A New Twist on Eco-Books

Stephen Tukel and Joshua Horwitz, environmental publishers, weren’t upset when they saw the unprecedented deluge of eco-books pouring off the nation’s presses last spring for Earth Day ’90. They weren’t worried about the competition, even though their own books were still waiting in the wings.

“Our feeling was the more books the better,” Tukel said. “We’re doing something different. We’re in it for the long haul.”

They’ve just caught up with the parade, having launched Living Planet Press with two action-oriented paperbacks for fall: “The Animal Rights Handbook: Everyday Ways to Save Animal Lives” and “The Rainforest Book: How You Can Save the World’s Rainforests.”

Does the world need more green books?

Tukel and Horwitz think so. Working out of an airy, multilevel loft complex in Venice, the two longtime friends are channeling their social consciousness into a new publishing niche, and collaborating with major environmental groups who will mass-market books to their members.

“It’s an alternative pipeline,” explains Tukel.

“The Animal Rights Handbook” will be given as a gift to renewing members by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), which bought 50,000 copies to help celebrate its 125th anniversary.

“The Rainforest Book” was published in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which bought 50,000 copies to sell to members, plus 70,000 more copies of a pocket-sized version to be distributed free to build support for their rain forest rescue campaign.

In both cases, Tukel and Horwitz maintained creative control over the books.

“Our books are ideas,” said Horwitz. “We’re producing them, not just publishing them.”

Their work “symbolizes a new populist era in environmental books, which traditionally have been rather lofty,” said Charlie Winton, president of Publishers Group West, the country’s leading distributor for independent publishers.

“Their books are very solid editorially, they look sharp, their price is accessible and they tell people, ‘You can make a difference.’ Ultimately, they show there are a lot of people out there who care.”

Living Planet Press entered the book world in September with an initial press run of 250,000 copies of its two books, of which 100,000 copies were already sold. As a result, Tukel and Horwitz, who self-financed the business on a shoestring, are already in the black.

But they don’t talk like businessmen. They see themselves as turning environmental concerns into action; they want their readers to do the same thing.

“We didn’t get into this business for the purpose of selling books in bookstores,” said Tukel. “Our commitment is not just to publish books but to see that they are widely distributed and widely read. Our hope is that these books are going to spur people to take action on issues which might have intimidated them before.”

Said Horwitz: “We want to empower people with information. These books combine the latest in scientific knowledge with aggressive public education.”

That there aren’t many alternative presses in Los Angeles doesn’t bother them because they think of themselves of breaking the rules. “I think we are able to do things that most publishers can’t,” Tukel said.

Working with an administrative staff of five and a handful of computers in a Venice neighborhood, they boast of moving a project from idea to bookstore in six to seven months.

The books are collaborations. “We tend to initiate the project,” Tukel said. “We want enough editorial control to shape the first draft, do the cover. We come up with the ideas, come up with the issues, match it with a major group that can promote it, and farm out the work to writers and artists.”

Both 35, they are relative newcomers to the West Coast, having moved their environmental consulting partnership from New York to San Francisco three years ago when Horwitz’s wife, Ericka Markman, an educational media distributor, entered Stanford business school. They incorporated Living Planet Press in January and moved to Los Angeles in June, attracted by the environmental urgency here.

“I like extreme situations and I think Los Angeles is an exciting place to be,” Tukel said. “It’s compelling, because there is no escape and I think everyone is aware of it.”

He sees the city as providing a prototype for the future of Western industrial culture. The scenario is like a movie script, he said: “Let’s take 10 million people and put them in this desert basin and add 10 million cars that burn gas and, for fun, let’s cut off their water supply and see what happens.”

The outcome is still to be written, he thinks: “Either people will grapple with the situation or the city will die. I think 100 years from now, people will look back and see the ‘90s as the last chance to get off these resource-consumptive highways we’ve been traveling on.”

Tukel, a graduate of Haverford College in Pennsylvania, was an early recruit to environmental causes. Having gone West in 1978 to study economics at the University of Wisconsin, he dropped out of graduate school to join the environmental battle in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where Union Carbide’s plans to mine uranium were fought by the Sioux nation.

