May 5, 2010
A few weeks ago we were so pleased to report here that the Eco-Libris blog had named Seymour’s GLOBAL WARMING book the "green book of the week."
Today we received a note from the reviewer, Raz Godelnik, who is doing valuable work on behalf of the environment at Eco-Libris.
He wrote: As you will see, our mission is to green the book industry and make reading more sustainable and we hope to make it happen sooner than later! One of our main activities is a tree planting program, where we work with readers, publishers and authors to plant trees in developing countries for the books they read, publish or write. So far we have planted with our planting partners around 150,000 trees! You’re welcome to see some of the planting activity on our planting gallery.
I took his suggestion and learned a lot on the Eco-Libris website. For one thing, more than 30-million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone. That is sobering.
Eco-Libris has come up with a very simple idea to enable those of us who are readers (and therefore big consumers of books) to do something simple and affordable that will have an impact: plant one tree for every book we read. They see it as a way of taking responsibility for the environmental impact of the books we read.
This is a big idea. Here is how it works:
You go to the website and make a commitment to plant 10 trees every month, for a cost of $10 per month. Eco-Libris has carefully selected qualified planting partners in Nicaragua, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Malawi – places where planting trees will not only benefit the environment but also the local community – and they will plant the trees.
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ou willl receive stickers like this one (printed on recycled paper) for every tree that you plant, affixing them to your books to demonstrate your commitment to the environment.
I’m not only signing up to support Eco-Libris myself, I’m going to give a gift subscription to my college student, who as a History/Literature major, will be very happy to start to balance out the environmental impact of all those books! What a great idea. A simple, elegant way to make a difference.
Posted by: Liz Nealon
