Niccolò Ammaniti

It isn't difficult to be in a state of complete awareness in a crisis and to do absolutely nothing, it is something masochistic and beautifully pleasing. Your woman cheats on you with your best friend, but you calmly put up with it, you pretend not to notice because doing something means changing the pre-agreed arrangement and this implies hard work. The secret to remaining motionless despite unfavourable external conditions is simple: stop raising your own threshold of endurability, stop convincing yourself that in the end the stench isn't too disgusting and that even if the building vibrates, the dishes crash to the ground, your wife dies under a beam, all of this isn't a real earthquake and you can quietly go back to bed again.

Rather than acting, it is better to delay, to find a system in order to adapt to the new situation. So when one day Greenpeace rang me to point out to me that by publishing my books on environmentally unfriendly paper, I risked deforesting the last thousand-year-old forests on the planet, I put down the phone, I sat down at my writing desk and I looked to do 2 things: 1) the least possible, 2) help an environmental cause.

After a while, I found the ideal solution: write less. Perfect. If instead of writing one 300 page book a year I write one 70 page book every 3 years, I will have done something good  and should I become a champion for the environment instead of for novels, I would be able to write poetry or even microscopic Haiku and everyone would say  that I am a good person. I knew that I had finally found a decisive criteria in order to examine literature: the very best writers were the ones that wrote less. Therefore for some poems the Italian writer Baricco was one of the biggest authors of all time given that with 'Seta' he had written 60 small narrow pages. And Ungaretti, the greatest representative of Hermiticism? A genius. Dante Alighieri and Omero? Among the worst authors in the history of humanity. And Proust? Let's forget about him.

I dwelled on this new critical view of literature for a while and then I rang my editor, Paolo Repetti, telling him that the next book would have been lengthened by including 12 pages of thank-yous. My good old friend Paolo nearly had a heart attack, he began to insult me but I was firm, I didn't give up. Eventually as well as making me write a 300 page novel, he agreed to print the book on environmentally friendly paper (recycled, with a high percentage of post-consumer fibres). So, in the end, I have become one of the first writers in Italy to publish eco-friendly novels. In the end it hasn't been too difficult and there are another 10 authors as well as myself in Italy today who have committed themselves to doing as much.

A little goes a long way after all. Use your own resources to obtain something that is necessary and deeply just. If the readers who show an appreciation of the planet that accommodates them, were to unite with the writers in this battle of paper, the publishers would take Greenpeace's initiative seriously, if not for the appreciation of nature, then purely for the appreciation of the economy.