A User’s Guide to Saving Earth : Books: A Berkeley baby boomer offers simple suggestions for the environmental novice.

John Javna has written 20 books including a couple that were big hits, but he wasn’t prepared for the reaction to this one. “People are ordering it by the dozens,” he said. “Every time the telephone rings it’s like this new adventure. It’s kind of unbalancing me, in a way.”

Javna was sitting in his study at home in North Berkeley, taking orders for a book that is just getting into stores and hasn’t been advertised anywhere. It’s a modest, 96-page, blue and gold paperback entitled “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth”--the sort of high-minded environmental advocacy that usually earns the writer a pat on the back from the already committed, and no money.

Javna, an enterprising baby boomer who heretofore has compiled pop culture minutiae into books with titles such as “The TV Theme Song Sing-Along SongBook,” formed the Berkeley-based EarthWorks Group to create the new book when he decided that individuals were ready to “do something” about the environment, but didn’t know where to start.

So, with a band of writers and researchers, he put together a primer for the environmental beginner. It not only tells people what they can do (“Snip six-pack rings”), but how to do it (“Before you toss six-pack holders into the garbage, snip each circle with scissors”), and why they should do it (“They have become an ocean hazard to birds and other marine life: A beach cleanup along 300 miles of Texas shoreline in 1988 turned up 15,600 plastic six-pack rings in 3 hours.”)

Or, “Stop junk mail.”

Why? “Americans receive enough junk mail in one day to produce enough energy to heat 250,000 homes . . . . and about 44% of it is never even opened or read.”

How? “Write to the Mail Preference Service, Direct Marketing Assn. which can stop your name from being sold to most large mailing list companies . . . . And recycle the junk mail you already get.”

The book also is packed with optimistic statistics. For example: “If every commuter car carried just one more passenger, we’d save 600,000 gallons of gasoline and keep 12 million pounds of ‘greenhouse gases’ out of the atmosphere every day.”

Early market response validates Javna’s instincts. Of the first printing of 26,000 copies, two-thirds have been ordered by bookstores and the rest, boxed in Javna’s basement, are “practically walking out of here,” he said, in a phone interview this week.

Javna is publishing the book himself (as EarthWorks Press) so, he said, he can keep the price down to $4.95. Perhaps as a result, people are buying it in batches:

* This week, he received a call from a Cape Cod resident who had heard “50 Simple Things” mentioned on a radio show and wanted to order a dozen copies for her friends.

* When he displayed the book at last month’s Globescope Pacific conference in Los Angeles, his first order, from University of Hawaii environmentalist Bruce Miller, was for 160 copies.

* The Greenpeace Store in San Francisco ordered two dozen books and sold out almost immediately, including a dozen in one day which is “very unusual,” reported store manager Evan Conroy. He ordered 100 more and sold those in a week. “This book is blowing out of the store!” Conroy said. The reason? “It’s an accessible format, and people are looking for answers.”

The book is organized in one-page chapters, and is broken into three levels of personal action:

* easy-to-take actions,

* those that require some effort,

* actions for the environmentally committed.

Javna is already talking about a second printing. But “because we use recycled paper, and printers don’t keep it in stock, it takes time to get an order filled.”

Those buying “50 Simple Things” aren’t just committed environmentalists--”it’s everybody,” he added happily. “People are just in love with the idea that there is something they can do to help the environment. It’s like my wildest dreams come true.”

Javna, 39, who grew up in suburban New Jersey in a “regular middle-class family,” has a history of chasing dreams. He went to Kenyon College in Ohio to study history, and dropped out because he didn’t feel like he was getting the right kind of education.

“The Vietnam War was going on, the counter culture was still pretty strong, and I think you could say that a search for identity was de rigueur, “ he recalled.

He headed for Oregon with the vague idea of becoming a forest ranger (“I thought I could just show up at the forest and apply”). Discovering that a specialized college degree was needed, he packed his steel guitar into a Ford van and toured the country as an itinerant musician, picking up hitchhikers who shared his quest, and concentrating on “hip communities,” like Santa Fe. “No matter where we went, there was a commune to hang out in,” he said. “It was a troubled time, but it was also a wonderful time.”

He tried everything from caretaking a gold mine in Oregon to owning a dollhouse manufacturing company in Vermont, but it wasn’t until 1983 that he found the career that felt right. With his brother, Gordon, he wrote a book called “60s!” that was published by St. Martin’s Press. “It’s a survey of facts, trends, trivia and fascinating little bits of information,” he said, “that illuminate the ‘60s.”

Javna, who one friend describes as a “hyper-energetic, human idea machine,” became an information junkie.

“Trivia can be an important thing as well as a minor thing,” he explained. “It can be fascinating details that help to illuminate any subject. I like lists of things, I like to find out where things come from, or how they got started.”

Utilizing that philosophy, he produced more paperback books. They included “How to Jitterbug,” “The Doo-Wop Sing-Along Songbook: The Classic Rock and Roll Songs You Always Wanted to Sing” and “Cool Tricks! A Grown-Up’s Guide to All the Neat Things You Never Learned to Do as a Kid!” He frequently writes in collaboration, and, with some fellow pop-culture writers, created the Bathroom Readers Institute. They are currently represented on B. Dalton’s best-selling list with “Uncle John’s Second Bathroom Reader,” an anthology of light-hearted essays on subjects ranging from “Where Pantyhose Came From” to “What Henry Thoreau Thought.”

All that whimsy laid the groundwork for his new book which is entirely serious, despite its lighthearted overtones.

