When Danny Seo was a third grader, he was assigned to turn an empty plastic detergent bottle into a bird feeder. Recalling the task, Seo said he was the only kid in his class to question the aesthetics of the final product. Seo is now making sure environmentalists everywhere don't have to face ugly bird feeders—or anything else, for that matter—in their goal to be eco-conscious. A 29-year-old who's getting a reputation as the green Martha Stewart, Seo has two books out from HarperCollins this year and his own TV show, Simply Green with Danny Seo(airing on the recently launched green lifestyle channel, Lime TV). In addition, Seo writes a monthly column about green decorating for CountryHome. While Seo may be one of the few personalities building a brand out of green living, his exposure points to something that publishers are beginning to realize: more and more "average Americans" want to know how to go green.
Seo, one of the founding editors of the now-defunct Rodale publication Organic Style, said the green movement has been building for a long time, but has recently taken hold. "I absolutely see a change," he told PW. "It's not a trend so much as a cultural shift, and you just have to look at the way people are buying cars or the long lines at Whole Foods [to recognize it]." Seo, who's Simply Green Parties bowed from Collins in June (with a print run of 50,000) and whose Simply Green Giving (also 50,000 copies) will come out from the imprint in September, said his goal is to teach people that living an environmentally conscious life is about more than being good; it can also be fun. Seo, who teaches in the first book how to make good use of everything from old videotapes (they can become flowery gift bows) to dryer sheets (make them into frosted gift boxes!), is out to show how recycling can become a part of homemaking.
Jennifer Hattam, senior associate editor at Sierra magazine (the publication of the Sierra Club, which also has a book division), said she's also seeing more and more Americans "adopting this idea that the green life can be the good life." Last November the magazine started a section called "The Green Life" focusing on "lifestyle things that are positive, fun and easy." And Hattam, like Seo, sees the interest in green living growing exponentially.
Alice Blackmer, publicity director at Chelsea Green, a Vermont-based indie that has been releasing niche titles on a variety of green topics for more than 20 years, said, until recently, not as many people were paying attention to topics about green living. "When we did The Straw Bale House a dozen years ago, it was pooh-poohed... but we've sold 145,000 copies. I think a lot of people thought that this was just a bunch of hippies playing out in the mud, but now top architects are doing [green building] and it's much more on people's radar."
Blackmer is so confident in the growing interest in green lifestyles that she continues to promote the idea of starting a section dedicated to the topic in bookstores. "I think it could really help booksellers," she said. "I'm sure that people interested in organic gardening would also grab titles about solar power and alternative sources of energy."
Certainly the market for and interest in green building—i.e., construction that relies on environmentally sound materials and produces more energy-efficient homes—is taking off. Jay Hall, a consultant to the U.S. Green Building Council, said more and more consumers are attuned to the existence of green building than ever before.
"Green building has been around for over 10 years in certain parts of the country," Hall noted. "But only recently have I seen the general awareness of it start to get a real buzz in the marketplace; it helps that in the last six months there's been a huge amount of coverage of it from the media." Hall said he thinks people are starting to realize there's a connection between leading a healthier life and choosing what kind of flooring you'll have in your kitchen.
Blackmer, who has The Green Self-Buildcoming out from Chelsea in November, thinks interest in green building is also rising because more Americans are facing the realities of living with more heavily polluted air.
Books like Gibbs Smith's January 2006 title It's Easy Being Green (now in its third printing) and Abrams's massive green guide, scheduled for January 2007, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century, are looking at the green lifestyle from the bottom up. Both books offer tips on how to live a more eco-friendly and -conscious existence. Michael Jacobs, CEO and president of Abrams, said he wanted to add to the global discussion about the environment, and to "make a contribution in the area of publishing," after the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia last December. Worldchanging—which grew out of a comprehensive Web site of the same name about the environment—is intended to guide people on every aspect of green living.
With categories that range from "You" to "Business," the book is a hefty 592-page cornucopia of information on what being green means and how to do it. As Deborah Aaronson, who edited Worldchanging, explained, sounding much like Seo, the book tackled the topic from the assumption that people no longer look down their noses at the subject. "There has been a cultivated assumption for the last 20 years that living green was punitive. You couldn't be fashionable or eat well or live in a beautiful home. That's changed. You don't have to wear Birkenstocks, eat tofu and dress in hemp in order to live a life that's good for the environment."
That books on green shopping and cleaning will be bowing from major houses later this year—DK's Rough Guides imprint will release The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Consciencein January; Simon & Schuster has just announced a series of books about green living from Deirdre Imus (wife of Don) with the first, scheduled for April 2007, being Green This! Vol. 1: Green Your Cleaning—confirms Aaronson's notion that the image of environmentalists as a small faction of Birkenstock-wearing activists is changing. And publishers are clued in. As Jacobs emphatically noted: "Green is not fringe anymore. Green is mainstream."
