Speaking in Greens 1: Chelsea Green

by Michael Fallarino

Download a PDF of this article here.

September 2007

Over the past couple of years as I have produced this column and spoken to many across the US, I’ve gradually come to think that the business of being green is, to a large extent, a community-oriented affair. Proselytizing and evangelizing seem to be of dubious value. By devoting myself to focusing within the green community, I’m finding taproots everywhere, and that’s a much more enjoyable approach to the business.

For many years I’ve been aware of a wonderful niche publisher named Chelsea Green Publishing. Now in their third decade of operation, the current CG catalog contains over 78 pages. This column is the first of two that looks at Chelsea Green. Margo Baldwin, the company’s president and publisher, was gracious enough to do an interview with me on the nuts and bolts of communicating to the community at large. It is edited for brevity, but an unedited version will be published on Fallarino.com in the future.

Michael Fallarino: Tell us about the origin of Chelsea Green Publishing.

Margo Baldwin: In 1984 my husband, Ian, and I moved out of New York and landed in Vermont. He had been an editor and worked in publishing, so we began a discussion about starting our own publishing company. We began in Chelsea, Vermont, and the company name was derived from the fact that Chelsea actually has two greens. Chelsea was colloquially called Chelsea Green because of its two greens.

We’ve moved the company a couple of times since then, and right now we’re in White River Junction, Vermont, in a restored and converted old bakery which is filled with artists.

MF: To what extent do you see your mission at Chelsea Green as an educational outreach program to various sectors of our American demographics?

MB: To the extent that our mission is to create change in the world, it's an educational outreach project. I feel that we’ve always been ahead of the curve in pushing the envelope in areas like renewable energy, organic gardening and farming – or what we call “eco-cuisine” – and local food sourcing. But these have always been hard messages to get out there until just recently; I’ve seen a big change in the last year. Now everyone is rushing in to green-wash themselves and promote the environment and sustainability, but still people largely don’t get it. The whole approach becomes green consumerism instead of real change. I’m consistently amazed at the degree to which schools and universities still do not teach anything about the environment.

MF: Name one or two criteria that you would use as the distinguishing benchmarks of “real change.”

MB: Real change must begin from an examination of the mindset that is used to determine what our place in the world is. We’re all connected by breathing the same air and one of our primary mistakes is our propensity to conceive of ourselves as something special. We are completely dependent on natural systems for our survival. Those systems have run amok and the economic complexities of population expansion have created interlocked mythological, psychological, and spiritual problems. If we’re going to survive as a species real change has to take these complexities into account.

MF: Can you identify two or three marketing strategies that address your target demographics as a communications company whose primary educational thrust is green and sustainable development?

MB: Increasingly, our marketing is focusing on internet based strategies that seek out alliances with like-mined partners and allies. On point, we’re remodeling our website to be a resource base for information about sustainable living rather than just being a source of information about our book catalogue. The traditional industry book marketing is pretty worthless; the model of long lead times and sending out lots of review copies is no longer the right primary strategy. We do need to get our books reviewed and talked about, but print media is in decline. Specialty publications still have a place. But we need to focus on specialized blogs, sites, and media such as the Sundance Channel, and treehugger.com, which was recently purchased by the Discovery channel.

MF: I’ve made it my business to pay increasing attention to the Sundance channel because of their dedication to promoting their new series The Green.

MB: The Green is hosted by one of our own authors, Simran Sethi! And the internet seems to be more efficient in putting us in touch with our target audience. Niche media is in a very good position to grow and define themselves. For example, we’re a primary partner in sponsoring the Bioneers conference, an outreach program of the Marion Institute, which will take place at UMass Dartmouth, October 19th through the 21st.[http://connectingforchange.org, and http://www.bioneers.org.]

MF: What is the greatest lesson you have learned from Chelsea Green’s largest failure?

MB: Doing books is like doing movies. Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re dead wrong. Some books that you’ve invested in substantially go nowhere, while others take off for unknown reasons.

MF: Is there any way to sort any of those probabilities out beforehand?

MB: I don’t think there is if your publishing criteria is to maintain a dynamic, interesting, creative approach to publishing that does not fall back on cookie cutter formulas for published works. You can focus your efforts on minimizing potential losses, but that does not make for an interesting approach to publishing. Risk is simply inherent in the process. One of the hardest lessons we’ve learned is to not get carried away with our own plans for growth. Many factors need to be considered to help prevent excess stress while a company is growing. A key to properly paced expansion is to maintain vigilant contact with your company’s mission. It seems to me that with all forms of media, the most interesting projects are increasingly being produced by smaller, independent media.

MF: On a recent Charlie Rose program, Rose queried New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman about where we stand in our efforts toward a greener and more sustainable way of being. Friedman’s response was that compared to where we were a few years ago, we were in the midst of a revolution, but compared to where we needed to be, we were having a party. How do you craft palatable educational objectives at Chelsea Green to stay true to form?

MB: We try to stay on the leading edge of the mission upon which the company was founded. That’s been relatively easy for us to do. When we started, no one was doing what we were doing. Many of our books have been for serious practitioners. In green building, we’ve been publishing about all the leading technologies. We published The Straw Bale House, and at this point that building technology has become more mainstream. We have to try and maintain industry leadership with a publishing focus like that. That means we have to be in contact with the leading practitioners of their respective fields of endeavor. Mainstream publishing releases a lot of mediocre material, but at Chelsea Green we want our reputation to be that of the premier publisher of media about sustainability.

MF: Do you see yourself developing forms of media other than print media? How will Chelsea Green develop over the course of the next decade or so? What is the gist of your ‘Zero Waste Publishing’ initiative?

MB: We’re in the early stages of becoming more diverse. We’d like a larger net presence and to try to grow more of an interactive community. The publishing industry is such a wasteful industry! We try to be ahead of the curve by publishing all of our books on recycled paper. Approximately forty percent of books get caught in a continuous cycle of being shipped out and subsequently returned over and over until they end up in a landfill! We’re trying to set up non-return initiatives to booksellers, and we’re involved in dialoguing with national chains about eliminating this kind of waste. It’s not a matter of trying to cut monetary losses; it’s about halting a wasteful practice that is entrenched in the industry.

To learn more about Chelsea Green Publishing and their catalogue of books, visit them at chelseagreen.com, call 802-295-6300 or circle #199 on Info Card.

Mike Fallarino is a contractor in the Albany, New York, area. He can be contacted at herbalist@berk.com.

The Investigative Contractor
23 • GBPD • 9/07
Examining a leading publisher of books on green building