Putting a Different Spin on Standard Vacations : Trends: A growing number of guides are highlighting alternative places and activities for travelers interested in learning and participating in worthy projects.

Mary Dymond Davis is an advocate for environmental causes and as such, she believes that one of the best ways to preserve the Earth is to lead a simpler life. Her enthusiasm has prompted her to write an unusual but important--and, indeed, enlightening--guide to the multiple places in this country where the simpler life is being attempted.

In “Going Off the Beaten Path: An Untraditional Travel Guide to the U.S.,” Davis takes inquiring travelers on a stimulating journey down the back roads and byways of the nation’s active environmental movement. She pays a call at such diverse destinations as an ecologically sound village being built in Oregon, a successful worker-owned natural-food restaurant in Vermont, numerous organic farms, a highway wildflower project in Louisiana and the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Maine, one of several sites included that commemorate noted environmentalists.

The book is the latest in a small but growing collection of guides focusing on alternative travel, where the pleasure of a vacation is in the pursuit of learning or in volunteering time and labor for a worthy project. This kind of travel--which includes foreign home stays, trail rebuilding in the national parks and language lessons abroad--goes beyond simple sightseeing and recreation to involve travelers personally in the place they are visiting. “Vegging out” at the beach does not qualify.

The value of alternative guides is that they call attention to interesting--and usually inexpensive--places and activities that might be overlooked because they are rarely promoted by tourist offices or mentioned in standard travel literature.

One reviewer called Davis’ book a guide to the “good stuff” in America, and at 473 pages, her list of good stuff is as lengthy as it is diverse. Scoff as you might at the idea of touring a waste-management site on your vacation, Davis nevertheless leads her readers to places that certainly are as informative and maybe as diverting as, well, an Epcot Center exhibit at Disney World.

Among them is the Norlands Living History Center in Livermore Falls, Me., a working farm where weekend visitors assume the role of members of a 19th-Century farm family. As Davis notes, the 445-acre property represents a time period when recycling in America was integral to daily life.

“That’s true,” agrees Barbara Ames, Norlands’ educational director. “Our live-in guests are surprised we don’t have garbage cans. Everything is used up, and no food is wasted. We feed the scraps to the pigs.”

The farm raises potatoes, parsnips and hay. Guests, who pay $195 each for a three-night stay, tend the crops with the help of horse teams and 19th-Century implements. Lodging is in a cottage without plumbing or electricity, and meals are cooked on a wood-burning stove. “People come away with an appreciation of what farm life meant,” says Ames.

In the guide’s preface, Davis spells out her objective: to describe “projects that point the way to an America that uses natural resources without depleting them, maintains the diversity of species, and enjoys the benefits of pure food, clean air, clean water and wilderness.” The places she has chosen invariably welcome visitors, who she hopes will carry away insights into an environmentally sound lifestyle.

A longtime environmental writer, Davis, 55, is no dispassionate observer. She has ties to what has been called the movement’s “fringe” element as a one-time writer for the Earth First! Journal, a publication of Earth First!, a group that favors confrontation, guerrilla tactics and civil disobedience on behalf of environmental issues. Co-founder Dave Foreman broke from it last year over a policy dispute, and now he is one of the editors of a new quarterly magazine, Wild Earth, whose publisher is Davis.

The magazine plans to distance itself from Earth First!’s radical approach, says Davis, who also has worked for the Sierra Club, a mainstream organization. Instead, Wild Earth’s objective is to be taken seriously as an influential voice on national environmental policy. “We want to reach policy-makers and scientists.”

None of Earth First!’s radicalism is to be found in Davis’ book. It is a reasonably straightforward guide to specific places where governmental agencies, private organizations and individuals are endeavoring to improve the environment.

“I aimed the book at as broad an audience as possible,” she says, which meant she did not include “way, way, way out places.” Whatever your political views, her knowledge of the environmental movement and her participation in it does give authority to “Going Off the Beaten Path.” I’m not aware of any other book like it.

At $15.95, the thick paperback actually is in its second edition. It appeared first in a shorter version published in 1990 by Appalachia-Science in the Public Interest, a small environmental education organization in Livingston, Ky., for which Davis also worked as a writer. Situated in scenic woodlands alongside a river, the center makes use of resource-saving technologies such as a solar hot-water heating system and a composting toilet. One of the center’s functions is to sponsor environmental retreats. It is included in Davis’ guide.

Soon after the book appeared, it was picked up by Noble Press of Chicago, a small publishing house that specializes in books on social issues. David Driver, the firm’s head, is a former stockbroker who turned his back on Wall Street three years ago. He looks for books to publish that he thinks can play a role in shaping the nation.

“There’s a large group of bright, inquisitive readers with a liberal bent who are interested in social, environmental and political books,” Driver is quoted in an interview earlier this year in Publishers Weekly. This is the sort of readership that should delight in some of Davis’ offbeat entries--many of them included in a section nicely titled “Places in Harmony With the Natural World.”

