by Jeremy Wiggins
I decided to do a little experiment on "Green" authors. Here is a Top 10 Green Book List.
Hot, Flat, Crowded - Thomas Friedeman - 448 pages
Hope on a Tightrope - Cornel West - 246 pages
Natural Capitalism - Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins - 416 pages
The Green Collar Economy - Van Jones - 272 pages
Cradle to Cradle - William Mcdonough, Michael Braungart - 193 pages
Exposed - Mark Shapiro - 224 pages
The Thrive Diet - Brenda Brazier - 309 pages
The Green Parent - Jenn Savedge - 204 pages
Go Green, Live Rich - David Bach, Hillary Rosner - 192 pages
My Stroke of Insight - Jill Bolt Taylor - 192 pages
http://greencottonblog.com/2008/12/top-green-books-2009/
= 2,696 pages of Pro-Eco Anti-Human Propaganda
You'll notice that I placed the number of pages in the books next to the authors.
Now, we get 500 pages in a ream of paper.
1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses .6 trees
So 10 reams is 5000 sheets of paper. So if all of these books sold 1 copy than we would have used .03 % of one whole tree. But we know that they didn't sell one copy each. My extensive research that I conducted (i.e. Google) has told me that the average book sells anywhere from 3,000 - 7,000 copies. So let us go in the middle at 5,000 copies. Now this is a conservative figure, mind you, because it doesn't factor in if any of the books sold MORE or LESS. For example, if a book was a bestseller, than obviously it would have sold more than 5,000 copies.
So there are 10 books @ 5,000 copies = 50,000 copies.
50,000 copies @ 2,696 pages = 134,800,000 pages of paper.
See where I am going with this yet?
134,800,000 pages divided by 500 = 269,600 Reams of Paper.
So, I punch all this into my little calculator and come up with the following conclusion:
~16,176 Trees are DEAD!
Even if you use recycled paper:
1 ton (40 cartons) of 30% postconsumer content copier paper saves 7.2 trees
(http://www.conservatree.org/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml)
I'm not doing that math, but you get the point. Now, why don't all of these authors refuse to put these books in print? With the technology of E-Books, they could literally SAVE trees for their books. Of course, they really only care about trees dying if they are being used to print another kind of paper, the DOLLAR.
