Is it time to make waves for the publishing industry? Photograph: PA
As the words of my book, The Bloodless Revolution, accumulated, I envisaged a parallel growth: the stack of pages they would have to be printed on, thousands of times over; every page representing a slice of forest, a belch of fumes and a squirt of toxic ink. Britain's publishing industry is only just waking up to the idea that their words may not be worth the trees they are printed on. Many of us would rather keep the world's remaining greenery - with its endangered flora, fauna and fungi and its entrapped carbon - than see words and pictures printed on its milled remains.
It feels like an easy sum to gauge the balance between forests and, say, the proliferating free newspapers that litter our public transport. This noxious combination of words and paper represents a clear-cut crime against the biosphere. Some newspapers print on partially recycled pulp, lightening their ethical load somewhat, and perhaps - when their words contribute positively to an understanding between peoples, for example - they reach the level of overall positive worth. Determining the value of individual texts has been an ideological scuffle in literary criticism for centuries: but the environmental cost of printing them hauls this dispute from the ivory tower into day-to-day decision-making. Is it right to write?
The publishing industry is slowly beginning to commit to using sustainably harvested trees. My publisher, for example, has made the admirable leap of claiming it will print many of its books on paper approved by the Forestry Stewardship Council (though in the office it still appears to print copy on double-spaced, single-sided dead trees, so that acres of blank white valuable A4-space are daily wasted). As the book deadline advanced, I resurrected the suggestion made early on in the venture: could we not use recycled paper? At a 10% premium in the book trade, this request comes at a price (one that governments, arguably, should meet until costs come down). The American publishers looked askance, and then agreed; but in Britain, with production budgets already stretched, the answer was a firm no. I tussled for weeks: it made commercial sense, I argued, because a recycled book would appeal to all those potential planet-conscious readers. This had no effect, until eventually I offered to forego a small tranche of my advance in lieu of the added cost. That did the trick, and I breathed a sigh of relief (inhaling, of course, the air sweetly oxygenated by the parallel slice of forest I imagined had been saved.)
Writing here, on the web, I feel blissfully free from weighing the value of my words against the value of the trees they are going to be printed on. Words fly through the web weightlessly, unencumbered by dead trees dragging down their net value. But can it be so simple; surely a hyper-scrupulous eco-conscience can winkle out some limit to their freedom? Sure enough, along with their weightlessness floats into view another ethical cloud: has anyone worked out what the carbon dioxide emissions are per word posted on the net?
The manufacture and running of all the world's computers, the toxicity of the hardware mountains that we currently dump on other countries; all this can be totted up on the environmental account of web-users and its authors. Our most ephemeral words are ineluctably grounded in the material world: flattening our forests, generating waste plastics and batteries, and leaking unwanted gases into our atmosphere. Even while we seek to change the world with words, they are changing the world for us.
