Beacon Broadside

Beacon Broadside is pleased to introduce today’s guest blogger, Kelly McMasters, the author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, which was recently released by fellow independent publisher PublicAffairs. 

As my husband and I watched the Earth Day news coverage of schoolchildren packing soil around flowers and seedlings in dirt lots last week, we cringed at the rows of plastic planters left in their wake. So many well-intentioned moves toward sustainability or earth-friendly practices end up like this, it seems.

My first book, an environmental memoir about my blue-collar hometown on the east end of Long Island, was released on April 21, the day before Earth Day, which seemed fitting to me. And since my book, deals with environmental issues—in this case, the physical along with the psychological effects a federal nuclear facility has had on my hometown of Shirley, and the radioactive waste that will be sitting next door to the town for more than 300,000 years (longer than Long Island has even existed)—I realized I had an opportunity to see how I could inject some green into the often wasteful process of publication in an effort to not leave behind my own proverbial plastic planters.

The first thing I did was to hook up with NativeEnergy,
a group that helps companies and individuals offset their carbon
emissions. They emailed me a worksheet that helped calculate the carbon
I’d be producing during my book tour. When making travel plans, I opted
to take trains instead of airplanes, stay with friends rather than use
hotels, and take public transportation within cities whenever possible,
which also significantly lowered my impact. You can choose to direct
your offsets to projects as disparate as low-impact hydropower
facilities in Montana, wind turbines in Colorado, and the largest solar
array in New Hampshire; I chose a methane project on a family-owned
dairy farm nearby by home in rural Pennsylvania.

Next, I followed a mention on treehugger.com to a company called Eco-Libris.
Clicking through to the company’s website, I saw the messages: Moving
towards sustainable reading. Balance out your books now.  According to
the site, about 20 million trees are cut down every year to produce
virgin paper for the books sold in the United States. Personally, I
can’t stand reading books on electronic media, but these numbers were
astounding, and I found myself considering the Kindle for the first time. I felt incredibly conflicted about participating in the destruction of more trees through my upcoming book.

Eco-Libris offers authors a chance to collaborate through a series
of possibilities. Since the first run of my book had already been
produced, it was too late to work together with my publisher and
Eco-Libris to stamp each book cover with their green seal and plant a
tree for every book, which is one option they offer. Instead, I decided
to purchase stickers, which are available at 80 cents a pop and promise
a planted tree per sticker. Currently, Eco-Libris works with three
planting partners active in Malawi, Africa and Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua,
and other places in Central America, all of which are subject to
non-profit reporting. I’m also working to include Eco-Libris in the
sales process for my nonfiction reading series at the KGB Bar. Bookstores in the city like the Strand have also joined in.

I don’t have much clout as a first-time author (I couldn’t exactly
demand the pages of my books contain a certain percentage of
post-consumer material). But I tried to apply the environmental lessons
I’ve learned about small changes—a light bulb here, a reusable bag
there—making big impacts inspire me. So far, I’ve handed out 50
stickers as gifts to my friends who bought the book. That’s 50 trees
somewhere in the world that will continue to grow even as the books
themselves begin to collect dust. Instead of imagining the trees
sacrificed for the story each time I pass a bookstore, I’ll take
comfort in my little Shirley forest.

Kelly McMasters’ carbon-offset book tour will take her to the Pilcrow Litfest in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend. Check out other stops on Kelly’s blog tour at: largeheartedboy.com and The Blue Marble Blog at Mother Jones Magazine.