Among them is the Laredo “Blueprint” Demonstration Farm, a 40-acre test farm set up in Laredo, Tex., as a joint venture involving Texas and Israel--a partnership formed because the two share similarly dry climates. The farm displays such alternative environmental technologies as wind-generated electricity, the use of aquatic plants for water treatment, drip irrigation (which will be put to good use in the upcoming world’s fair in Seville, Spain) and the construction of farm buildings from bales of straw. The project is viewed as a catalyst for change in the Laredo area.

Nicknamed the “trash museum,” the Environment Center Museum at the Hackensack Meadowlands in New Jersey has organized a series of trash exhibits to demonstrate the harm today’s throwaway society is causing the environment. Other exhibits suggest remedies. The Meadowlands, a state reserve, is a stopover for migrating ducks, geese and shorebirds.

A more conventional destination is Seaside, a lovely upscale resort community on Florida’s Gulf Coast near Panama City that has strong yuppie appeal. It is being built in the style of a 19th-Century village, where, as Davis notes, residents “could walk to stores, service centers and schools.” This is being achieved in Seaside by clustering residences around a commercial core as a way of eliminating strip sprawl and reducing the need for cars within town. Cottage rentals are available year-round.

The factory where Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream is made in Waterbury, Vt., qualifies environmentally because of its financial contributions to community-welfare programs in Vermont and elsewhere, and because of Rainforest Crunch. The nuts for this ice cream are purchased from rain-forest peoples, so they will have an economic reason to preserve the trees rather than chop them down for farmland. Guided tours of the factory have become one of Vermont’s biggest attractions.

As in other aspects of life, Davis is a believer in simplicity in travel. So in keeping with her philosophy, she urges travelers to explore first the offbeat places nearby before heading for more distant sites she has described. And maybe, if you have become an environmental convert, you might go on foot, by bicycle or, at the very least, by public transportation rather than private car--as your own contribution to cleaner air.

One section of the book is devoted to “Places for Remembering,” a look at some noted environmentalists and the places where they lived, traveled and worked.

Thomas Jefferson is recognized for his efforts in experimental farming at Monticello, his Virginia estate, and Frederick Law Olmsted for New York’s Central Park, which fostered the creation of urban parks elsewhere.

Another section features natural areas--such as national and state parks, forests and wilderness areas--that have historical importance to the environmental movement. One is Redwood National Park in Northern California, created and later expanded through the efforts, in part, of concerned environmentalists wanting to save the redwood trees from being cut for timber.

Among other recent guides to alternative travel:

--”New World of Travel: A Guide to Alternative Vacations in America and Throughout the World” by Arthur Frommer (Prentice Hall: $16.95). A lifelong advocate of budget travel, Frommer annually compiles his list of travel opportunities “that stretch your mind and change your life.” They include folk-dance camps, religious retreats, cultural-awareness tours in the Third World, arts-and-crafts vacations, bicycle touring, weight-loss getaways, foreign home stays and hostel stays.

--”Environmental Vacations” by Stephanie Ocko (John Muir: $15.95). A guide to volunteer science projects where vacationers participate in ongoing scientific research in such fields as archeology, botany, paleontology, geology and animal behavior--often in primitive lodging facilities in remote corners of the world.

--”Volunteer Vacations” by Bill McMillon (Chicago Review: $11.95). More opportunities, beyond the scientific, to put labor and skills to worthy uses, such as rebuilding hiking trails, assisting in historic restoration projects and assisting in medical missionary efforts in Third World nations.

--”Volunteer!: The Comprehensive Guide to Voluntary Service in the U.S. and Abroad” edited by Adrienne Downey (CIEE-CVSA: $6.95). Listed are some 200 voluntary service organizations needing volunteers to provide medical care, restore historical monuments, serve as advocates for the poor, aid refugees, help preserve the environment and build community centers. The guide is published jointly by the Council on International Educational Exchange and the Commission on Voluntary Service and Action.

--”Work, Study, Travel Abroad” (St. Martin’s: $10.95) and “The Teenager’s Guide to Study, Travel, Adventure Abroad” (St. Martin’s: $11.95). Both publications of the Council on International Educational Exchange, they detail such diverse learning opportunities as language institutes, academic study abroad programs, creative-arts schools, home stays, volunteer opportunities and educational tours. The guide for teen-agers is aimed at students 12 to 18; the other, for all ages.

--”Soft Paths” by Bruce Hampton and David Cole (Stackpole: $10.95). A guide to hiking, camping and backpacking in the wilderness without harming it. Specific techniques are described for minimal-impact fire-building and waste disposal in such diverse regions as desert and Arctic tundra. The guide is a publication of the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyo.

--”Elderhostels: The Students’ Choice” by Mildred Hyman (John Muir: $15.95). An evaluation of Elderhostel programs at 220 colleges in the United States. Elderhostel is an inexpensive back-to-campus vacation and education program for travelers age 60 and older.