April 22 is Earth Day. Appropriately enough the Santa Monica Public Library and the City of Santa Monica’s Environmental Programs Division is sponsoring a new literary award that aims to ”commend authors, illustrators, and publishers who produce quality books for adults and young people that make significant contributions to, support the ideas of, and broaden public awareness of sustainability”. The Green Prize for Sustainable Literature will be awarded in September 2007 in the categories of adult fiction, adult nonfiction, youth fiction and  youth nonfiction.

Books published in the United States during the 2006 calendar year are eligible for the prize but publishers must hurry to submit their candidates as the deadline is April 30! And this means you, Abrams publicists! One book that sprang immediately to mind as an excellent candidate in the nonfiction adult category is Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21 Century (Abrams, 2006).

Edited by environmentalist  Alex Stephens of the popular blog worldchanging.com, ”this beautifully designed volume (which comes with its own slipcover)”, as LJ reviewer editor Irwin Weintraub raved in a LJ Xpress review last December, “collects ideas and workable solutions from more than 60 contributors that demonstrate the human potential to create a better future and a sustainable planet.” 

While this volume meets the the prize’s basic sustainability criteria (future and long-term oriented, awareness of ecological and resource limitations, regional and global in scope,etc.), the sponsors of this award  strangely forgot to include sustainable requirements for the nominees’ physical production, such as  requesting that a certain percentage of the submitted title  be printed on recycled paper or on paper that comes from environmentally managed forests (see “Harry Potter Goes Green”). Fortunately, Worldchanging is ahead of the game, having been printed on environmentally friendly  New Leaf Paper. And the publisher went one step further by purchasing wind power credits equivalent to the amount of electricity used to produce the book.

As our own Michael Rogers reports in today’s book news, “Scholastic Orders Record-Breaking Printing“, the publisher is printing a jaw-dropping 12 million copies of J.K. Rowling’s seventh and final series title, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That’s a lot of paper, 22 million pounds of paper, to be exact. But environmentally concerned Potter fans worried about devastated forests can relax. Reuters reports that Scholastic Corp, in collaboration with the Rainforest Alliance, will ensure that 65 percent of the 16,700 tons of paper used to print the book will be Forest Stewardship Council paper, which comes from socially and environmentally managed forests. To date, this is the largest purchase of FSC-certified paper for a single printing.

This coming May marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of author Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the public to the dangers of pesticides and helped lay the groundwork for the modern U.S. environmental movement.

Carson began her writing and science career in 1936 at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (today the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service). In honor of the Service’s most famous employee, the Friends of the National Conservation Training Center is launching the Rachel Carson Online Book Club. Starting March 1 and running through November 2007, participants will study Carson’s life and works. Each month features a guest moderator who will also offer his or her own comments on the text under discussion. Moderators include Carson biographer Linda Lear (Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature), Houghton Mifflin executive editor Deanne Urmy, and Cindy Van Dover, marine biologist and director of the Duke Marine Laboratory.

Besides Silent Spring, other Carson books to be discussed include Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, A Sense of Wonder, and Always Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, as well as a forthcoming anthology edited by Peter Matthiessen, Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin, April 2007).

And if you want more Carson-related books to consider for a reading display or a book club, check out Priscilla Coit Murphy’s What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of “Silent Spring“, Jim Lynch’s novel The Highest Tide, and The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement, a new biography by Mark H. Lytle. Both Lynch and Lytle will be moderators on the online book club.

It’s official. The ninth planet in our solar system is no more. Today in Prague the International Astronomers Union stripped Pluto of its planetary status, noting that the tiny celestial object did not meet new guidelines required to join the now exclusive club of eight ”classical” planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Already second-graders and other Plutonian fans are mourning Pluto’s fate. “I just can’t stand by and watch as the solar system’s Fat Girl gets pushed down into ever-more ignominious substrata of social ostracism”, writes NYTimes op-ed contributer Tim Kreiger. The reclassification also raises the interesting question of whether libraries will toss out their astronomy books, or at least tear out the Pluto chapter.

But, as they say, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings. Coming in January from Princeton University Press is Vanderbilt University astronomy professor David W. Weintraub’s Is Pluto a Planet? A Historical Journey through the Solar System, which traces the history of how ”planet” has been defined over the centuries. ”Our author would actually beg to differ with the IAU’s decision, ” writes Weintraub’s editor in an email to LJ. “Weintraub says that Pluto IS a planet—and not just a minor planet either. He argues that Ceres, Vesta, Pluto, and Sedna should all be called planets, and that in fact, the solar system has more than 20 planets!  But these objects are all more than just planets.  Pluto is a planet and a Plutino and a Kuiper Belt Object.  According to Weintraub, it’s unsatisfactory to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution, since there is a veritable zoo of different kinds of planets actually out there. Acknowledging this will give us a better sense for the reality of a complex and nuanced universe.” —Wilda Willams