Society of Authors Interviews Chris Rhodes about his eco-parable, “Hippy the Happy Hippopotamus!”

I was among several authors, involved with "sustainability", who were interviewed by The Society of Authors (UK) recently, as part of their “Tree to Me” sustainable publishing campaign. Interviewer: Teddy McDonald. 

“A modern day eco-parable (for 5-8 year olds), with themes of family, community, sustainability and diversity: aimed to help young children with reading English, and to see that cooperation, empathy, and being inspired by Nature, are the best ways to live in a massively changing world.”

Awarded as a Winner in the Authors Show's "50 Great Writers You Should be Reading" contest.

The Interview.

TM. I guess maybe the best place to start would just be if you could just tell me a bit about your sustainable journey and what got you interested in sustainability and then how you heard about Tree to Me.

CR. I've always loved nature. I grew up in the countryside, first in South Wales and then in Gloucestershire, and then I moved to Banbury and then to London and became a city boy. But I've always had this love, the love of walking in nature and all that sort of thing. Yes, I was a university professor in chemistry, this is probably about 20 years ago, and I really found myself gravitating towards environmental matters, if you like. Then I got the opportunity to set up an independent consultancy and I got involved with energy and, in my deliberations about energy, I came across a phenomenon called Peak Oil, which didn't mean that we're about to run out of oil any time soon, but we've got this hugely oil dependent society. And if we can't maintain the flow of oil into it, then what do we do? And so I started writing a blog about this, called “Energy Balance”, which has got quite a few million hits over the years. And I was really thinking around energy and what do we do about fossil fuels? Can we get enough renewables, etc., etc..

And it struck me that we are going to have to relocalise a lot of our activity if we don't have all this oil dependent transportation, in our own lives, but also importing food and energy itself and so on. And it occurred to me that children are going to be challenged in all sorts of ways in the time to come and I put this story together about a little Hippo for my niece who was four then – she's 29 now, so we're going back a few years.

And the story of the Hippo. 

He's got the mind of a five year old boy growing up in Africa. And it's his interactions with his family and human creatures and so on. And it just struck me that it would be nice to bring out this story, not in any preachy way, but just to sort of get over the ideas that cooperation rather than conflict and connecting with nature are probably the best ways of solving where we are at the moment and going into a happy kind of future.

And also I sort of wrote the first story - I've written quite a few other stories in the hippo-series since - but I thought to myself that it might take a while to get a publisher for it. So I thought, okay, I can write words, but I can't draw to save my life, frankly. So I tried to look around friends, and then somebody said, “Ah, Jeanette Cole, she's really good”. So I was put in touch with Jeanette, and Jeanette drew the illustrations for that, and we've done lots of outreach in schools, and she lives in East London and in a lot of the schools there, the kids don't have English as their first language. And the teachers have said, “You know what? This is really so easy for them to read from, to engage with”. I met kids who normally don't have a lot of confidence in reading out loud, and they do, they take to it. I think it’s down to Jeanette's lovely illustrations, which draw them in to the stories, and the words. So that's kind of all part of my view of sustainability.

I mean, I do a lot of different things. I still continue to write academic papers. And regarding this campaign [Tree to Me] – well, kind of interesting – here is a paper of mine, just accepted, entitled, “Trees - protectors against the changing climate”, which is going to be published in an academic journal, and I'm pointing out that we should stop destroying nature. Keep the trees preserved. Protect the trees, and the trees will protect us. So I'm kind of carrying on with the academic work, but also community related stuff, and things to do with nature.

And we came up with something called “For Our Children’s Earth”, the idea being that we need to protect and rebuild the soils, and we're having a film screening in Reading. It's part of a national screening of “Six Inches of Soil”, and being shown by Transition Town Reading, an organisation that I have become chair of, mainly because nobody else wanted to do it at the time. But we're doing this screening, and it's all sort of going on with our other activities.

And what I found with the Hippo stories, is they naturally bring up discussions from kids about nature, about the environment and so on. So all these things, although that wasn't quite what I was thinking when I put the stories together for my niece, along with all the sustainability topics that I've got involved with since, it's all become kind of interleaved.

And that's probably expressed in a slightly haphazard way, because there are a lot of complex things that have happened, coming in from different directions, but if any of it proves useful at all, I’m glad.

TM. So you obviously wrote it for your niece was there, was it always in your head that you were going to publish it in some way? And what was the experience of publishing it like? Was it on a big scale to begin with?

CR. Not at all. The first shot we had, we used Lulu - you are probably familiar with that, a sort of online print on demand, right? Yes. Here we are. It's one of the original ones [CR holds up book to the camera]. It's an unusual sort of size. It's one of the American sizes. But I think we did an initial run of  50, and since then we've sold about 2,000 copies altogether over the time, but just in small runs, basically.

