A Colorado forest will bear the UCF name

Eric Woodard

Issue date: 5/15/08 Section: News

 UCF will be named in association with a forest of 100,000 trees, thanks to the sales of used textbooks.

UCF was awarded the privilege in April after students submitted the most votes during a contest as part of the "Buy a Book, Build a Forest" campaign sponsored by College Book & Supply in conjunction with the Arbor Day Foundation.

On April 25, Alaina Bernard, assistant director of the UCF Arboretum, accepted a check for $100,000 from the Nebraska Book Company, the parent company of CB&S, on behalf of the Arbor Day Foundation, the organization planting the forest.

"I was accepting it on behalf of Mother Earth," Bernard said.

Martin Quigley, director of the UCF Arboretum, said $100,000 is a significant amount of money for a tree planting effort.

"Tree seedlings are cheap," Quigley said. "It costs pennies per pine seedling to actually produce the tree, which means you could spend a lot of money on other things that have to be done that are less tangible than the trees themselves."

Quigley said a thorough planting effort involves land preparation, machine rentals, fertilizing and weeding expenses in order to be restorative to the natural habitat.

Last fall, Michael Garmon, a UCF alumnus, started the Facebook group "UCF Needs a Forest Named After Them" when the voting contest began last October. Everybody in the group rallying anyone and everyone to vote for UCF on www.buildaforest.com made it possible, he said.

"When we started out we weren't even in the top 10," Garmon said. "A week later, after everybody voting … we caught up pretty quick and ended up with a couple hundred thousand votes, so we were pretty far ahead of everybody else."

During the contest, UCF, along with other schools across the country, voted to plant the new trees in one of three national forests: Flathead National Forest in Northwest Montana, Huron-Manistee National Forest in Northern Michigan or Pike and San Isabel National Forest in Central Colorado.

Pike and San Isabel National Forest, which needs more than 130,000 acres replanted after the Hayman Fire of 2002, won with 52 percent of the vote, weighted as a percentage of each school's enrollment. The best time to plant the trees, Quigley said, would be in late fall or early next spring.

David Fox, general manager of CB&S, who presented the check to Bernard, said that used textbooks make life easier not only for students and professors, but for booksellers like CB&S.

"That's part of the corporate philosophy and part of the local store philosophy to do whatever we can to help stretch the resources we have," Fox said.

The future of the "Buy a Book, Build a Forest" campaign and the forest will be known by the end of summer, Fox said.

The contest capitalizes on the fact that students are more likely to buy used textbooks instead of new editions. To raise awareness, a portion of the money used to buy or sell used textbooks is donated to the Arbor Day Foundation.

"The idea is that if you're going to produce new books all the time, you've got to cut down an enormous amount of resources to get the paper and the cardboard to print those books," Fox said. "I think the students are already aware of it; we need to make the faculty aware of it."

John Meyer, textbook manager for CB&S, said that frequent rollover to new editions by publishers can have a negative effect on business.

"I know that when people come in and all they see is 'new,' people are going to shop around and they probably won't find it locally," Meyer said.

One of the tricks of the textbook publishing industry is known as "built-in obsolescence," a method of ensuring a zero buy-back value for bundles of textbooks and materials. Books such as these come with quiz pages and worksheets to be torn out, one-time use Web access discs and covers with school-personalized embossments.

"The whole reason that's in there is to make it harder for us to buy it back and harder for us to sell it," Meyer said.

However, the success of the "Buy a Book, Build a Forest" campaign is an indication of hope for business models aimed at protecting the environment as well as turning a profit in the publishing industry.

The Green Press Initiative is a nonprofit organization that works to reduce the negative impact the printing and publishing industry have on the environment. The GPI has done research to show that 42 percent of readers would pay a dollar more to have books printed on environmentally-responsible paper.

Erin Johnson, associate director of the GPI, said at this stage in policy development and implementation within the industry, most revenue gains are in savings.

"Making money would come as a result of growing awareness by readers that book pricing must reflect true use of resources and pay for it," Johnson said in an e-mail interview.

Quigley would like to partner with the university's business, economics and sociology departments sometime next year to organize a curriculum for a multi-disciplinary course on resource management at UCF.

"You can talk about the biology and ecology all you want, but people have to want to do it and somebody has to come up with the money," Quigley said. "It has to be a perceived social need before it's going to happen."

At a minimum, 100,000 trees will replenish 746 of Pike and San Isabel's missing acres, but David Fox said the biggest goal of the campaign is getting the message to the people with the most power to change.

"We don't pick the books, the professors do," Fox said. "If we can get the message through to just one professor to please stop adopting new editions or, maybe if you're in the habit of adopting a new one every year, maybe skip and do it every other year."

Quigley said that in his teaching experience, updating textbooks every year is generally unnecessary, even in the study of biology.

"There is almost no need for any textbook to be rewritten within five years," Quigley said, "unless something radically changes; something really fundamental shifts."