Green Me

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While Ready, Set, Green fits neatly into the one-size-fits-all category, many of the books piled up in my office most certainly do not. Some of them, like Big Green Purse, instruct shopaholic moms on how to buy their way green. Others, such as YOU CAN PREVENT GLOBAL WARMING (and save money!), are for those who worry most about climate change. For them, there's also a book about adopting an eco-chic, low-carb lifestyle, How to Live a Low-Carbon Life. And then there's Go Green: How to Build an Earth-Friendly Community, for those who have already cleaned up their own act and are looking to indoctrinate everyone around them. And of course there are titles that are just so foolishly specific that I don't know why anyone would buy them. One example is Biking to Work. Do we need a book for this?

Some books offer ways to save money by saving the earth, and some show how you can spend money saving the earth. Among the former, there's Go Green, Live Rich, by David Bach, with the help of science writer Hillary Rosner. Bach is the guy who has written nine "get rich" books in the past nine years, selling more than six million copies. I always wondered who actually bought these things, a notion that stems from my sense that I should be able to figure this out without the help of a guy who's getting rich selling me books about trying to get rich. But in the end, Go Green, Live Rich was the book that left me feeling most hopeful, precisely because Bach socks you in the wallet. I learned a lot about just how much -- in dollars and cents -- I could do for me while doing something good for everyone.

"Consider this," Bach says. "Perhaps, after you read this book, you will decide to try just four tips: #3, 12, 26, and 37." These are improving your car's fuel economy (saves $884 a year), lowering (or raising, depending on the season) your thermostat three degrees ($114), making your own nontoxic cleaning products ($580), and bringing your lunch to work (which reduces your use of take-out containers and saves $2,250). That's $3,828 saved in one year. Our get-rich guy later shares some investing tips, noting that if you were to invest that sum every year in a green mutual fund, after 30 years you'd have $696,479, assuming an average return of 10 percent a year. (That rate of return may seem far-fetched this year, but averaged over three decades, it's certainly possible.)

Another eye-opening Bach observation: if your household income is $50,000 and you own two cars, one out of every three paychecks is used to pay for them. When you factor in gas, insurance, maintenance, registration, and depreciation, keeping up a car costs $8,580 a year. That's a lot of money saved if you, average American, give up one of your household's two cars. I don't own a car, so I shared this tip with my mother, a recent retiree who would happily ditch her Subaru and ride a horse everywhere if she could. She's just reported back that my stepfather will be leaving his car in the garage in order to "try out the bus."

The beauty of Bach's book is that, by assigning dollar values to everything we consume, we can't help but give some thought to the amount of excess crap that defines our modern lives: cars, bottled water, iPods, iPhones. It's not just about being a do-gooder; it's about money, which, if you subscribe to the financial self-help mantra, has something to do with winning.

So what to make of this pile of books? Will making me more sustainable -- thinner, richer, less inclined to death by suffocation under giant piles of unnecessary stuff -- prove to be a sure path toward planetary sustainability? Or, coming at it from the other side, can adopting environmental values improve my physical fitness and financial security and even make me happier?

Perhaps. In his 2007 book Deep Economy, Bill McKibben cites a jarring, counterintuitive statistic: the wealthiest nations in the world report the lowest overall levels of happiness. The poorest, those with the least stuff, have a different sort of wealth -- rich culture and close communities -- lost to most Americans. By extension, shopping guides may not lead the way to green nirvana (hardly a surprise), but taken in total, my sagging shelves laden with self-help books hold quite a few reasons to believe that we might soon be headed in the right direction. And that makes me a little happier. Slightly improved, even.

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 EDITOR'S NOTE: The original version of this article omitted Hillary Rosner from the author credit for Go Green, Live Rich. We regret the error.