So there's not been an issue of having a great pile that we needed to do something with, or God forbid, dispose off. I would never want to be in that position. But yes, we've just done it – and it's moved almost by, it's too much to say, an underground movement, but word of mouth. And then people get in touch with us and say, “Oh, would you come along and...” you know, give some sort of outreach somewhere.

And I talk about the environmental aspects, and read the stories. Jeanette helps the kids to draw the pictures, of hippos and everything else, and we sell them that way. But it is also available via Amazon. And we produced it that way. And it's available in various independent bookshops, including a local one, Fourbears Books in Caversham. 

So it's been relatively low-key, but steady, and it's more all the other things that have come from it, basically. The way it sort of fits in with the community stuff, with the kids and really where we're all going as a human society, and how their future is likely to be.

TM. So I suppose obviously you didn't have to worry too much about print run in that case. But what about the other stages of the production process? Did you have did you have control over, for instance, the use of inks or finishes, trims and cover materials? Were any of those things a consideration when you were trying to make it a sustainable book?

CR. To be perfectly honest, when we started this, even despite my developing thinking in terms of sustainability, until the Tree to Me campaign came along, I hadn't – I don't know why I hadn’t – but I hadn't thought, “Wow, the publishing industry producing books, and of course this has sustainability issues in terms of where the basic wood comes from to make the paper, the inks and all that”.

So what I'm doing now, I mean, yes, we've had sort of total control of the thing in a general sense, but we've just used commercial printers. But now I'm looking to people, printers who swear that it's all ecologically sound, to use recycled paper, or paper that has not had a huge detrimental impact in its production, that sort of thing.

And also I saw something the other day, I don't think it works so well for printing books, but for the fliers and so forth – this is paper with seeds incorporated into it. So you could tear that up and put it in the ground. It's a bit like this sort of guerrilla gardening activity where somebody casually goes along with a handful of seeds and chucks them in a hedgerow somewhere, the idea being to grow flowers to help the pollinators, this kind of thing. I mean, you would certainly hope not to have to be shredding and disposing of books. But certainly all the advertising stuff, if you did that in that way, it's even better than composting it because you could actually bring forth new life basically and help out the local environment.

TM. Did you find the Tree to Me questions useful in relation to your book before or after publication? Obviously you didn't send these questions to a publisher as some authors would use the campaign, but was it a useful prompt just to think about issues around your book’s sustainability or how you might do things differently?

CR. Yes, I think, sort of, from going forward now. Despite my activities in sustainability, for some reason I've not really thought of the fact that this of course applies to producing and distributing books. But now I'm aware of these aspects of where the basic materials come from, what happens potentially to them afterwards and throughout the whole production and distribution process. Yes, I think the way you set that out is very useful and I would certainly pay attention – if we proceed forward carrying on under our own steam, then I will take account of those indicators. But I think seriously, to expand this on the scale that we would like to... I mean, I would like to have a million kids reading Hippy the Happy Hippopotamus, and the other Hippo stories, because it's such a strong and positive message.

And the feedback we've got from teachers and parents and everybody is wonderful and that gives me heart to carry on with it. But I think this is going to be a, well... I think in general, the whole publishing industry is going to take all that stuff on seriously from now on. It’s with us. It's part of modern life. It's almost criminal. And in some cases, probably what happens in grabbing resources really is criminal in some parts of the world. But yes, it's a sort of offense against society to not take sustainability as an issue in terms of everything we do.

TM. I was going to ask you – and you may not have comment on this, but I was just wondering – if you had any thoughts about how it could be made easier for authors to ask these questions of their publishers? I know that you've had you've obviously had other books, and you’ve gone through independent publishers with those. Because these are difficult conversations for authors to have a publishers.

CR. Yes, and authors don't necessarily want to put publishers off, I would imagine, by making their job sound more difficult. Yes, you're right, I've worked with lots of different publishers, I've worked with a lot of academic publishers, for example, like the tree paper I’ve just shown you, in publishing in journals. I had a black comedy novel called “University Shambles”, that was published by a small press near Cambridge. They have sadly gone bust, so either I try and find another publisher for that, or if we go it alone, then I will make sure that the printing is operating in a sustainable kind of way. So, there's a bit of a question mark to that one.

But I think it should become part of the package from the publisher, a set of questions about sustainability or along the lines of what you have with your campaign – like the frequently asked questions (FAQ) kind of thing. Where the publisher explains what the situation is in regard to these issues, to give the author an idea what they are getting involved with and what the impact of their book is likely to be if they go with this particular publisher.

