On Independence Day in the United States, this “Best of BTB” special edition features author/activist Jane Mosbacher Morris. She urges us to reflect on the future of publishing, from news to novels. “What we bring into our households, what we bring into our offices, truly influences the environment in which we’re living,” she says.
Interview with Jane Mosbacher Morris
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In our own homes and in the House of Representatives, the holder of the power of the purse is in a powerful position. Spending choices determine what we will have for dinner and how government will invest in guns and butter. Yet spending choices also matter in many far-reaching and lasting ways.
Jane Mosbacher Morris is founder and CEO of To The Market, a company that connects businesses and consumers to ethically made products from around the world. In her new book, Buy the Change You Want to See, Mosbacher Morris urges us to think consciously about all of our purchases and to leverage our consumption habits to bring about change in the world around us. The choices we make whenever we open our wallet, she says, affect our environment, our communities, and our culture.
“Supply chain transparency focuses on how to make the journey that our product takes from raw material to our front door a more transparent one,” she explains. “We’ve often talked about farm to table. Well, I like to talk about factory to front door.”
In the same way, Mosbacher Morris urges greater transparency in publishing.
“It really matters where we get our publishing products from – our books, our news, our novels, whatever they may be. It matters to the individual authors, but it also matters to our culture, too,” she tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “If as a community, as a culture, we want to support robust storytelling and photography over scandalous celebrity tell-alls, we have the ability to impact that by purchasing publications that are doing that great work.
“What do we want our national discourse to sound like? What do we want to have conversations with our friends and family about? Is it about a celebrity divorce, or is it about something much more meaningful, much more thought-provoking, and much more important? What we bring into our households, what we bring into our offices, truly influences the environment in which we’re living.”
