Wednesday, 22 Oct 2003

COVELO, Calif.

Today, the season seems to be turning. Instead of brilliant sunshine, the hills are capped by light clouds, and for the first morning in a long time, I wasn’t awakened by the hummingbirds buzzing around the feeder outside my window. Instead of the hummers’ buzz, today the air is full of the sound of scurrying in the underbrush, as quail and ground squirrels go about their change-of-season activities.

Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time is our weekly editorial roundtable meeting, the anchor of Island Press’s editorial calendar. RT (as we call it) happens each week of the year unless too many of us are traveling or on vacation, and brings together the entire Island Press editorial staff — ten of us in four locations (Boulder, Tarrytown, D.C., and Covelo) — representing the full range of Island Press subject areas: Human Habitat; Economics, Policy, and Law; Shearwater Books; and Ecosystems Studies. (Click on the links to find out more about the books that we publish in each of these areas.)

The RT agenda opens with a discussion of program and administrative issues. The centerpiece of the second half of the meeting is the presentation by individual editors of book proposals that are ready for serious consideration for publication. RT is the first of two in-house meetings on the way to a contract offer (the second is the Publications Committee). As I always explain to authors, RT doesn’t make a final decision, but it is an excellent barometer of in-house sentiment.

It’s up to each of us editors to decide when a project on our desk is ready for Roundtable. Usually that happens after we have been working with an author for several weeks, after a well-crafted proposal and sample chapters have been reviewed by outside experts in the topic and the author has responded in writing to points raised by the reviewers. By 9:00 a.m. eastern time Monday morning of the week a project will be on the RT agenda, the sponsoring editor circulates to all attendees the material from author and reviewers, along with a cover memo.

In order to accommodate this continental editorial staff, we have a state-of-the-art black microphone/speaker box for conference calls in D.C., a good conference service provider, and an evolved standard of etiquette: since eye contact and hand-waving are ineffective, participants must wait for a break in the conversation to speak; jokes must be loud enough to be heard via the black box (no under-the-breath below-black-box-detection-level humor allowed); if there’s a dead silence after you’ve made a strong statement, the proper response is “Is anyone there?” because the service provider may have dropped your phone line.

Today I am presenting a proposal for a revised edition of Legal Aspects of Owning and Managing Woodlands, by Thom McEvoy, who is an associate professor and extension forester at the University of Vermont. We published the first edition of Legal Aspects in 1998; the book is a unique reference and guide for private forest owners about managing their land, and several topics need to be updated or expanded in order to ensure that the book continues to meet the needs of its readers. The first edition of this book reached a sizable audience and won an award from the National Woodland Owners Association, and the published reviews complimented McEvoy on a useful and comprehensive presentation. Since we are publishing a new book from Thom next spring (on managing woodlands for forest health as well as income), a revised edition of Legal Aspects would be an excellent companion to the new book.

For all these reasons, I expect this to be a non-controversial RT discussion — which would mean I’d get the blessings of my colleagues to take the project to the next Publications Committee meeting for a formal decision. But I’ve been wrong before. As a relatively small publisher, we simply don’t have the time or resources to publish every worthy proposal that we see; making (and communicating) painful choices is perhaps my least favorite part of the job. Roundtable is the arena where the criteria for these hard choices are debated, among colleagues who share a commitment to IP’s mission but also an understanding of, and different perspectives on, the publishing risks. Unpredictability is part of RT’s charm and challenge (though I have been known to use different nouns in that phrase when the meeting comes to a conclusion that I had not expected).

One of the things I will mention today in my presentation is the importance of reaching private landowners with our books. In the last several years, we have published a number of books for private owners of forests, ranch lands, and farms, in part because we know that if global biodiversity is to be protected, private landowners will have to play a big role. Forests, for example, cover almost 33 percent of the U.S. Fifty-eight percent of that expanse, or 430 million acres, is owned by almost 10 million private citizens, corporations, or other entities (those statistics come from America’s Private Forests: Status and Stewardship, by Constance A. Best and Laurie Wayburn, which we published in 2001). These private forests are tremendously important for clean water, a variety of other ecosystem services, sustainable supplies of timber, and habitat for many different species of plants and animals.

This is a topic that directly connects my personal and professional lives. This part of Northern California is logging country. The hillside from which my drinking water comes (by gravity flow) was virgin forest when I moved here in 1971, but was logged three times — each time more trees, from steeper slopes, were removed — between 1975 and 1998. The difference between reading about the effects of logging on erosion, roads, and water and experiencing those effects firsthand is dramatic. I have watched the creeks fill with silt after each cut, and last year I finally installed a filter on my drinking water tap.

The forestry manuscripts that I have worked on for IP have gone straight into my memory bank of information that makes a difference in my understanding of my daily life. This will be part of the unspoken subtext as I present Thom McEvoy’s proposal to my colleagues in moments. Time to dial up the conference call …