I don’t know much about things environmental, but Eco-Libris has me confused:

Every book you read was once a tree. Now you can plant a tree for every book you read.

The idea is, you make a donation that goes towards planting trees to ‘replace’ the trees that were cut down to produce your book.

But the trees your book is made out of were planted to make paper in the first place, right? So it’s not like reading a book causes fewer trees. In fact, reading more books should cause more trees. As demand for paper goes up, more trees need to be planted to produce that paper. We don’t need to feel guilty about reading books if all we care about is the number of trees. If everybody read 10,000 books per year every year, the planet would probably have to be covered with trees to produce the paper required.*

In fact, couldn’t Eco-Libris result in fewer trees? Since it is imposing a voluntary ‘tax’ on books, those who choose to pay the tax will face a higher price per book and so will consume fewer books. In the long run, this will mean fewer trees planted to make books. Although the tax revenue will be spent on trees, but if demand is elastic enough, couldn’t the quantity reduction more than offset this?

So I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Eco-Libris is complete nonsense, and it’s things like this that make me wary of environmental movements in general.

* I understand things could be more complex, if trees planted for paper displace other species and result in lower biodiversity, which could be harmful. But Eco-Libris doesn’t seem to address this issue.