Read a Book, Save a Tree

Making books kills trees.  In fact, every year, 25 million trees are massacred for our book-reading pleasure.  It might even be 30. And that’s just in the US.  So you might think that e-books and e-readers would be the greener choice.  And you would be wrong.

Environmental impact.  It’s about more than trees.  It’s about everything that happens in making, using and disposing of any object, blue jeans to jelly beans.   And when the beans have all been counted, books come out ahead.

First, there is material extraction: collecting the stuff to make the object.  According to a recent article in The New York Times, making one e-reader takes 33 pounds of minerals.   This includes the rare mineral columbite-tantalite used in many electronics, and whose mining in eastern Congo has been funding an ugly war.   A physical book requires 2/3 pound of minerals (mostly gravel for the roads it gets shipped on).  It takes 79 gallons of water to make an e-reader; a book needs only 2.

Slow Book Movement, Rule #3

Um...a book?

Things were recently looking pretty bleak for my quixotic project, saving books from e-xtinction.  During the grand Denver confab known as The AWP, I sat across an early breakfast of hash-browns and oeufs over-easy with my favorite editor Dawn Marano.   She, too, lamented the advent of you-know-whats and the possible future disappearance of Books.  And for a moment, I felt cheered!  An ally!  But then she said she’d already been through her stages of grief, and now that she’s made it all the way to acceptance, she’s bought the e-reader whose name starts with a K.   To my ears that K thing always sounds like the little twigs you set fire to just before the logs really catch, and that little piece of news started a little conflagration in my own brain.  I guess you’d call it shock.  Will I ever get past denial?  Will I ever plunk down the plastic and download my own book on to a gadget?  (I hope to god my publisher makes an e-version of my own book available when it comes out next March, cause god knows that’s where the future of the money is).

So I was feeling pretty down, until

An Ode To My Students

My class “Literature and the Environment” is not for the student looking to sit back and chill.   It’s a class for champions.  And this semester, I got them.  This little ode is for them.

We started in late January.  It rained.  We read essays by Barry Lopez, bell hooks, Luther Standing Bear, Edward Abbey and Jonathan Safran Foer.  We read Wendell Berry on the Unsettling of America and pondered the ravenous drive for conquest that runs like a river of blood through our history.  What is nature, we asked?  Where is it?  In what ways am I in it, of it?  In the dance between nature and culture, must it be a zero sum game?  And most importantly, what is our paradigm?  What is the paradigm of western culture that has brought us so blithely to our current perilous brink?  Can we change it?

Can reading literature change it?  I want them to believe it can, because it has the power to change the way we think and see.  These students have been willing to entertain that possibility.  They’ve been willing to look into their own ideas and conceptions.  They’ve even been willing to change.

In February (still raining), Thoreau led us through the woods to rapture of his morning bath and the Homeric trumpet of a mosquito, while Michael Pollan brought us back out into the garden and reason.  Rather than roping “nature” off into wilderness preserves while we despoil every other corner of the planet, why not treat the whole thing like a garden?  Let us get what we need while nature gets what it needs to survive.  That way, when we have a woodchuck problem, we don’t have to firebomb the woodchuck burrow, we just need to build a fence.