Get ready to shrink your footprint on Mother Earth. No Birkenstocks necessary.

SO, YOU WANT to save the earth.

While that's noble and all, figuring out which are the must-dos amid the slew of should-dos bandied about by talking heads can get mighty confusing pretty quickly. Luckily, you have us to cut through all that chatter.

We checked in with some experts to find out their top tips for decreasing your impact on the earth - otherwise known as reducing your carbon (or ecological) footprint.
"A carbon footprint is really a visual metaphor for what kind of energy and resources each of us [uses as we go through our day]," says Lisa Wise, executive director of the Center for a New American Dream. "If you have a large footprint, it means you require a large number of environmental resources to sustain your place on this planet. The smaller the footprint, the more sustainable your lifestyle is."

To put it more scientifically, a carbon footprint measures "the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide," according to CarbonFootprint.com (a website where you can measure your own usage). Nowadays, Americans are among the leaders in using up the earth's resources - which is not exactly something you want to be known for. The average American "generates about 15,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year from personal transportation, home energy use, and from the energy used to produce all of the products and services we consume," according to ClimateCrisis.net. And that, the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report says, gobbles up nearly 24 acres' worth of natural resources ­during a lifetime. Compare that with the average carbon footprint of the Italians, which is seven acres; of the Japanese, which is 12 acres; and of the Indonesians, who tread lightly, using just three acres per person.
But no matter how well (or poorly) each individual country is doing, it all adds up to a not-so-pretty picture: Since the late 1980s, the footprint of the collective population on earth has exceeded what can be sustained by a whopping 20 percent or more. If we keep it up, by the year 2050, the world's population will have used up between 180 and 220 percent of the earth's biological capacity.

Most environmental agencies aim for an 80 percent reduction in overall carbon emissions by 2050. "That is really almost a nonnegotiable number," says Wise.

To do your part, consider these steps: