YOU WILL NOTICE (or you may not) that Saltscapes has changed size slightly with this issue. It’s a small thing for you, the reader, but a big deal for us in terms of the logistical changes that must be made internally, so we’ve been working and planning and fretting for some considerable time. Ours is an industry where millimetres matter.

The initial business plan for the launch of the magazine in 2000 called for an imposing, oversized publication designed to send a statement that a prominent new periodical had arrived on the market and should be taken very seriously.

As we look forward to 2008, with rapid growth, high customer satisfaction and many awards behind us, we can happily conclude that the time required to prove ourselves worthy has expired.

We also look forward to a “greener” future, and we join with a mass of individuals and corporate bodies in minimizing our ecological footprint. Our good friends at Advocate Printing in Pictou, NS, have installed a shiny new, high-tech, state-of-the-art press offering far greater paper efficiencies than we enjoyed in the past.

The time required running the press (and wasting paper) before the required quality is reached and the actual print run can commence, for instance, has been dramatically reduced. In addition, by altering our outside trim size to a slightly narrower, slightly deeper shape, thereby fitting more efficiently on the new press, we will save a substantial quantity of paper over the course of a year.

Trees, when considered a mere source of fibre with which to make paper, are a renewable resource, for sure. But trees are forests, and forests are wildlife habitat, and water reservoirs and temperature moderators for our rivers and lakes. We feel a responsibility to do our part to minimize our impact and, indeed, we only purchase paper from suppliers who are independently certified as responsible forest harvesters.

As a publication that has in the past, and will in the future, report fully and graphically on the very negative impact of poor forest harvesting practices, it would be clearly hypocritical to do otherwise.
Let’s all make sure that the ongoing public preoccupation with “green living” is not just the latest hip fad du jour with all the staying power of bell-bottom jeans.

Jim & Linda

~ Linda & Jim Gourlay
e-mail: gourlays@saltscapes.com 

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