Last Friday, “The Intermittencies of Death”, the new book by José Saramago, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, was presented in Lisbon. At the event, the Director of Programs of Greenpeace International, Bruno Rebelle, thanked Saramago for his support of the Greenpeace campaign to encourage the publishing industry to use papers that do not involve the destruction of primary forests and whose manufacturing process minimizes the impact on the environment. The Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese, Italian, French and Catalan editions of “The Intermittencies of Death” have been printed on paper that respects primary forests, the last virgin forests on the planet.

In Spain, the Forest-Friendly Books project has so far managed to print 15 titles on “forest-friendly paper”, with a total of 700,000 copies printed, and a list of authors who are demanding that their publishers print their books on this paper. In Spain, in addition to José Saramago, authors such as Isabel Allende, Manuel Rivas, Javier Moro, Javier Cercas, Jose Luis Sampedro, Rosa Regás, among many others, have joined the project.

The Greenpeace project is being developed in other European countries such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Holland and Germany. In Canada, the pioneer country of this project, there are currently 35 Canadian publishers committed, six million books printed on forest-friendly paper and 45 writers committed to the project. In the international context, among the writers committed to the Greenpeace project we find authors such as Günter Grass, J.K. Rowling or Margaret Atwood.