable Earth by Huey D. Johnson:

"It has been twelve years since the first edition of this book. In it I described Green Planning as a concept of great importance and a promising step toward solving environmental problems. Since then, the environmental programs of most nations have not kept pace with the growth of those problems, which are now capped off by the arrival of the huge threat of global warming. Nonetheless, I’m pleased to say that in certain countries, principally the Netherlands, Singapore, and New Zealand, Green Planning has shown exemplary success as a way to work toward social, economic, and environmental sustainability.

These past eighteen years of successful environmental management offer many valuable lessons to other nations, states, cities, corporations, and institutions that need to get on with environmental quality management. The purpose of this third edition is to describe the ongoing idea and show how it is working. To this project I bring the benefit of my own forty years of experience as an environmentalist and planner, as well as the work of the Resource Renewal Institute (RRI), which I founded in 1983 to study and promote Green Plans.

When I first looked at Green Plans as environmental policy, I thought the Dutch example was outstanding. I still do. Their plan, known as the NEPP, the National Environmental Policy Plan, has been functioning now for eighteen years. That length of time is important because for any program to be able to change a society’s environmental policies on a Green Plan scale, the policy needs to survive over time. The eighteen years of Holland’s successful Green Plan is the driving reason for the third edition of this book."

Huey D. Johnson is the founder and president of the Resource Renewal Institute in San Francisco. To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Green Plans, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Green-Plans,673377.aspx.