Here's six and a half minutes of Bill McKIbben in his faculty office at Middlebury College, talking about American Earth, an anthology of two hundred-some years of American writers on the environment. "I hope that [the book is] used widely in colleges and high schools," McKibben says. "We really need to keep this particular strain of literature alive. It's so useful in shaping people and informing young people in particular about the possibilities for their lives. We can't afford those voices to die out, and so it's great fun to play a little part in trying to keep them loud and alive."

Some of the cutting back and forth in the multi-camera setup feels a bit arbitrary, but overall this is a good example of the book trailer as short informercial.

As long as we're on a nature kick: After seeing yesterday's post about Penguin pitching in to plant a billion trees, Dan Wagstaff of Raincoast Books emailed to remind me that his distribution company is partnering with Eco-Libris to plant a tree for every environmentally-themed book sold at 80 retail outlets throughout Canada.