Ecocentricity Blog: We Should Start a Book Club!

What is the greatest invention of all time? Reasonable people could disagree. Strong submissions include the internal combustion engine for its disruption in transportation and industry, vaccinations for their public health benefits, and the computer or internet for their impact on everything from data storage to global communications.

I would respectfully disagree with advocates for each of these, however. I would argue that, but for one other technological innovation, none of these would have been developed. Moreover, this innovation had an immediate and radical impact on society from the moment it was created. My vote for greatest invention goes to Johannes Gutenberg and his mechanical, moving type printing press.

Gutenberg’s new thingamajig dramatically reduced the amount of time required to create a book, allowing the printed word to expand rapidly across the globe. More books meant that more people could access them. Access to books represents access to the knowledge contained therein, so I would argue that the printing press was a necessary invention for mass-education to become possible. I would further argue that advanced inventions like those listed above do not happen without broad societal access to education.

The printing press turns 579 years old this year. Quite a run! Yet here we are today seeing the literal printed word die out. The digital age is upon us, and with it comes the obsolescence of physical books.

But whether it’s from a sense of being nostalgic or old-fashioned, I’m not ready to see the end of page-turners. I still choose physical books over digital ones, and I bet I’m not alone. Yes, I know that the environmental footprint of a digital book is smaller, so call it a guilty pleasure. I still think books are worth celebrating, so that’s what we are doing!

Really, it was Lisa Lilienthal’s idea. She was Ray’s longtime publicist, and she continues to be a great friend and advisor to us at the Foundation, helping us with messaging and our communications. After seeing that I planned to write about Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (last week’s blog), she said, “We should start a book club!”

So we did. You’ll see it plugged in the quarterly newsletter that goes out this week, but I also wanted to splash a few words on it here as well. As we continue to learn more and more about environmental sustainability, we will update this page with new good reads, and I’ll write a blog post each time to announce it. It’s my hope that you’ll be inspired to read them yourselves.

Whether you prefer digital or physical books, I hope we can all agree how important it is to always keep learning!

Ray Anderson's 1994 epiphany began when he read The Ecology of Commerce. Here are some other titles we suggest. Welcome to our Book Club