“I’m a baby boomer, which puts me in the heart of things,” Javna said. “You learn that when you are thinking of something, so are eight million others.. . . So I feel that when I’m interested in something, I am in massive company.”

Right now he and his wife, Sharon, are expecting their first child and Javna is thinking seriously about the future.

“I wanted to take this skill and use it to communicate something that is worthwhile, and I was thinking about home ecology. I was wondering how much water I used every day. We had a drought here, and the news started seeping through that the environment is really important. It was making me feel bad, to know that so much was going on that needed to be reversed, and I didn’t know what to do.”

The obvious answers, to join an organization, or write to your legislators, did not satisfy him. “I wanted me to be able to do something, and as I talked to other people, I found the same feeling. They wanted to make the right choices, not, inadvertently, the wrong ones.

So last spring he began to assemble interested writers and researchers to fill the need for a how-to primer. There was no lack of information, and Javna’s passion for research served him well. He spent much of June in Washington hiking from one environmental or government office to the next, his backpack bulging with pamphlets, brochures and studies.

“Everything we’ve got is documented,” said Javna. “We had three basic sources of information: the environmental organizations and individuals, the government agencies, and trade organizations.” (Because of the scope of the information, Javna emphasizes that he can’t guarantee results, but is providing a starting point.) As a researcher, he found the environmental organizations to be well-organized and helpful. The government was tougher, he said, because of the bureaucracy.

When he went to the Environmental Protection Agency, wanting to know if an automobile tuneup would improve gas mileage, “they sent me from office to office to office--the car section, the air-pollution section--and I finally ended up where I had started. If anything, it dramatized for me the problems for anyone starting on a simple level to find out things like this.” (What he found, and subsequently published, is that a “well-tuned car uses up to 9% less gasoline than a poorly tuned car. That means 9% fewer toxic emissions.”)

An early collaborator was writer Phil Catalfo, who was already immersed in home ecology. “I insulated my attic, and in my 100-year-old house it meant we had to turn the heater on half as much. That’s a substantial saving,” he said. “So many of these things have an economic benefit to the consumer.”

The writers settled on a conversational style for reader appeal, and on the bite-sized informational format.

Said Javna: “We wanted to write like beginners, because when experts write, they use a lot of jargon. And we wanted the information broken down, so people could read it in one quick burst and think ‘That’s simple--I can do that,’ then act on it.”

They also aimed for a tone that would not be as grim as current “greenhouse effect” headlines--coming up with chapter titles like “The Twilight Ozone,” “Leave It A Lawn,” “Brush Up on Paint,” “Your Gas Is as Good as Mine.”

“We wanted to overcome the dread and despair about the environment that many people suffer from,” said Catalfo. “We are trying not only to inform, but to empower.”

“A number of people came together on this,” he added, “but John was the major domo, the vortex.. . . John’s a real bundle of energy--he seems to operate with a million little pieces of paper with notes on them.”

In the course of his research, Javna picked up more collaborators.

One was Chris Calwell, a research associate in the San Francisco office of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a member-supported, nonprofit environmental group with a double focus on research and public action.

“My participation kind of mushroomed,” said Calwell. “First, John asked if I had a couple of facts that I might contribute, then I started getting more and more involved.

He ended up providing some of the environmental “factoids,” writing the introduction and doing a technical editing of the manuscript.

The book will fill an important need at NRDC, he added. “When you have 100,000 members scattered all over the country, you get a lot of questions and rarely the same one twice.”

Information about the book, which was being shipped to Los Angeles environmental stores and book stores starting last week, is available at EarthWorks Press, Box 25, 1400 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, Calif. 94709.

The new book is dedicated to the “not-yet-born.” And the EarthWorks Group is already working on its next project. “50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save the Earth” is scheduled to be out in April.

“That’s the important audience,” said Javna.

Top 10 Simple Things to Save the Earth

1. Turn down your water heater. For every 10 degrees, you save 6% of the energy used. The recommended setting is 130 degrees.

2. Put a plastic bottle in your toilet tank. You can save between 3,000 and 5,000 gallons of water a year. (Don’t use a brick, because bricks can dissolve and clog up the water system.)

3. Install low-flow faucet aerators and shower heads. A family of four can save 17,000 gallons of water a year.

4. Keep your car’s tires properly inflated. You will increase gas efficiency by up to 5%. About 50% of America’s cars have under-inflated tires. If they were all inflated properly, we could save up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline a year and prevent up to 40 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, the primary “Greenhouse gas,” from entering the atmosphere.

5. Bring your own shopping bag. It takes a 15-year-old tree to provide 700 grocery bags, and grocery shoppers use billions of bags every year.

6. Eliminate waste before you buy. Packaging waste accounts for about one-third of all the garbage Americans send to landfills. For a start, buy eggs in cardboard, not Styrofoam cartons; and beverages in recyclable glass or aluminum containers.

7. Recycle cans, glass and paper. The energy saved from one recycled aluminum will operate a television set for three hours.

8. Replace a regular (incandescent) light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb. It uses a quarter of the energy and will last 10 times longer. And it will keep a half-ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere over the life of the bulb.

9. Buy rechargeable batteries for household use. Americans use 2 billion disposable batteries a year and 75% of them contain mercury, a highly toxic substance that can leak from landfills into soil and ground water.

10. Set the blades higher on your lawn mower. Forget the manicured look, and cut the grass two to three inches high. This encourages the roots to grow deeper and helps retain moisture in the soil, requiring less water.