While I may lack the long flowing hair and the preference for tie-dye, I am still a hippie at heart. Apart from a fondness for The Grateful Dead and sandals, hippies have long been the de facto symbol for the environmental movement, until recently, that is, when being green became a chic and trendy thing to do. But the point of this column is not to climb back up onto my soapbox to decry the lazy, consumer-driven environmentalism which has become so pre-eminent in American society as of late. No, this editorial is more of a mea culpa of sorts. You see, I’ve been harboring a dark secret, a paradox of action and opinion which would seem to undercut my holier-than-thou tirades upon which I embark. I own a Hummer H3 and I love it!

OK, not really. My crimes against nature are not quite so egregious as to sit behind the wheel of one of those monstrosities. What I do own, though, are large numbers of books. Books printed on paper, from trees. So it turns out I’ve been hugging trees while I let other people cut them down, grind them up and tattoo words onto them. Sarcastic writing aside, according to The Green Press Initiative, about 30 million trees a year are cut down to produce books sold in the U.S. The newspaper industry is also an obvious culprit as well, consuming 95 million trees last year. All these statistics lead to one very obvious conclusion – it’s high time that the print industries embraced recycling.

And indeed, the industries – booksellers, publishers, mills, printers and others – have already begun to move in the direction of a more environmentally responsible industry-wide set of standards. The Green Press Initiative has collaborated with more than 25 stakeholders to deveslop a Book Industry Treaty on Responsible Paper Use, which among others things seeks to shift the industry’s collective average of recycled fiber from an estimated 5 percent to 30 percent by 2012. The Treaty also seeks to move at least 20 percent of the industry’s paper usage to Forest Steward Council-certified paper by 2012.

Movement is also being made from the consumer side of the equation. Organizations such as Eco-Libris allow for concerned bibliophiles to offset their own personal libraries with the planting of trees. For less than a dollar a tree, Eco-Libris works to reforest damaged areas as well as working with Web sites such as Chegg, a textbook rental site, to plant a tree for each book rented. In addition to offsetting your own book-buying, there are a growing number of Web sites designed to facilitate book-swapping and trading in an effort to reduce the number of new books being purchased.

It is precisely such concepts as being aware of how seemingly innocuous aspects of our lives can be affecting the world around us that is at the heart of the new environmental movement. While patchouli, tie-dye and Phish are all well and good, the Green Movement has progressed beyond its anti-establishment, counter-culture beginnings. True environmentalism must be, and is becoming, interwoven within the larger social framework. Ecological awareness is becoming, and must continue to be, an issue which permeates all aspects of our life on this planet. Regardless of the technological breakthroughs we might make, of the developments which might allow for a “better” and “easier” life, regardless of how much chemistry can improve our lives, we cannot forget our roots. While we can control and influence our environment, we are sustained by this planet; it is still the supporting force of our existence.

There is a groundswell of increased environmental awareness, shown through this change in the social consciousness – this understanding that every aspect of our lives affects the environment, and a majority of the time, a positive change can be accomplished with minimal work.

This is perhaps the Internet’s most persuasive tool for change: that it allows people a greater ability to pay other people to care, which is for better or worse how Americans get things done. We pay people to vote for us, to entertain us and to save the planet for us. The most important idea is to simply realize that we can do something, whether it’s buying a used book, trading through a Web site or paying someone to plant a tree as a requiem for all those killed so that you could own the Harry Potter series.

– Quincy Miller is a senior in English from Altoona.