Green publishing

I now have my copy of The Low Carbon Diet, as blogged earlier ... it really is the most user-friendly guidebook to greening your life that I've come across.

I went to an environmental publishing meeting at the last London Book Fair. The chairman, a 'green' publisher, started by asking the audience to raise their hands according to which shade of green they felt themselves to be - none, light or dark, dark being a committed eco-warrior brand of being.

I raised my own hand for 'light green'. The chair, I suspect, would have claimed 'dark green' for himself, though one of his first tales was about driving the motorway in his car. Still owning a car, though I never use it, was one of my own reasons for being shy of the 'dark green' tag.

The big issue of the event was paper, whether it was sustainable or not. Years ago with Harper San Francisco I agreed to surrender part of my royalties to have my book produced on sustainably harvested paper - trees would be planted for those that were used in my book's manufacture. I headed down from my eco-publishing meeting to the Simon & Schuster stand to check on the paper status of my own new book, Suffer & Survive. It is all to be printed on on paper that comes with all due sustainably forested certification. Hooray.

I was impressed on reading The Low Carbon Diet how much green practice I already put into play - stuff that has come into my life automatically. I check the food-miles on all my purchases, for example (why oh why must all beans now be grown in Africa? I'd love to buy beans again - maybe from my local farmer's market). I shower not bathe, hold back on toilet flushing, walk and use public transport, have switched my electricity supplier to Ecotricity, that kind of thing. I'm still searching for the extra pledges I need to make - and did at least just cancel a flight to Italy to save the CO2 addition. Maybe I'll click on to save a flush, install a Hippo in the toilet, and save some extra water that way, as The Low Carbon Diet recommends. And in non-flying terms, they've pointed me to a grand little site which helps steer travellers through the various connections that make travel round the world by train and ship possible, www.seat61.com.

I'm kept up to speed by my partner James Thornton. an environmentalist to his core. He's written the feature article for the June Ecologist magazine which features the work of the new legal / environmental NGO he's set up, ClientEarth. It's the first body set up to enforce and shape environmental legislation throughout the EU. My own role is a shade of William Golding's who gave the name Gaia to James Lovelock's conception of the the Earth as a self-regulating organism (a notion also upheld, years earlier, by the subject of Suffer & Survive, J. S. Haldane). The name ClientEarth came about during a conversation James and I held last summer, walking the beach at Santa Barbara. He had often said of his career as an environmental lawyer that his client was the Earth. The name seems a perfect fit.