Here’s a tip for the week ahead: Take a kid for a walk in the woods, and explain to her why forests are so important. They absorb CO2 and release oxygen. They guard against erosion. They provide food and shelter to zillions of the planet’s creatures. Teach a child about forests, and encourage her to help these ecosystems thrive.

So suggests 365 Ways to Save the Earth (Abrams, 2005), for the day of August 16. This relatively compact coffee-table book, with an introduction by Elizabeth Kolbert [1], features stunning photos of nature around the world – from Greenland’s glaciers to Kenya’s flamingos to Uganda’s mountains to the deserts of Egypt and the treasures of Australia’s oceans. But the tantalizing pictures, from French photographer Philippe Bourseiller, are just one half of the book – the motivation for the accompanying messages. 365 Ways is a how-to guide, a daily manual for living a more Earth-friendly existence.

Which makes it all the more baffling that the book was published in hardcover, making it significantly heavier to ship than if it were paper-bound – meaning more fossil fuel is burned in the process of showing you how to stop burning so much fossil fuel. What’s more, it’s not even printed on recycled paper (or at least it appears not to be, and there’s no indication otherwise).

Al Gore’s recent book [2] on climate change, by comparison, is bound in paper and printed with chlorine-free ink on 30 percent recycled paper, with all the energy use from production offset by investment in green power. (Full disclosure: I contributed to Gore’s book.)

But hypocrisy aside, if such a thing is possible to overlook, 365 Ways is a useful book about making choices, about the power of the individual, and about the cumulative effects of lives lived without thinking about the impacts of our action.

Each day features a tip for reducing your impact, complete with background facts to explain how your actions make a difference. Most of the book’s planet-saving measures are easy to follow; many are ideas that may not have occurred to even the most eco-conscious among us. For instance: Clean the coils on your refrigerator to increase its efficiency by up to 30 percent. Install a tankless water heater, which uses less gas because it only heats water when you need it. Use sustainable school supplies, reusing as many as possible from last year and, when necessary, purchasing solar-powered calculators and recycled-paper notebooks. Replace mothballs with cedar chips. Clean your windows with vinegar.

Other tips are obvious but never too obvious to reinforce: recycle, turn down your thermostat, invest in socially responsible companies. With 365 to choose from, there are new ideas for everyone to try.

Still, some of the suggestions are mildly mystifying. The tip for August 12, for instance, is “Mow the lawn at reasonable times.” The rationale is noise pollution, but surely better advice is to mow your lawn with a human-powered push mower, which makes virtually no noise and uses no fossil fuels – or install a lower-maintenance groundcover, something that needs no mowing and nothing more than the natural amount of rainfall.

And still other tips in the book are questionable. The page for October 10 advises, “Say ‘no’ to disposable diapers,” suggesting the use of reusable cloth ones instead. One reason offered is that the cloth diapers will, when finally thrown away, decompose in six months – but unless you’re ensuring your cloth nappies end up in an industrial compost [2] heap, this simply isn’t true. (Cloth diapers that end up in a landfill won’t decompose.) And where water is scarce, as it is in most of the American West, using extra water to wash cloth diapers can be worse for the environment than throwing away disposables. Not to mention the use of detergent, and the bleach…

With Bourseiller’s photos showing us exactly what’s at risk, how could we not want to tread as lightly as possible? Perhaps the book’s publisher simply forgot to read the text?