By Steve Mertl, Daily Brew – Wed, 12 Oct, 2011

One of Canada's foremost authors is lending her name, literally, to an innovative way of reducing the effect of the book-publishing industry on the world's forests.

Margaret Atwood, celebrated for books such as Surfacing, The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace, is producing an autographed limited-edition work this month titled In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination.

The $100 book's 300 copies will be printed on paper made partly from straw "without any harmful impact on forests and their fragile ecosystems," Atwood told the Globe and Mail.

The project was conceived by Canopy, a Vancouver environmental group, as a way of demonstrating the value of using wheat and flax straw as an alternative to wood pulp to make fine paper.

"I just find it shocking that in 2011 we still cut down 400- to 800-year-old trees to make bank statements and junk mail," Canopy executive director Nicole Rycroft said in an interview with the Globe. "We want to demonstrate that in fact you can produce paper without using forest fibre at all."

The Atwood book is made entirely from wheat and flax straw and other recycled wood waste, Rycroft said. The material is being called Second Harvest.

So far, only only one batch of Second Harvest paper has been produced by Cascades Fine Papers in Montreal using flax straw from Alberta and wheat straw from China. Rycroft said despite an abundance of wheat straw in Canada, there are no pulping facilities for it.

But that could change if interest from other publishers and printers is anything to go by, she said.

"We have documented 800,000 tonnes of paper demand on an annual basis for papers based on straw," she said. "That would be enough to keep four mills running full time."

Canopy said it believes half a billion trees could be saved from the loggers' chainsaw by using straw-based paper.

This isn't Canopy's first foray into book publishing. A few years ago, it got Vancouver-based Raincoast Books to publish the Canadian edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on 100-per-cent recycled paper, including a note by J.K. Rowling acknowledging the gesture.

In Other Worlds explores Atwood's lifelong relationship with the science fiction genre, from childhood reading in the 1940s to her studies at Harvard and later writings and reviews on the subject.

She also discusses the differences between science fiction and speculative fiction. Atwood won the Arthur C. Clarke award for her dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale but rejected having it labelled as science fiction

Proceeds from the book's sale will go to finance Canopy's Second Harvest program.

The CBC did a straw poll of its own, asking on its news website whether Canadians would pay $100 for the book. More than two thirds said no, though that doesn't reveal whether respondents are leery of a straw book, don't want to part with a hundred bucks or simply don't like Margaret Atwood, regardless of the price.