planting a tree

The extinction of a tree species from an area means the loss of tens of thousands of different ways of being in the world. The particular curvature of its limbs, casting the movement of the squirrel or the myna into a different melody; the unique way its leaf pattern creates patches of light, and variously blurred umbra and penumbra, affecting soil conditions and tendencies towards certain understory species; the biochemical orchestra of the plant drawing out nutritional, allelopathic, medicinal interactions out of all those around it~ this is just a small sample of what is gained in novelty by planting a single tree into an area that no longer harbours that species. We, who tend to view conceptual and emotional differences as strongly as we do physical ones, feel the death of another human being as extinction as well. The environment will never be the same without the multilayered song that that person brought into the world invariably by their simply day to day existence.

a publishing house

A publishing house recently asked me if I would be interested in publishing my Master’s thesis in the form of a book through them. After firing a few emails at them, I’ve ascertained the following facts: 1) they will print of FSC paper, 2) I will retain the rights to segments as large as 80% of the text, 3) they have multiple printing sites and print to order as close to the order destination as possible (to reduce their carbon footprint, they tell me), 4) they attempt to produce the books for as cheap as possible in order to make academic documents more widely available.

Should I agree? FSC paper is not recycled (does this matter?) and I haven’t really looked into whether or not it truly is “sustainably harvested”. It has met with some criticism regarding its monitoring but has responded conscientiously. The print to order idea is a good one, but a problem is that those digital books are often hard to read. I guess my main concern though is with the copyright issue. Do I want to hand over what I’ve written to a company in this way? Of course, compared to most publishers, retaining the rights of up to 80% of the text is considered huge (I guess that is the reward I’d get for them not giving any of the profits to me?). But it still means that I am willing to be compliant with copyright laws. The book would now be purchasable through Amazon, which means that its exposure would increase, but is this the only way of increasing exposure? Couldn’t I just upload a pdf of the writing onto this blog or some other site for others to download for free? One interesting fact I’ve recently gleaned from our e-discussions is that I am free to edit the writing before they publish it. I could then potentially just add 20% gibberish onto the end of it so that I could still send free copies of the original to whoever I wanted (but then again, now that I think of it, the last 20% of it was gibberish anyways). But then again this: do I even care about exposure? I haven’t made even the simplest steps to try and “spread my message” up to now. I haven’t sent it to any of my friends or family unless they’ve expressly asked for it. Am I hoping that I may circumvent the immodesty of imposing this document on those who’ve never expressed interest in it by making it a (private) public document available through whatever search engines? Possibly. Maybe I would even hope to gain legitimacy by having it available through such institutions: because then all those family members and friends that never cared to ask for it might suddenly be shaked into interest. But another concern: so many of my preoccupations during that time seem outdated now. It doesn’t take much for me to poke holes through them. Why would I want to present in such a formal way that which was only a temporary process?