The first clue is the video trailer, which appeared online in mid-December. With its rapid-fire images of violent tornadoes, cracking ice floes, wild lightning storms, and flooded subdivisions, it looks like an ad for a Hollywood disaster flick. But in fact it’s promoting a book: The Weather Makers, Australian author and scientist Tim Flannery’s look at the history and impact of climate change.

The trailer is the first step in an unusual – and unusually big – marketing push that HarperCollins Canada is planning for the Canadian edition of the book, which is out this month. And the campaign is also a prime example of how publishers are taking a different approach to books about environmental issues, both in terms of content and promotion.

HarperCollins Canada is pulling out all the stops for The Weather Makers. Flannery will embark on a five-city tour this spring, to Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, and Ottawa, where he will appear at press conferences, bookstores, and Q&A sessions. There’s also a strong green tint to the campaign, says Harper publicity director Rob Firing: Toyota Canada is donating the use of hybrid vehicles for Flannery’s tour, and the book itself, as well as most of the marketing materials, will be printed on ancient-forest-friendly 100% post-consumer fibre.

It’s an ambitious plan for a foreign-originated title by a little-known author. But Firing says that given the response to the book in Australia, where it was released last fall, and advance buzz for the forthcoming Canadian, U.S., and U.K. editions, he expects it to capture a wide audience. (The book has a different publisher in each of those markets.) “Flannery has been able to get all of the science right and give it to you in readable form,” says Firing, who adds that the book is also a call to action that suggests ways ordinary people can combat climate change.

That call to action might be crucial to the book’s success; the push for The Weather Makers comes at a time when it’s debatable whether readers are willing to spend money on old-school environmental-issue titles. Indeed, Greystone Books publisher Rob Sanders says the market for straight-ahead environmental books collapsed several years ago. “We weren’t able to sell the good lectures, the scolding lectures, or the dire warnings,” he says. For Chris Plant, co-publisher of New Society Books, a small B.C. press that focuses on sustainability issues, the key word in environmental publishing these days is “solutions.” New Society’s The Sustainability Revolution, by Andrés R. Edwards, has had strong showing, selling between 5,000 and 6,000 copies across North America since its release nine months ago. “The movement has morphed from protests about an issue to ‘What can we do about it?’” says Plant.

Like HarperCollins, Greystone is betting this spring on an issue-driven book that’s newsworthy and shocking: the house will publish Thomas F. Pawlick’s The End of Food, about the food-processing industry, in May. “He gives us chapter and verse about what happens to the food we eat, and that’s an issue that’s going to hit people hard,” says Sanders.

Greystone associate publisher Nancy Flight, who is also David Suzuki’s editor, says a big-name author also helps propel sales of environmental books. Suzuki’s books resonate with readers as much for his storytelling skills as the content, she argues. “His book Tree tells a Douglas fir’s life story from its beginning, when the seed is released from a pine cone and finds a spot in the earth, ’til it’s a nurse log on the floor of the forest,” she says. “So there’s a nice narrative arc there that’s used to bring in all kinds of scientific information and issues.”

Chris Bucci, senior editor at McClelland & Stewart, agrees with Flight’s philosophy, saying that the way to combat reader fatigue over environmental issues is to find unique ways to tell stories. One recent proposal Bucci was interested in was Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, which will address the global food trade through the pair’s experiment to eat only foods produced within a hundred-mile radius. “That’s a really good way in to these types of issues,” says Bucci. “Maybe it doesn’t scream environmental book off the top, but I think it will be successful, and perhaps part of the reason is it has a different approach to the subject matter.” (Random House Canada ended up buying the book, and will publish it in spring 2007.)

From a bookseller’s perspective, blurbs are key to moving environmental books that lack big-name authors, according to Ellen Pickle, owner of Tidewater Books in Sackville, New Brunswick. “Endorsements by better-known people will help sales,” she says. That should be no problem for The Weather Makers. The Canadian edition has a foreword from the president of World Wildlife Fund Canada and features an appendix of green power retailers that was vetted by Greenpeace Canada, not to mention blurbs from authors Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) and Ronald Wright (A Short History of Progress), as well as U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair.