Background - July 5, 2005
It can take a long time from being aware of a problem and deciding to do something to solve it.Drawing on personal experience, I have often been bothered by the stench of the rubbish bin for whole days before deciding that it was time to take the bin out, go down 5 flights of stairs and empty it in the skip.
Ancient forest threatened by industrial logging to make cheap copy paper and magazines.
It isn't difficult to be in a stateof complete awareness in a
crisis and to do absolutely nothing, it issomething masochistic and
beautifully pleasing. Your woman cheats onyou with your best
friend, but you calmly put up with it, you pretendnot to notice
because doing something means changing the pre-agreedarrangement
and this implies hard work. The secret to remainingmotionless
despite unfavourable external conditions is simple: stopraising
your own threshold of endurability, stop convincing yourselfthat in
the end the stench isn't too disgusting and that even if
thebuilding vibrates, the dishes crash to the ground, your wife
dies undera beam, all of this isn't a real earthquake and you can
quietly go backto bed again.
Rather than acting, it is better to delay, to find a system in
order toadapt to the new situation. So when one day Greenpeace rang
me to pointout to me that by publishing my books on environmentally
unfriendlypaper, I risked deforesting the last thousand-year-old
forests on theplanet, I put down the phone, I sat down at my
writing desk and Ilooked to do 2 things: 1) the least possible, 2)
help an environmentalcause.
After a while, I found the ideal solution: write less. Perfect.
Ifinstead of writing one 300 page book a year I write one 70 page
bookevery 3 years, I will have done something good and should
Ibecome a champion for the environment instead of for novels, I
would beable to write poetry or even microscopic Haiku and everyone
wouldsay that I am a good person. I knew that I had finally found
adecisive criteria in order to examine literature: the very best
writerswere the ones that wrote less. Therefore for some poems the
Italianwriter Baricco was one of the biggest authors of all time
given thatwith 'Seta' he had written 60 small narrow pages. And
Ungaretti, thegreatest representative of Hermiticism? A genius.
Dante Alighieri andOmero? 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 thenI rang my editor, Paolo Repetti, telling him that the next
book wouldhave been lengthened by including 12 pages of thank-yous.
My good oldfriend Paolo nearly had a heart attack, he began to
insult me but I wasfirm, I didn't give up. Eventually as well as
making me write a 300page novel, he agreed to print the book on
environmentally friendlypaper (recycled, with a high percentage of
post-consumer fibres). So,in the end, I have become one of the
first writers in Italy to publisheco-friendly novels. In the end it
hasn't been too difficult and thereare another 10 authors as well
as myself in Italy today who havecommitted themselves to doing as
much.
A little goes a long way after all. Use your own resources to
obtainsomething that is necessary and deeply just. If the readers
who show anappreciation of the planet that accommodates them, were
to unite withthe writers in this battle of paper, the publishers
would takeGreenpeace's initiative seriously, if not for the
appreciation ofnature, then purely for the appreciation of the
economy.