Planting New Trees to Replace the Ones that End up on the Bookshelf
Shakespeare gave us Hamlet. Tolstoy gave us War and Peace. Joyce gave us Ulysses. Those were their gifts. But today, book lovers also bear the albatross of their literary art: millions of dead trees.
In fact, some 4 billion trees are cut down each year for paper—and about 30 million of them are used for books bought in the U.S. alone.
This fact didn’t sit right with friends Raz Godelnik, Eylon Israely, Oren Entin, and Gilad Ness-Berlin, four literature buffs who last year founded Eco Libris, a Seattle- and Delaware-based organization that works to balance out trees lost to book-making by planting new ones in developing countries, from Malawi to Guatemala.
“I read a lot,” says Israely. “Two books a week, even when I’m really busy. And I thought, ‘Here’s an opportunity to give something back.’ I know it sounds corny but it’s true.”
In the group’s first year, Eco-Libris was responsible for 72,000 new trees. Its members believe that by working with local communities in deforested areas they can achieve the best results. They’ve hand-picked a number of non-profits in the developing world and partnered with them to take care of the actual tree planting.
In working to spread its message, Eco Libris also has partnered with bookstores in the U.S., Canada and Europe, and has collaborated with authors and publishers in the U.S., U.K. , Canada and Europe.
Eco Libris is not a nonprofit—the group keeps a portion of the proceeds from every sale.
Here’s how it works: visitors to the company’s website, www.ecolibris.net, are prompted to select how many books they’d like to offset by planting a tree. After clicking on ‘Go’ they’re directed to another page, which tallies up the final cost—about $1 per book/tree, which is then paid using Paypal.
The organization uses the one-to-one book-to-tree ratio mostly for purposes of clarity. It’s very difficult, Israely says, to put a number on exactly how many books can be produced from a single tree—the answer is probably several dozen, although that depends on the length of the book, the quality of the paper, and the constitution of the tree itself.
Either way, for each book you balance out, you’ll receive a sticker—made of recycled paper—which reads, “One tree planted for this book.” You can then display it on your book covers, proclaiming your commitment to the environment and to the world.
