Fun, New Video Urges, 'Keep It Local, America!'

Tom Campbell and friends of The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina, have created a campy, fun 1940s newsreel-style video with a serious message: Shopping local is green. The spot, "Just Around the Corner," uses archival and newly shot video to dramatize how a book shipped from an Internet retailer rather than bought at a local bookstore ups the carbon load in the environment significantly. "How much fuel is required to make up the difference?" asks the video narrator. "Too much, chum!"

The two-minute video starts with the headline "Local Bookstores in Peril!" and the narrator suggests, "Consider your humble local bookseller the next time your order from one of the corporate giants. You may just be breeding an ecological disaster in your own backyard." With footage of pollution-spewing trucks and planes and a chaotic packaging center staged in The Regulator's storeroom, the video explains how much more energy is saved by buying books from the local bookstore, and how much carbon is spewed into the air by the alternative.

Campbell, who is a co-owner of Regulator Bookshop, got the idea for the video after he compared typical Amazon shipments of one or two books per package with the store's own shipments, which averaged 24 books. "I realized there's a whole lot more shipping and packaging involved getting books to people when they order from Amazon," he said, adding that he figured it out to be about three times as much. "This means there are three times as many trucks on the road," Campbell said. "And these trucks are coming from a warehouse hundreds of miles out of town."

Campbell shared his idea for the video with Regulator customer Jay O'Berski, who teaches drama at Duke University and is the head of a local theater group. O'Berski, who got on board immediately, then recruited Jim Haverkamp, another teacher at Duke. With the help of 15 volunteers, they were able to shoot the video in an hour and a half. Campbell gave the volunteers gift cards, but added that they all said they didn't expect anything. They just wanted to support their local independent bookstore.

Campbell is including the video in the store newsletter and is making it available to independent business alliances since its message applies broadly. He said, "Anything that uses any amount of packaging is going to be the same way." Citing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (the book makes a cameo in the video), Campbell noted that if retailers had to pay a tax on carbon, most Internet commerce would "go up in a puff of smoke. It would be tough going if they had to pay for putting all that carbon out there."

Check out "Just Around the Corner" on YouTube, and pass it along. --Karen Schechner