Let us buy Anna Sova Luxury Organics Turkish towels, $58 apiece. Let us buy eco-friendly 600-thread-count bed sheets, milled in Switzerland with U.S. cotton, $570 for queen size.

Let us purge our closets of sinful synthetics, purify ourselves in the flame of the soy candle at the altar of the immaculate Earth Weave rug.

And let us never consider the other option: not buying.

Almost three-quarters of the U.S. population buys organic products at least occasionally: From 2005 to 2006, the sale of organic nonfood items increased 26 percent, from $744 million to $938 million, according to the Organic Trade Association.

But when environmentalist Paul Hawken is asked to comment on the new green consumer, he says, dryly, "The phrase itself is an oxymoron.

"The good thing is people are waking up to the fact that we have a real [environmental] issue," says Hawken, who cofounded Smith & Hawken but left in 1992, before the $8,000 lawn became de rigueur. "But many of them are coming to the issue from being consumers. They buy a lot. They drive a lot."

Holey sweaters get pitched, not mended. Laptops and cell phones get slimmer and shinier. We trade up every six months, and to make up for that, we buy and buy and hope we're buying the right other things, though sometimes we're not sure:

When the market research firm Hartman Group asked devout green consumers what the USDA "organic" seal meant on a product, 43 percent did not know. (It means the product is at least 95 percent organic - no pesticides, no synthetic hormones, no sewage sludge, no irradiation, no cloning.)

Which is why something gets lost in translation: Polyester bad; throw out the old wardrobe and replace with natural fibers! Vinyl flooring bad. Rip up the old floor, lay down new cork!

It's done with the best of intentions, but that "bad" vinyl was probably less destructive in your kitchen than in a landfill. Ditto for the older, but still wearable, clothes.

And that's not even getting into the carbon footprint left by a nice duvet's 5,000-mile flight from Switzerland.

Really going green, Hawken says, "means having less. . . . Everyone is saying, 'You don't have to change your lifestyle.' Well, yes, actually, you do."

But buying green feels so guiltless.

"There's a certain thrill, that you get to go out and replace everything," says Leslie Garrett, author of The Virtuous Consumer, a green shopping guide. "New bamboo T-shirts, new hemp curtains."

Garrett describes the conflicting feelings she and her husband experienced when trying to decide whether to toss an old sofa. "Our dog had chewed on it. There were only so many positions we could put it in" without the teeth marks showing. But it still fulfilled its basic role: "We could still sit on it without falling through."

They could still subscribe to the crazy notion that conservation was about conserving. Says Garrett, "The greenest products are the ones you don't buy."

There are exceptions. "Certain environmental issues trump other issues. Preserving fossil fuels is more critical than landfill issues," she says. If your furnace or fridge is functioning but inefficient, you can replace it guilt-free.

Garrett and her husband bought a sofa eventually - but only after finding a home for the old one.

Making the effort to be a green consumer is something Chip Giller, editor of the enviro-blog Grist.org, applauds.

"Two years ago, who would have thought we'd be in a place where terms like locavore and carbon footprint were household terms?" says Giller, who views green consumption as a "gateway."

The important thing, he says, is for people to keep walking through the gate, toward reduced air travel, energy-efficient homes, and much less stuff.

"We're not going to buy our way out of this."