I've always been a pretty sustainably-minded person. My father is a professor at UCLA whose specialty is Native American literature; I grew up going to pow-wows and taking cross-country trips to the Badlands. My nickname in college was, embarrassingly, "Flower."

But, like most of us, my eco-focus stopped at water conservation and recycling. I bought conventional cleaning products because that's what I was used to-even though I saw the "natural" cleaners on the same shelf, I wrote their claims off as marketing rather than turning over the bottles and comparing the labels.

I didn't really make the connection between the environmental impact of how I lived until I met Christopher Gavigan at Healthy Child, Healthy World. I was nine months pregnant with my third child, and we met to talk about my helping with publicity and marketing efforts for the organization once the baby was born.

We sat in his no-VOC painted office filled with oxygen-emitting plants and as he explained to me what his mission and focus was I basically had a panic attack. We talked about lead and VOCs in paint, furniture and carpets; I was in the process of remodeling my house and had been living and working as the workmen stripped old paint and installed new carpets. He told me about pesticides and how they work their way up the food chain; I vowed to eat less meat and make it organic, and to buy locally produced food as much as possible.

I went home and got rid of all my chemical cleaning products after learning how much they contributed to indoor air pollution. When my baby was born, I took Christopher's advice and used BPH-free bottles (after breast feeding first, of course). With the other two babies I had used disposable diapers; with this one I alternated between cloth, flushable inserts and chlorine-free disposables in a pinch.

I started doing my own research. And I quickly realized how much of an impact what I bought for myself and my family could have on the environment-and the marketplace. For example, most clothing is made of cotton, which is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world, accounting for 25 percent of all pesticides used in the U.S. according to the Sustainable Cotton Project.

It takes an astounding one-third of a pound of pesticide to make one t-shirt and two-thirds to make a pair of jeans. (Dump a pound of flour into a bowl and keep that visual in mind the next time you go shopping.)

Let's say one manufacturer makes the decision to buy conventional cotton, and a second manufacturer decides to make a similar t-shirt in organic cotton. They make the shirts, and put them side-by-side in a store. Now if everyone in that store has made the decision to not buy conventional cotton t-shirts but buy organic cotton instead, that regular cotton t-shirt will go unsold and the other will sell out. The next time the first manufacturer goes to make his shirts, hopefully he'll choose organic cotton. The organic cotton farmer will have more business. There will be more competition in organic cotton and the price will go down. And so on.

This analogy could be applied to food, makeup, furniture, clothing, cars-I was astounded at how simple and easy it was for me to think outside of the conventional box when it came to shopping. Just putting a fresh perspective on it also helped me look closer at whether I truly needed something, or just wanted it. When I did end up in a shopping situation, I looked at labels and origin and typically ended up putting back on the rack what I might in the past have purchased.

Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff also blogs on eco-fashion at www.ecostiletto.com

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