Three Answers: John Javna

Three Answers today are from John Javna, whose 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth will be published by Hyperion on Earth Day, April 22

PW: This book is a revision of your original 1989 title, which sold over five million copies; why did you think a new edition was needed?

JJ: I took the book out of print in 1995, because I just didn’t agree with myself any more, that the eco-tips in the book weren’t helpful enough. And I became a little disillusioned—that no many how many of these tips we acted on, it seemed obvious that they weren’t really going to protect the planet’s life support system. I started thinking that it’s not going to make the difference if the culture, the society, isn’t going to commit itself to really turning these things around. And one day my daughter Sophie, who turned 13 last year, asked me how come we didn’t compost any more. We started talking about the meaning of doing small environmentally friendly things, and I suddenly realized that this is simply not acceptable: looking at the future generations that I had only been talking about theoretically in the first book, it simply wasn’t an option to bail out on people like her. If we as parents really love our children, then we have an obligation to do everything we can, and I was not living up to that obligation. It dawned on me that I had to find a way to express how people could be environmentally active without trivializing it. So I gave Sophie and my son Jessie each a copy of the original book and said now we’re all going to figure out how to redo this in a way that really means something.

PW: The new book lists 50 partner organizations, such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation. How and why did you get these groups involved?

JJ: We got to the point where the old 50 things, as important as they are, weren’t adequate. So I thought how can we find an easy entry point to doing things that really matter? Two things struck me. One is that it had to be something that involved a collective energy—it had to be done as a community. The other thing was it had to be an issue—it’s more important for a person to have a sustained, committed effort to achieving something than to randomly perform activities that seem like the right thing. So I thought the book would best serve the long-term goals by connecting individuals who really want to do something with the infrastructure that already exists and are doing this actively. So we decided that each of the 50 things, instead of being a random action, would be a whole issue and that issue would be picked by a group. The environmental groups that are out there are full of dedicated volunteers and professionals who are involved on all levels. We picked a cross-section of the groups that represent the environmental movement—some small, some large, some new, some old—and they in turn picked issues that they thought were important and accessible and that they could help people get committed to.

PW: What do you and your family do to stay involved with these projects?

JJ: We certainly do many of the things that are in the book; but those individual things aren’t what the [new] book’s about. So I’m totally involved now with the coral reef; I’ve chosen that as an issue I’m going to work on, and try to get the right legislation passed so that more marine preserves exist. It’s vitally important that we get politicians in place who understand that this is a life-and-death struggle. We need people with vision and who are committed to making the big decisions, so I’m very involved with the Oregon League of Conservation Voters. Also, we have electric cars, and Sophie has taken that on. The issue is that if we’re going to have electric cars, and we need them for a variety of reasons, we need to lobby—to talk about them and let Congress and the car manufacturers know that this is important to us. My son Jessie’s gotten very wrapped up in the mountaintop removal—companies are blowing the tops off of mountains and destroying vast areas of pristine land in Appalachia. We’ve found things that we care about, and that’s what the book is about: find something that you can get behind and comfortably make a part of your life. And I guess the final thing is that I tell everybody to visit our Web site, 50simplethings.com.