Nelson welcomes Judith Plant on October 8 at the Civic Theatre
By Contributor
Nelson is welcoming British Columbia publishing pioneer, Judith Plant – the co-founder and publisher of New Society Publishers (NSP) — on Wednesday (October 8) at the Civic Theatre.
Chances are, if your personal or professional interests revolve around food, gardening or permaculture, natural building & alternative energy, parenting, education & community building, or environmental & sustainability issues, you probably already have an NSP book on your bookshelf.
Presented by the Kootenay Co-op, Otter Books and Deconstructing Dinner, this will be a very special and rare opportunity to hear from a leader of our time who has been instrumental in empowering people and communities around the world to be their own leaders in building more ecologically sustainable and equitable societies.
NSPs mission really has been to publish books that can change the world.
This Nelson-only event will host Plant as she shares a slideshow and presentation at the Civic Theatre alongside an NSP book sale organized by Otter Books. This type of event will be a first for Plant.
NSP has been publishing books for over 30 years and has operated as a “solutions-oriented publisher focused on providing people with the tools needed for a world of change”.
“They help us “know the talk, and walk the talk”.
NSP has published the likes of Joanna Macy, Starhawk, John Taylor Gatto, Richard Heinberg, Michael Ruppert, Steve Solomon, David Holmgren, and John Ikerd among others.
While NSP books are staples on Kootenay bookshelves, there are many recent examples of how their books have also supported or featured Kootenay initiatives.
The now under-construction 24-unit Nelson Cohousing project at Six-Mile has been using the NSP-published book Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities (2011) as their project’s go-to manual and have employed authors Charles Durrett & Kathryn McCamant as architects and consultants.
This past spring, the region was host to author Jean-Martin Fortier who offered workshops based on his recent NSP book – The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-scale Organic Farming (2014). Dozens of copies are now in the hands of local farmers. And last fall, NSP released Uprisings: A Hands-On Guide to the Community Grain Revolution (2013) – a book which features and was inspired by the Kootenay Grain CSA and Kootenay Co-op Radio’s former Deconstructing Dinner radio show.
This event is unique says coordinator Jon Steinman; “Our culture is pretty well-practiced at hosting and celebrating authors, but it’s not often we celebrate the publisher who makes the author’s ideas available to all of us.”
Steinman came up with the idea for the event earlier this year when NSP hosted a Gabriola Island screening of Steinman’s new Deconstructing Dinner television and web series.
“When I was on Gabriola and had the chance to meet Judith Plant, I realized just how geographically isolated NSP is from the communities and people their work has touched globally,” describes Steinman.
“I decided then that NSP was its own story worth celebrating and where better to do that than in the Nelson area where I would anticipate exists the highest per capita presence of NSP books in Canada.”
