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About This Issue
The Story Behind Our New Look
By Kathleen O'Toole, Editor
As a kid in 1920s Chicago, Gabriel Almond and his friends hung out summers on the beaches of Lake Michigan. They loved the clean sand, but they also took pride in the air quality.
“We saw the floating slag of ashes arriving from the steel mills in South Chicago and Gary, and we thought, ‘that’s progress,’” Almond told me with a grin and a shake of his head one day in 1993. He was then an 82-year-old professor emeritus of political science at Stanford, well aware of the downsides of the industrial revolution.
That image of youth standing in awe of belching factories comes to mind whenever I find myself trying to be an environmentally conscious manager of this organization. What do our readers and the population at large expect of us today, and what will they expect tomorrow? To be forward thinking, it seems to me, you have to appreciate both history and new knowledge that come along regularly to reinvent the future.
In the new-knowledge category, I recall my own teenage years in the 1960s. Arriving home from school one day, I found Grandmother O’Toole reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Looking up from the book, she asked me if I had heard any birds on my walk home. I shrugged my shoulders, I suppose. She said that she had been missing the birds singing for a long time, but until Carson’s book she had not realized their decline might be attributable to DDT, a chemical her son, my father, was using on our farm.
Since Carson, many others have brought us new evidence for alarm. My predecessors at this magazine had the foresight to switch from petroleum-based inks to ones made from soybeans once the risks to the environment and health were clearer. History tells us no organization can rest on its laurels.
When you picked up this issue of the magazine, did you notice that it looks and feels different? My colleague Arthur Patterson recently went shopping for paper that would use fewer trees. The trend among responsible publishers is to use paper that prints well with the least new wood and greatest amount of recycled content, especially post-consumer waste, as opposed simply to recycled material from print overruns. At this time, the best match to our needs was paper from Italy. But when we thought about the greenhouse gases created by transporting paper for 26,000 magazines from Italy, we decided instead to press North American manufacturers to do better.
This issue is printed on papers that are, on average, 58 percent from post-consumer-recycled material. Our estimates, based on the Paper Task Force in which the Environmental Defense Fund participates, are that we used 111 fewer trees than on the last issue. In addition the paper production used 38,796 fewer gallons of water and 71 fewer British thermal units of energy. It created 5,291 fewer pounds of solid waste and 9,587 fewer pounds of greenhouse gases. The paper also cost 14 percent more in dollars, but I am happy to make up some of that cash by forgoing a new picture of my gray hair and wrinkles.
Environmentalism is here to stay, Professor Almond told me in 1993, because we are too smart now to accept the Western idea of an “unproblematic progressive future.” There is no turning back from technology, he said, but it needs to be managed now as much to solve problems as to improve standards of living. It’s not surprising then that the GSB would be at the forefront of such efforts. The magazine had to change to keep up with the rest of the School. If I sound satisfied, don’t believe it. Like many of you, we realize this is only one step on a path that requires many more ideas.