Publish and be damned
* Write off the future
* Print on fancy paper
* Chop down trees
* Recycle schmichael
One day you start writing a book about how to f**k the planet. Soon you realize that the actual pages are as significant as the prose, more so, in fact. With a shiver of excitement you recognize that, if canny enough, the manufacture of the book could help annihilate earth’s remaining ancient forests. Books start as trees, and this one could hail from the most pristine of woodlands, a previously unspoilt wilderness butchered and churned into pulp upon which to print your enlightening words.
It would be recklessness of the highest order not to hand-pick the forest that provides your paper. The perfect place is a sanctuary for endangered species, a tranquil land undisturbed by man, a complex ecosystem that has taken centuries to evolve. You tremble with exhilaration as you hear the imaginary screams of buzz saws scything through the trees. Occasionally, lurid visions of sustainably managed woodland appear before you. Increasingly, forest-friendly pulp plagues your thoughts. But you must stay strong. Somehow, you will succeed in ravaging the planet’s ancient forests with the timeless text of truth and, one day, those who survive the impending ecological holocaust will read about these bygone forests in the very books that led to their downfall.
And so the hunt begins for the greatest paper merchant in the world. Of course you should start with those firms fortunate enough to be sited in areas of unspoilt woodland. First stop: Finland, home to some of Europe’s last untouched forests, mostly in the Gortnamoyagh region. You anticipate a quick result but, although initial investigations prove promising, several rounds of enquiries find no one with the requisite courage to play ball. You move next door to Sweden, which also, infuriatingly, has the temerity to let ancient trees remain standing. But again, nothing doing there. On to Estonia, and it’s the same old story. Italy: nope. Latvia: a blank. Further east, and your journey takes you to Russia. Surely here, in the name of Stalin, there must be one paper merchant willing to chop down trees just to ensure that an obscure writer has a platform upon which to spill their half-baked ramblings. In deepest Siberia, plenty of paper companies are rumoured to be gleefully raiding the virginal boreal forests, yet the moment they hear that your book is about the environment, interest seems to wane. And so, in desperation, you head south to the rainforests of Indonesia and, more specifically, to the enormous factories of one of the world’s biggest paper companies, Asia Pulp & Paper (APP).
Once, backed by Barclays and NatWest, this behemoth could be unfailingly relied upon to devastate ancient forests with flair. The country’s rainforests – the final refuge of the orang-utan – never stood a chance when APP was in town. However, disquieting gossip has been circulating for some time that these boys have gone soft. You whisper a prayer and make the call. Your heart sinks. The rumours are true. APP has gone clean. The world is going mad, you think. This lot had such a good thing going. They were trusted to flood Europe with ethically unsound paper, supplying, among others, a number of leading publishing houses and, by George, they delivered. But not any more. You take stock and decide to investigate several other Indonesian paper merchants whose immaculate reputations have been forged on vaporizing precious habitats. Fresh enquiries confirm your worst fears. The days when forests were illegally logged for the burblings of writers that would never sell (and a minority that did), might suddenly be in the past. Once, more than 5 million tonnes of pulp was pillaged from Indonesia, but international scrutiny has meant that no more than 1.2 million was projected to be thieved from the jungle this year. Everyone, it seems, is going clean. Or at least trying to.
Only Canada remains. The country that gave the literary world Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields more crucially has loads of old trees ripe for converting into books. On paper, as it were, it looks positive. You learn that almost half of Canada’s boreal forests are allocated for logging, much of this designated for paper companies. Aware that you may be building yourself up again only to get hurt, you make some tentative enquiries. Bullseye.
