‘It’s the call of the wild.’

By the end of this year over half the world’s population* will be, for the first time, living in towns and cities.

For most of us in the West we have long accustomed ourselves to the idea that splitting with the rural in favour of an affair with the urban makes for a more exciting life. Like crazed moths we are drawn towards the hot, flashing lights. Merrily, we continue to cover the earth in blankets of houses connected by knots and loops of asphalt ribbon, put up tower blocks to hide the hills, plug up rivers with slabs of concrete, and generally behave as if nature was a bloody inconvenience.

Aren’t we silly?

I’d like to say that we’re beginning to see the error of our ways. But even now that green is the new black – I mean even the Tories have replaced their burning torch symbol with a scribble of a tree – we prove reluctant to get in touch with nature. This isn’t just a shame but looks rather short-sighted since the best way to understand what effects our activities are having on the world is to get out there and take a good look.

What’s that I hear? No, listen carefully. I do believe someone or something is calling us . . .

Perhaps there is something in the air, but here at Penguin we suddenly find ourselves publishing, over the next seven months, eight books on the subject of the wild world. From May (yes, yes, I should have posted this last month, I’m running late, sorry and all that) through to November we have a book a month – two in October – which delves into a particular aspect of the wonderfully various lives of nature. These are books that not only tell us but show what we’re missing.

We got quite excited about this. In particular Rosie did and came up with the idea of Call of the Wild. This is a web page on penguin.co.uk where each month you can read an extract from the featured book and also discover some exclusive material on the author or the book itself. It might be a podcast, a Q&A, a new piece of writing. You’ll just have to check back regularly and find out.

So what are the eight titles?

May is Wild by Jay Griffiths; June is Wildwood by the late Roger Deakin; July is Britain and Ireland’s Best Wild Places by Christopher Somerville; August is Wild Trees by Richard Preston; September is Out of the Blue by Chris Yates; October’s are Hugh’s Hedgehog by Hugh Warwick and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin; and in November we’ll have Consider the Birds by Colin Tudge.

I’ve never forgotten Gary Larson‘s Far Side cartoon where a moose wearing curlers is handing a telephone to another moose – her partner/husband? – who is sitting in an armchair looking surprised. She is saying to him: ‘It’s the call of the wild.’ Still makes me chuckle. No doubt it loses something in my translation of Larson’s picture into words.

There are no such shortcomings with these authors. They write and you are transported, finding yourself deep in the wild places of the world. It’s the next best thing to being there, which, unfortunately, is the closest most of us will get.

Check out Call of the Wild now.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

* I mean, of course, the human population.

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Let’s hear it for a bit of old-fashioned craft

So I was washing the dishes a while back and the radio was on – no wait, let me provide some context …

My boss sent me to Applied Green two weeks ago. What? You know, green things (they’re the new black if you’re the kind of person always in search of the next black) done practically. Basically, this was a conference where a bunch of business doers and thinkers – David Hieatt from Howies, Marc Sands from the Guardian, Eugenie Harvey, conference stalwart Russell Davies and others – told delegates that thinking green as a business wasn’t good enough any longer. We drones in firms need to act green and – this is the bad news – do it yesterday.

I won’t preach at you or bore you with stats (something the Applied Green speakers avoided), but I will say that the conference was scary. Scary terrifying. You see the climate change debate is over. Green is not just about global warming or damage to the planet. It’s about sustainability. About what we’re going to leave behind for future generations. Take cod. In the North Sea overfishing has caused a perilous decline in stocks to the point where many scientists say it will never recover. No more cod in the North Sea. Yet the fishermen resent, complain about and get around the few restrictions which ensure there are some stocks left for them to fish in years to come. Madness? Then what about the rest of us. Throughout the 20th century we’ve been treating the world like we treat our cod (I don’t mean covering it in batter and lobbing it in the deep fat fryer – mmm … planet and chips) – I mean plundering it in expectation that it will forever renew itself as if it was some magical porridge pot. Everyone from me and you to global publishing houses are soon going to have to act in a way that does not have a deleterious effect on tomorrow. (Okay, I lied about the not preaching, but really once you look into this stuff you’d have to be some kind of nincompoop petrolhead not to get evangelical.)

What I liked about this conference was encapsulated in a line from – and I don’t quite believe I’m going to write this – Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film The Eleventh Hour. ‘What a great time to be born. What a great time to be alive. Because this generation gets to completely change the world …’ Why? Because, whether we like it or not, we are about to reverse half a millennium (in the west at least) devoted to MORE: more choice, more product, more power, more consumption, more us. Because more can’t continue indefinitely. We all need to change. We need to think about LESS. Less plunder, less product, less consuming, less waste. Of course, in any sales department less is a very dirty word.

