The Greenest Way to Read

Which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an old-fashioned book? The New York Times has the answer for you after carrying out life-cycle assessments of both.  But, the article concludes :

All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library.

Then again, for how much longer will your local library (even supposing you have one in the first place) have books printed on paper?
(Readers' responses to the article are here.)

When Fatimah Lost her Kampung

A few days ago I wrote about the launch of a children's book called Fatimah's Kampung by Iain Buchanan at Badan Warisan. I ended up being pretty late because I had decided to walk to Jalan Stonor from KLCC, along what I thought was a familiar route. I ended up getting lost, completely thrown by the way the area has changed since I was last there, with huge high-rises and building sites beginning to dominate this formerly green and peaceful enclave with its colonial bungalows.

I realise now, after reading the book, that there's a certain irony to all this - for Fatimah's Kampong is the story about how a landscape changes as the city encroaches, and how what is best about a place will be sacrificed to commercial interest.

In the introduction to the book Buchanan talks about how the book came to be written. He says he came to Malaysia first to teach shortly after Independence and that he took away with him a memory of the landscape which became part of him.

He continued to teach geography in a university in the East Midlands, and one day he had a call from one of his former students, Maznoor, now a college lecturer herself, coming to the UK to do a diploma in TEFL. They later married and Buchanan found himself part of a :

... large, lively, and very loving Malaysian family ..

But revisiting the landscape he had fallen in love with, he found that there was good reason to mourn :

... there was painted concrete, dead laterite and a gaudy brittle sameness ...

After taking early retirement, and wanting to communicate the ideas that he has lectured on in a way that was more vivid and exciting to young people, he began work on Fatimah's Kampung, a labour of love which took him eight years to complete, while Maznoor went out to work in a British factory to pay the bills. It was a true labour of love.

The book tells the story of a girl growing up in Kampong Hidayah. The family home was built by her great-grandfather with materials taken from the forest. When most of the other kampungs disappeared because of the expansion of the city it was allowed to remain untouched by the Sultan who owned the land.

Fatimah grows up amidst fruit trees, and forest (where she believes Pak Belang the tiger still might be hiding), and near to the frangipani filled graveyard where her relatives were laid to rest, and the keramat once home to a holy man who knew the ways of the forest in the way no others did.

The rhythms of kampong life of are recorded - her grandmother gathering herbs to cure ailments, the children's games, the visits by hawkers, Ramadan and the bustle of Hari Raya at the end of it, the monsoon floods.

But then the bulldozers move in and Fatimah and her family are forced to relocate to a high rise near by where they can see the final destruction of their kampung, and the forest around it.

There is one small mercy - the kampong house itself is to be saved and taken to be part of a new theme park which Fatimah gets the chance to visit.

Labelling books can sometimes do them a disservice, and whilst the book will undoubtedly appeal to older children (many of whom may have lived the story!), it will strike a chord with every Malaysian who cares about the environment and heritage, regardless of age, and will probably travel very well beyond these shores as the issues it raises are universal ones. I'm not ashamed to say that the story moved me to tears - especially the part where Fatimah finally does come face to face with her tiger.

But it is the stunning illustrations, with every detail of tree and leaf and kampung lovingly recorded, which make this book an absolute joy to own. (I have had to pries my copy out of the hands of visitors to the house who haven't wanted to put it down and talk to me!)

I wonder if Fatimah's Kampung might not be better described as a graphic novel and one that could easily become a classic of the genre?

The book is published by the Consumers Association of Penang, and this surprises on two counts. First of all, the organisation is known for its pamphlets on consumer and environmental issues and they have not, to my knowledge, ever undertaken a project like this before. Secondly, that they have made such a great job of it - this is a beautifully produced book that you could put beside any produced overseas and feel proud of.

Have I raved? Sorry. But I sincerely mean every word of praise I have heaped on this book.

But why not see for yourself? Iain will be appearing at Readings@Seksan this coming Saturday and a limited number of his books will be on sale.

Shamini Saves the Planet

Shamini Flint is interviewed by Vennilla Rajaguru the Jakarta Post and is pictured here (in a nice Balinese setting) with some of her children's picture books. She talks about her route to publishing, her fascination with modern Asia and her desire to teach children responsibility for the environment through her writing.