“It was a formative experience for me,” said Tukel, who spent the next year as a community organizer. “There is probably no more frightening reality than uranium mining in your back yard, and the Black Hills are sacred to the Sioux religion. The lines were drawn. In war terms, it was a full-scale assault on the Black Hills without the consent of the people who had lived there for thousands of years. It really harkens to the present and the situation in rain forests.”

Tukel spent the ‘80s doing direct-mail marketing for public interest groups, including the Native American Rights Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Human Rights Watch and others.

In the last few years, he and Horwitz (who met as teen-agers picking peaches on a trip to an Israeli kibbutz) have worked together as writers and consultants for nonprofit groups, creating direct-mail marketing packages.

Horwitz, a writer, grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended a Quaker high school, then Princeton, then New York University film school. Although he has published five children’s books and written screenplays, his writing career was “not particularly successful,” he said.

He entered the environmental world via direct mail, but gradually grew interested in the issues he was writing about: “You have to be an expert to reduce a complex issue to a four-page newsletter. . . . I learned about everything from air and water issues to land use.”

The marketplace was equally intriguing to a struggling writer whose publisher talked in terms of 5,000 books. Horwitz would write a direct-mail piece on “Pesticides on Children’s Food” or on “Saving Elephants” and the NRDC would mail 500,000 copies. Even with the throwaway factor, he learned, that meant at least 50,000 readers.

Looking at the potential marketing power posed by environmental groups’ membership lists, Tukel and Horwitz saw a way to convert their direct-mail experience to mass market books.

“We’re giving the environmental groups something to put in people’s hands,” Horwitz said. “People might throw away junk mail, but they don’t throw away books.”

For their first project, they drafted the “Animal Rights Handbook” and took the idea to the ASPCA, which was gearing up for its 125th anniversary. “We think there is a huge mainstream market for animal rights,” said Horwitz. “This is a great example of a movement that has been branded as extreme and shrill-toned, and we thought the time was right to take it to the masses.”

The ASPCA, was receptive. “They met a need for us,” said Steve Zawistowski, vice president and science adviser. “We had 25 or 30 different flyers on various subjects and when people called in with questions we would pluck a bunch out of the rack and mail them, but it still didn’t give a context.”

The “Animal Rights Handbook” offers a step-by-step entry into animal rights’ concerns, Zawistowski said. It takes basic information about fur ranching, product testing, factory farming and other animal-rights issues and ties them together with the philosophy of animal rights.

The ASPCA is giving the book a big national push, he said: “It’s designed so anyone can pick it up and read it and see how their lives can adapt to animal rights. And it gave us the opportunity to take on the task that we might not otherwise. The whole fearsome process of trying to find a printer and a publisher when you’re dealing with 800 things. We’d probably just put it on the back burner.”

“The Rainforest Book,” written by Scott Lewis, is getting equally high marks from its partners at the Natural Resources Defense Council. They like its fact-packed overview chapters and emphasis on personal action.

“We are trying to reach as many people as possible” said Linda Lopez, NRDC director of public education. “People have heard about the rain forest, they know there is a problem, but they don’t have any idea what to do about it. . . . This is a chance to really educate people.”

NRDC, with a staff of more than 80 scientists, lawyers and environmentalists, has led successful fights to reduce lead in gasoline and eliminate chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in aerosols and Alar in apples. For 20 years, they have worked mostly slowly and quietly through legal channels, Lopez said, but when they published the 1989 book “For Our Kid’s Sake: How to Protect Your Child Against Pesticides in Food,” it helped galvanize parents to get the pesticide Alar taken off the market in a hurry.

“The book was effective, but we could have sold more,” she said. “We didn’t know how to market it. We didn’t know how to advertise it, we didn’t have any distribution system.”

Living Planet will distribute the package, which includes books, a coloring book, audiotape and T-shirts to bookstores, museums and zoos, and “we don’t have to do any of that, and the book gets across the message,” Lopez said. “We are thrilled and we didn’t have to hire any other staff.”

That’s the sort of partnership Tukel and Horwitz envision. Living Planet Press is now working up a spring list of six titles, including “Saving Our Ancient Forests” with the Wilderness Society, and “Safe Food” with NRDC.

“We’d like to see these books become fixtures in the public debate,” Tukel said. “We have hitched our wagon to the environmental movement.”