Which leads me back to washing my dishes and the radio. I was listening to Radio 4’s In Business. The programme was devoted to the subject of craft. They were talking about how companies in pursuit of profit and pleasing their share holders can easily forget the very people their business aims to serve i.e. those who provide its income: the customer. They cited M&S in the ’90s as an example of a firm that forgot it was supplying good quality merchandise to its customers and instead focussed on profitability and share price. The result? It’s customers deserted in droves and the company had to spend several years rebuilding its reputation. Richard Sennett argued that firms had to return to the old-fashioned idea of craft. Craft means being creative, being very good at something and this satisfies two key groups: the staff and the customers. The staff enjoy the creative challenge of producing their best work (instead of being mere money-drones) while the customers will queue up to enjoy the fruits of their labours.

Applied Green got me wondering whether better craft might just mean fewer but better books. (The book industry continues to churn out year on year more new books than ever before.) Which means the old book trade mantra of pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap isn’t going to cut it in a green future. Publishers are now printing books on FSC accredited paper i.e. the trees cut down are from well-managed forests. But it would be preferable not to be carting around the world so many bits of dead wood. Among the various madnesses that possessed the human race in the 20th century, our rampant consumerism is perhaps the one that future generations will look back on with most perplexity. Why did they need so much low-quality stuff? Why didn’t they demand less stuff that was simply better-made and longer-lasting?

Aren’t the best books the ones that we re-read or lend to our friends?

Colin Brush, Senior Copywriter

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Trains, Planes and Book fairs

I am writing this on the plane back from Frankfurt.  Having made a somewhat fleeting visit of 36 hours, I hold my hand up and admit to being a Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) lightweight.  A plane journey is always a good time to reflect especially when, in my case, I have forgotten my book.

The last time I visited FBF was back in 1997 when (pre-Penguin) I worked in international sales so FBF was the highlight, or lowlight depending on your viewpoint, of my year.  Five days of back-to-back meetings with customers and agents meant that I inevitably returned to the UK with the start of a cold and a sore head.  Ten years on, I was keen to see how much the event might have developed given the scorching pace of change during that time.  And my conclusion?  Not a lot.  It is still the same vast space beavering with activity with its somewhat paltry food offering (though I was taken with the introduction of Mövenpick ice-cream trolleys) and I am relieved that the smoking policy has been updated since my last visit.  The Penguin stand is still vast and impressive (though, I admit that this time I might be biased). I am also struck by the same question: do all these people really work in publishing?

So, despite the huge technological advances (back in 1997 I used to fax my handwritten orders back to the office), most of us still see the need, and indeed value, of attending the world’s largest book fair.  And, it isn’t just because people can meet face-to-face to discuss business, it’s also that they can share a beer or two at the end of a long hard day. Social networking sites may be able to help us find long-lost friends but there isn’t yet a cyber equivalent to match that personal social interaction.  I find this somewhat comforting in the same way that I felt when I heard that an online textbook company in the US had started to issue ‘scratch and sniff’ stickers to students who admitted to a yearning for the smell of a musty textbook.  I guess that makes me old fashioned.

The other thing that strikes me about the sheer volume of people who travel around the world – and in some cases, across it – to attend FBF is the impact of our choice to do so.  Other than an enlightened few, not many of us back in 1997 would have worried about the carbon output of our journey to Frankfurt.  These days, we are overwhelmed with stories about global warming and the consequences of human behaviour yet we still choose, in the main, to fly.

I attended the Bookseller green seminar back in May.  One of the speakers was Alastair Sawday (of whose guide books I am a huge fan).  Alastair is well-known for his environmental campaigning and, when asked what the publishing industry could do to play their part, he responded simply: take the train to Frankfurt.  (You can read about Alastair’s train ride to Frankfurt in today’s Publishing News FBF Daily.)  I nodded my head along with many others but didn’t follow it up.  But when I do a quick back of an airplane napkin calculation and tot up that the carbon footprint of this single event is likely to be around 130,000 tonnes (see rough calculation below), probably equivalent to the annual footprint of a global company, I am ashamed. 

So why didn’t I get the train?  I told myself that I couldn’t justify the time out of the office or away from home.  Truth is, I could have just as easily worked on the train and would have had a much more pleasant experience along the way.  We publishing companies (and indeed all companies) need to do more to encourage – yes encourage, not just tolerate – our employees taking the extra time to travel by train (which, by Alastair’s calculations isn’t far off the time it takes to fly) because it will cost us a lot less in the long run – and we’re not talking Euros.  So, the campaign for 2008 starts here: take the train to Frankfurt.

Rough carbon footprint calculation of FBF:

Assume 300,000 attendees in 2007 (286,000 in 2006), 50,000 from within Germany: assume 50% fly on a typical flight from Dusseldorf to Frankfurt which measures 0.08 tonnes (25,000 x 0.08 = 2,000)

200,000 from outside Germany but within Europe: assume 75% fly on a typical flight of London to Frankfurt which measures 0.17 tonnes (150,000 x 0.17 = 25,500)

50,000 long-haul visitors: assume 100% fly on a typical flight of New York to Frankfurt which measures 1.73 tonnes (50,000 x 1.73 = 86,500)

All air flights = 114,000 tonnes. Add car trips, train journeys, energy at Buchmesse and hotels takes total to approximately 130,000 tonnes.

Rebecca Sinclair, Corporate Communications Manager

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