This paper continues the line of research on representing actions, on the automation of commonsense reasoning and on planning that deals with causal theories and with action language C. We show here that many of the ideas developed in that work can be formulated in terms of logic programs under the answer set semantics, without mentioning causal theories. The translations from C into logic programming that we investigate serve as a basis for the use of systems for computing answer sets to reason about action domains described in C and to generate plans in such domains.