TM. So in terms of the questions, which of them felt the most pertinent or relevant to you?

CR. Well, actually the deforestation and water use there, for example, I said I've just had this paper about trees accepted. 

And basically what I'm saying, in a nutshell, is if we carry on destroying the forests, destroying the natural environment, you can forget about zero emissions targets in terms of cutting fossil fuels. I mean, this might sort of encompass the whole thing a bit better in terms of my thinking, it's called ‘carbon tunnel vision’, because the message that comes over all too often from the government, and generally speaking, is as long as we decarbonize our energy system, we can carry on as we are. Everything is going to be hunky dory. But that's nonsense, because, if we got to zero carbon energy, if we're still using that energy to destroy the forests and the soils and overfishing and polluting the oceans and shoving plastic everywhere, we're still doomed, frankly. 

So we need a whole, more integrated, way of approaching this. And I think that set of questions was nicely integrated, because you talk about renewable energy, you talk about deforestation, you talk about water use. It's the bigger picture.

When I first started writing the “Energy Balance” blog, which is now getting on for 20 years ago, and I give lots of public lectures and sometimes I lecture at universities. 

I've not been formally employed by a university for 20 years and don’t miss it at all. I still interact with universities around the world. I do all sorts of things. And people have said to me, “Well, you know, the problem is we're in overshoot.” So I kind of casually replied, “Yeah, that's right.” And then I got sent a paper a couple of years ago by Bill Rees, who was one of the originators of the ecological footprint analysis, you know, Earth Overshoot Day is the 2nd of August – so in other words, we’ve used up a year’s worth of resources by then and I hadn't really got what this meant until I saw that. And then – bloody hell – the penny dropped, and it just framed the whole picture of our overconsumption of resources and the fact that the waste we're producing in how we use them is overwhelming the capacity of the Earth to absorb it. So it's a real double whammy.

So yes, it's energy, it's resource use, it's how we use those resources and the energy in terms of the waste, greenhouse gases, but plastic pollution and really all the whole show.

TM. Did the questions spark a wider conversation with those around you or with people who you've worked together with on the books? So colleagues, for instance, or anyone close to you – were the questions sort of a prompt to talk more about sustainability?

CR. Yes, perhaps not those precise questions because I hadn't seen them before we started doing this. But, Jeanette Cole, the illustrator of Hippy the Happy Hippopotamus, and I have got a couple of other books in the series so far... and she is very much into environmental matters and sustainable energy and so forth. And, I know a lot of people, and this is what they are talking about... you may remember, I said my father was ill.

Now, I wouldn't have imagined Dad becoming any sort of environmentalist, but I phone him up, and my God, he's well aware of the places that are on fire or flooding and everything else. So I think it's becoming that almost everybody is aware of climate change and environmental damage, and certainly people that I know from all walks of life are. I've also written quite a few articles, mostly about sustainability and energy, for a journal called Science Progress. 

I was on the editorial board of that journal – still am, actually – and everybody involved with it is deeply and definitely aware of the sustainability aspects in their own lives. So yes, I don't think I know anybody who isn't concerned, right? I guess there are a few people... I don't know what Mr. Trump thinks, for example, about the coal industry. I seem to recall him saying that, no, we can't cut our use of coal because it disadvantages our economy against other countries that are producing coal like China and Russia. But the trouble is, I think we have a fear of giving things up; there is a reluctance, because it almost seems like you're stepping back. You know, you're giving up something that you've earned through your hard work. And so on. You're sort of stepping back toward the dark ages, if you’re not careful. But of course, if we stay on the path we are on, then we're all going to lose everything.

So we have to change our behaviour. I'm coauthor of another paper which says that Overshoot, as I was talking about, our overconsumption of resources, and also overwhelming the Earth by the waste we produce, is down to a kind of behavioural crisis, and a lot of it is driven by advertising. 

You're told to buy more and more and more, etc., etc. So it's going to be tackled in that way. But I do think there is a sort of splinter movement of awareness that is moving away from this kind of thinking.

TM. Have you communicated [your book’s] sustainable credentials as an object with your readers? Have you communicated that in the pages of the book or via other channels to like let people know?

CR. Well, as an object rather than the concept to the message? No, because I think until I signed up for this present thing we're talking about I wasn't really quite aware of the impact of the publishing industry on the environment. So, now it’s more of a going forward stage, but I think it will add a lot to the environmental, the sustainability message in the book to say, “...and hey, here it is, this object, it's been printed sustainably…” Sustainable is one of these words... it’s so overused, sometimes people don't quite know what it means and yet it's a good word because it covers everything, doesn't it? So I use it, but I don't totally like it. But yes, if you could say, well okay, this waste paper has been produced from the book’s advertising literature, it's got seeds in it so you can tear it up and plant it in the garden and so on and so on. I think that that would be fantastic.