You have high hopes for Hachette USA. This company, whose British division is also one of the UK’s biggest book publishers, and owns numerous well-known publishing imprints, including Mitchell Beazley, Hamlyn and Orion, represents almost a fifth of the market. Hachette has been known to work with a company called Abitibi-Consolidated, a wonderfully zealous logging operation with the capability to provide more than 6 million tonnes of newsprint and commercial paper a year. Abitibi-Consolidated logs trees in Ontario and Quebec, smack in the middle of Canada’s boreal forests, the largest ancient woodlands of North America. This great, sickeningly intact sprawl of trees accounts for a quarter of the world’s remaining forest. 47.5 billion tonnes of carbon are stored within its soils and leaves, seven times the amount produced worldwide by cars, coal and electricity every year.
But Abitibi-Consolidated is no slouch. In fact, it is pretty damn good at its job. Less than 20 per cent of the forest it has logged in Ontario remains intact. Once its diligent employees have hacked down trunks, scraps of woodchips are flogged to a company called SFK Pulp, which scrunches the remains of ancient trees into a gluey mulch and forwards the sludge to the vast paper mill of the planet’s second largest producer of magazine and book paper, Stora Enso, in Germany. From there it has been flogged to lots of publishers, including your friends at Hachette. Result.
Barely able to believe this turn in fortune, you investigate further. Hachette has used woodchips from an area of degraded boreal forest a hundred times the size of London. These boreal forests were home to scores of endangered and rare species. Hachette seems like the dream partner in crime. Plans for an exhaustive, forensically researched book about pretty much nothing are drawn up. It will be very long and trivial. It will use a lot of trees. But then something tragic happens. Hachette suddenly loses its credentials. It becomes a turncoat. Overnight, Hachette becomes the enemy, their representatives suddenly talking about the importance of recycling, sustainability. They even mention the C-word. Certification.
So the hunt must continue. You return once more to the southern hemisphere and this time to the pretty island of Tasmania, home to some of the tallest trees in the world. Such potential trophies are worth a 12,000-mile journey in – or, rather, for – anyone’s book. The trip takes you to the door of a new £100 million wood-pulp mill built by lumber giant Gunns. Here, millions of tonnes of timber will be mulched. Some people on the island fear that the mill has the potential to pollute the Bass Strait, the slip of water between the island and mainland Australia, not to mention despoil a beautiful island. With a sense of growing agony, you hear that the government has imposed forty-eight environmental conditions on the mill. Spill so much as a droplet of chlorine dioxide and it’s into the dog house for you. It was a dark day indeed when Gunns confirmed that they were going to comply with such fervent bureaucracy.
In mid-2008, a sad truth slowly emerges. It is fast becoming impossible to write on paper which is not corrupted by a high recycled content or approved as environmentally friendly by those chaps at the Forest Stewardship Council, who, quite frankly, are becoming the bane of everyone’s life. The virtue of choice has been stolen from us all. It all suggests that your book might have to be printed on forest-friendly paper after all. If so, it is guaranteed to make for depressing reading. Maybe it will get even grimmer. Soon, more books will be published online, completely eradicating any remaining potential for chopping down attractive rainforests. But hope must spring eternal. Someone, somewhere, must still be cutting down ancient woods to ensure crappy books gather dust in backstreet bookshops. Keep looking. Tenacity is so often the principal attribute to those intent on environmental mishap. It’s all too easy to just give up.
* Forest Stewardship Council is hit by corruption scandal when it emerges it has been certifying books made from Peru’s last great forests. Highly unlikely.
* Gunns paper mill haemorrhages 20,000 gallons of chlorine dioxide in mid-2011 after being struck by sea surge blamed on climate change. It is Australia’s worst ever pollution scandal. Imaginable.
* More books appear directly online as feckless publishers become obsessed with their carbon footprint. Inevitable.
* A new generation of paper merchants emerge in south-east Asia, undercutting competitors by illegally chopping down rainforest and making good old paper like in the good old days. Consumers don’t give two sods. A book’s a book, innit. Possible.
* Guide on how to f**k the planet published in late 2008. Readers complain it lacks integrity by being published on recycled paper. Predictable.
Likelihood of forests still being destroyed by book publishers by 2015:43%