She's also rather intriguingly written a book called How to Win a Nobel Prize: A Stay-at-Home Mum's Guide ... and knowing the guts and determination of this lady I wouldn't put anything past her.

Don't forget that you can meet her at Seksan's on Saturday afternoon.

Save Trees, Swap Books

A passionate plea from Charlotte Northedge, on the Guardian's environmental pages, for readers to swap books rather than buy new ones.

Here's a scary fact uncovered by Greenpeace :

... one Canadian spruce produces just 24 books, which means that if you get through one book every two weeks your reading habits destroy almost one large tree every year.

The article has links to lots of book swap sites on the internet. (More here.) In the Klang Valley, there's a very active BookCrosser group who meet regularly to swap book and talk about them. They're going to be at KLAB tomorrow.

I wanted to save a few trees myself and decided finally to go and buy a Sony Reader and join the valiant e-book set. Of course the sales assistant in the Sony shop hadn't even heard of it!!!

(This was the same assistant who had told me sniffily some time before that Sony doesn't sell cassette tapes because the technology has moved on ... even though the voice recorders in the show case were the kind which use cassettes. Duh!)

The Green Bookaholic

In case your book-reading conscience needs a prick.

The US publishing industry is responsible for 12.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide entering our atmosphere each year, mainly because of cutting trees to produce paper, according to the just-published report Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the US Book Industry (found via).

The situation in the UK is of course comparable, and booktwo.org quotes an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement in which environmental scientist and author David Reay throws some pretty scary statistics at us:

What with production and transport, the average paperback has eaten its way through 4.5kWh of energy by the time it gets to a reader. In terms of climate impact, this is equivalent to about 3kg of carbon dioxide emissions for every glossy new textbook. So, for a print run of 10,000, there is a cost of 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide not mentioned on the dust jackets. But this is a best-case scenario. The sale-or-return system virtually guarantees that the damage is much more severe. If half the books delivered to bookshops then have to be trucked back to the publisher and pulped, there’s yet another great belch of greenhouse gases to ultimately heat up the cheeks of both publisher and author…

Assume that the average print run for those 200,000 titles is just 1,000 copies. That’s 200 million books coming off the presses in a year - 600,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and, even if we assume very low return rates, enough pulped book to fill the dining hall at Hogwart’s several times over.

In terms of its contribution to global warming, UK publishing in effect puts an extra 100,000 cars on our roads. Our esteemed seats of learning are a sizeable cog in this engine: the average undergraduate buys at least three volumes per course, while most academic offices are crammed from floor to ceiling with dusty tomes…

The industry is terrifically wasteful. booktwo.org estimates that :

... half of all books printed in the UK are never read. And they’re not redistributed either, but returned to the publishers or otherwise disposed of, usually pulped or simply placed in landfill.

The good news, the industry is becoming much greener :

The book industry’s use of recycled fiber has increased six-fold in the past few years, and many companies in the book business are developing environmental policies and setting goals to increase their use of recycled and certified paper, improve impacts on forests, reduce energy consumption, and lessen their overall carbon footprint.

Approximately 45 percent of publishers now have meaningful environmental policies in place, with concrete goals and timelines. In fact, four of the top 10 publishers-including Random House, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Thomas Nelson-have joined 160 smaller publishers in making significant public commitments in this arena. In addition, a solid majority of respondents (more than 220) have endorsed the Book Industry Treatise on Responsible Paper.

But, something else to chew on. Global shipping is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and most of the books we buy in this part of the world are shipped to us from the US and UK. And books are mighty bulky things.

Greener solutions?

Well those who love read their books in digital format tiny carbon-footprint have tiny carbon-footprints compared to the rest of us. (I hear Chet and Leon cheering.) Maybe some attitude shifting (including my own) has to happen?

I reckon that if we want to be truly environmentally friendly in our reading we should encourage major publishing houses in the west to explore the idea of print-on demand so that small numbers of copies of books can be printed here as we want they are ordered. (Is this just a dream? Why couldn't this work?)

Publishers can of course make greater use of recycled paper. The quality is excellent, but according to Amir who has used it, the price is much higher than for new paper.

And perhaps the industry as a whole (here and in the west) has to look at the way it deals with returns and make an effort to be less wasteful ...

Perhaps you have some more ideas of your own?