A Blueprint for Survival was an influential environmentalist text that drew attention to the urgency and magnitude of environmental problems.

[3] It recommended that people live in small, decentralised and largely de-industrialised communities.

Some of the reasons given for this were that: 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 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.