Back in my post-collegiate salad days, a popular little paperback was published called "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth." If I'm remembering correctly, it was one of the first books to suggest that we could shop, reuse, and recycle our way to a better world.

This seemed pretty appealing during the era when President Reagan was heating up the Cold War to the point that a nuclear exchange with the USSR seemed not just possible, but practically inevitable.

With those ICBMs locked and loaded, recycling the Sunday paper felt comfortingly tangible -- just as likely to protect the environment as marching in one more fringe political protest rally that the TV news and politicians would ignore.

Well, the US survived the Soviet Union -- and so did the market for green advice books. Two decades after "50 Simple Things," just try to enter a bookstore (virtual or actual) without bumping into over a dozen tomes offering advice on how to shop, eat, dress, and furnish our way to a safer, cleaner, healthier world.

I recieved a review copy of one recently: "Living Green: The Missing Manual," by Nancy Conner. It's a pretty good guide, if uneven. Conner alternates straightforward advice on mixing your own non-toxic cleansers, lowering the thermostat, eating organic, et cetera, with more hardcore explanations of how hybrid automobiles work, what building green "means," the pros and cons of different renewable energy sources, and the problems with factory farming.

Conner may be hoping that finding answers to the personal care questions will inspire curiosity about the systemic issues that made them problems in the first place.

As with many of these guides, only a few pages at the very end (10 out of about 280) are devoted to "getting involved" in environmental causes -- whether by fundraising for advocacy groups or cleaning up a local woodland or waterway.  The most simple way of all to get involved -- contacting elected officials with questions and opinions about clean power, unsafe food, and everything else discussed in previous chapters -- is not addressed.

But, as befits a guide to living green in the after-Reagan, post-Cold War era, 3 of the 10 pages are devoted to investing in environmentally sensitive mutual funds.

There are so many of these books out there (I even helped write something similar myself several years ago: "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century"), that I'm guessing they sell pretty well overall.

And why not? With mega-quandires like global warming bearing down on us, and political progress on these issues so hard-won and incremental, the notion of trading even recession dollars and a little elbow grease for green absolution remains appealingly simple.

Certainly, there are inherent contradictions in buying new stuff in order to conserve resources: replacing an old wastpaper basket with one made from recycled newspaper may be marginally more virtuous than buying one made from virgin plastic, but neither is preferable to repairing the old basket.

Not every green consumer is going to become an enviro-advocate. But given that we're a nation of shoppers, some guidance on making enviro-conscious choices at the store can't hurt. Maybe it does lead a few to ask bigger questions and demand better solutions -- that is, along the path from "consumer" to "citizen."