I think there are different ways of estimating carbon emissions and so forth, but they're quite difficult. It wouldn't apply to me and what I've done so far. But of course, I can probably do some calculations to come up with something to address that aspect of it. And I would do, because going forward it's important to address the sustainability issues of the object itself, how it was produced and to come into your hands literally.

So I think that's going to be an important part of the message and it's often, I think, powerful to give practical examples of things. You can say things, you can quote things, and there's so much doom and gloom in the world. And I think sometimes, if you've actually got something like this and you can say it was sustainably produced and the other aspects of it in a in a real tangible, practical sense, I think that would carry the message forward more powerfully.

TM. The next question I had was, has the Tree to Me questions and sort of engaging with the campaign – has it changed the way you might think about the next book that you produce if you've got one lined up or if you're thinking about producing another book. And is there anything you do differently next time?

CR. Yes, for sure. Okay. In terms of printed copies, we just have "Hippy the Happy Hippopotamus", but there are two more in electronic form, other books, "Hippy Eco-Hippo" and "Visitors for Hippy". We are planning to get those printed, for sure the three books; we would intend to use a printer that can guarantee that the materials have a low environmental impact in all respects. So yes, that's going to become a critical part of it. Or, if we do eventually manage to get a publisher, then I would engage in discourse to make sure that we get the right one, who is also on board with this kind of thinking, and how they produce it would have minimal environmental impact. But yes, that's going to be a critical part.

I would also say the novel “University Shambles”, as we take that forward out of the wreckage of the publishers - who were based near Cambridge - going bust, then we would certainly make sure that the materials, not just tick the boxes, but are genuinely of low impact. I would look into that as deeply as possible.

TM. So what’s next for you? Do you think you will be writing another book or is there anything there anything else in your sights in terms of a next publication?

CR. Well, we’ve got the three books so far in the happy Hippo series, which we want to take forward as described, and then the novel already written. New books to write… I may do. Of course, it's an enormous amount of effort to go into that. People keep saying to me, you ought to write a book about energy. Well, yes, I'm probably well qualified to do that. But there are other good books on energy by very well qualified people. I think I might produce a book about trees because I have a growing love for trees. I wanted to get an actual academic article out to try and get the message to governments to say, look, this is where you need to put your money, change the law if necessary on that level. But it's a matter, I think, also of what we can do as individuals, as communities at the local level, which is what the Transition Towns movement is about. But I think, until I decide firmly on that, I will continue writing articles, I'll write my blog, I will cooperate with people on the scientists warnings topics, papers, things like that. When something ignites me sufficiently to write another book, I'll write it. There are a few things on the drawing board, actually, and I will probably go with one of them when the muse strikes me and I have enough energy to focus on a particular thing. I'll just say I'm involved with a lot of different things in the world, so I might have to put some of those to one side if I were really to focus on a book in regard to what sustainability activities I'm engaged with at the moment.

TM. If you one tip for authors – whether in their personal lives or professionally – about sustainability, what would it be?

The phrase that comes to mind is “think global act local”, which of course was from Fritz Schumacher’s book, “Small is Beautiful”. 

But it’s true, while many of the problems confronting us, like climate change say, and all the rest of it, are global... that's to say, they affect everybody, there is a lot you can do at the local level to ensure some resilience, so you can insulate buildings yourself. You can grow food, you can do a bit of guerrilla gardening. Because we need some resilience against supply chains failing, for example. You know, as I said, my thinking in this way began around the fact we might not be able to... well, we almost certainly won't be able to maintain the oil supply. I don't think we can run this civilization all on renewable energy. But we shouldn't do it either because of all the other impacts on the environment. So I would say our focus should on the local, you know, what you can actually do in your own community yourself, but be aware of the global picture.

TM. What would be your tip for readers about sustainability?

CR. Yes. Well, you know, the tips for readers are not so different. But if I can say then for readers, use less stuff, produce less waste. The two things are not disconnected. And so, as I say, overall, the problem is we are in overshoot. We're using up too much stuff and we're using more than the Earth can provide. We're producing too much waste in how we use those resources, more than the Earth can absorb, basically. So in this time of rising costs of energy and everything, of course, everything you do to try and save money, if you like, does reduce the environmental impact. So that would be one metric. How could I save some money?

So, use less energy, do things more locally, try and get hold of a patch of land, if you can, and grow local food. It also helps to bring communities together and build communities and in a very healthy and positive way.