Recently, Aurealis started thinking about how we could save the planet.

In the stately Aurealis boardroom, we tossed up between instituting a utopian regime and formulating a plan to maximise innate human potential without developing those really huge craniums when we realised we were surrounded by ceiling to floor bookshelves. That’s when it dawned on us that in many ways, we had already been doing our part in saving the world.

With the accepted science pointing out that we have an unfortunate rise in carbon dioxide levels and that these increased levels are responsible for an accelerating greenhouse effect that is bumping up global temperatures with some decidedly nasty outcomes waiting for us, it behoves us all to do something about reducing the amount of carbon dioxide floating around and doing its best to make us all miserable.

That’s why we have all this talk about carbon trading and carbon offsets and carbon sequestration—which is where we see our greatest contribution coming to the fore.

Carbon sequestration is generally thought of as pumping vast volumes of carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs, but it can mean locking up carbon in many ways—just so long as it doesn’t break down and become CO2 in the atmosphere.

Our answer? Gazing at the bookshelves, there it was. Books. Books are made of paper. Paper is made of trees. Trees are made of carbon (mostly). If we burn trees, that’s bad because it releases carbon. If the trees rot, it releases carbon (bad). But making the paper into books that sit on shelves all neat and protected, well, that’s locking up all that carbon for hundreds of years. It sits there, unspoiled, a handy carbon sink for posterity. Every book is helping, every shelf is of benefit. Every library is a vast world-saving lock-up, doing its best to keep up from the devastating effects of worldwide climate change.

Think about it. Buy books and save the planet. It’s your duty to do so.