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Sharri Markson

From The Age:

According to the UK Press Gazette, some Australian journalists have put even their tabloid British cousins to shame. "I have never come across such outrageous reporting practices," is the blunt analysis of Claire Burroughs, chief press officer at St Mary's Hospital, London.

[...]

But formal complaints have now been made to the Australian High Commission in London by St Mary's, by the liaison officer representing the family of Melbourne man Sam Ly, who died on Friday, and by several families of the injured who have not been identified.

[...]

Soon after, however, the press office learned that a second Australian journalist, Sharri Markson, a young Sunday Telegraph reporter who last year was named as News Limited's Young Journalist of the Year, had gained access to Professor Tulloch's room.

According to the ward's chief nurse, Markson had arrived at the ward looking upset, with a bunch of flowers, and insisting on seeing the injured man.

Professor Tulloch told staff at the hospital he initially assumed she was a student but realised she was a journalist when she began conducting an interview, and taking photographs with a digital camera. He completed the interview in the knowledge that she was a journalist.

"Sharri never misrepresented herself," says Sunday Telegraph editor Jeni O'Dowd. "She was never asked by any hospital staff why she was there. She introduced herself to Professor Tulloch, who was with his wife in the room. She told them who she was and where she was from. They were happy to talk to her and pose for photographs."

"She duped a nurse; I've had that from the nurse and I've had that from John (Professor Tulloch)," Ms Burroughs responds.

When Ms Burroughs arrived on the ward, she says, Professor Tulloch, who was suffering from vertigo as a result of a perforated eardrums and could not see properly because his glasses had been lost in the explosion, said he was tired and confused and no longer wanted to be interviewed.

The hospital immediately cancelled plans for the pooled interview, creating angry scenes that intensified over the weekend when Seven aired the hand-held camera footage of the interview that Reason had conducted during his encounter with Professor Tulloch.

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Why the death penalty is still a bad idea

As Execution Nears, Last Push From Inmate’s Supporters

By BRENDA GOODMAN

Published: July 15, 2007

ATLANTA, July 14 — It was a Friday night in a rough part of town when Officer Mark A. MacPhail of the Savannah Police Department showed up to work his second job, moonlighting as a security officer for the Greyhound bus station on Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, an area where transients were known to congregate and to drink through the early morning hours.

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Georgia Department of Corrections

Troy A. Davis was convicted of killing a police officer in 1989.

A few hours later, early on a Saturday morning in August 1989, Officer MacPhail was shot and killed as he tried to break up a fight over a can of beer. He never drew his weapon.

The man convicted of shooting the officer that night in 1989, Troy A. Davis, is likely to be the focus of an unusual clemency hearing before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. On Monday, the board is to hear the case of Mr. Davis, 38, who was sentenced to death in 1991 for the killing.

Though prosecutors have considered the case solved for nearly two decades, a chorus of eyewitnesses say the police arrested the wrong man. Now, on the eve of execution, scheduled for Tuesday, they have joined his family and his lawyers in an effort to get the courts to hear new evidence they say proves he is innocent.

With no physical evidence — the murder weapon was never found — prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses who took the stand against Mr. Davis.

But since his trial, seven of the nine have recanted or changed their testimony, saying they were harassed and pressed by investigators to lie under oath. Other witnesses have come forward identifying a different man as the shooter.

But because of a 1996 federal law intended to streamline the legal process in death penalty cases, courts have ruled it is too late in the appeals process to introduce new evidence and, so far, have refused to hear it.

Legal experts, including William S. Sessions, a retired federal judge, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a self-described supporter of the death penalty, have sounded the alarm over Mr. Davis’s case. They say it underscores the many ways the death penalty is unevenly and wrongly applied, particularly in the South, the region with the most death penalty cases.

“It would be intolerable to execute an innocent man,” Mr. Sessions wrote in an op-ed article for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It would be equally intolerable to execute a man without his claims of innocence ever being considered by the courts or by the executive.”

Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, is expected to testify at the clemency hearing Monday.

In addition to the hearing, lawyers for Mr. Davis asked for a new trial, but on Friday, Judge Penny Haas Freesemann of Chatham County Superior Court in Savannah denied the bid. Mr. Davis’s lawyers told The Associated Press that they would appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Mr. Davis’s older sister, Martina N. Correia, has watched her brother’s battle against a legal system she believes is biased against poor black defendants.

Georgia is one of only two states that do not guarantee defense counsel for condemned prisoners after they have exhausted their direct appeals.

“Our father worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Savannah,” said Ms. Correia, 40. “My fiancé is a police officer. We trusted that if you’re innocent, the system would work.”

“When they finally got people to tell the truth, they said it was too late to introduce it,” she said. “Some of these people, I don’t know how they sleep.”

On June 10, Ms. Correia and her mother led representatives from Amnesty International to the offices of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles and delivered thousands of letters written in support of Mr. Davis, asking for clemency.

It is rare for the board to commute a death sentence but not unprecedented. Since 1973, the board has granted 50 clemency hearings and commuted 8 sentences.

The last was granted more than three years ago, however, and even Mr. Davis’s lawyers acknowledge that despite the outpouring of support for their client, undoing 15 years of what previous defenders have admitted was poor legal work on behalf of their client would be a long shot.

“But we believe the truth can prevail,” said Jason Ewart, a lawyer from Washington who is representing Mr. Davis.

Some of the facts of the night Officer MacPhail was killed are not in dispute.

Early on the morning of Aug. 19, 1989, a man described as a neighborhood thug, Sylvester Coles, began harassing a homeless man named Larry Young for the beer he was carrying in a paper sack.

A crowd of bystanders, some of whom had spilled out of nearby Charlie Brown’s Pool Hall after hearing the ruckus, followed the fight as it progressed up Oglethorpe Avenue toward the bus station.

Several witnesses later testified that they had heard Mr. Coles threaten Mr. Young with a gun and then saw him pull a pistol out of his pants and then use it to beat Mr. Young on the head.

Fearing for his life, Mr. Young yelled for someone to call the police, and Officer MacPhail responded. He was shot twice and died.

Mr. Davis said he had been one of the bystanders who came out of the pool hall and watched as Mr. Coles tormented Mr. Young. He said that he had run when he heard Mr. Coles threaten to shoot Mr. Young and that he had never looked back.

Mr. Davis surrendered to the Chatham County Sheriff’s Department several days later when he learned the police were looking for him, said his sister Ms. Correia. The family says it trusted that what seemed to be a case of mistaken identity would quickly be sorted out.

With no physical evidence to connect Mr. Davis to the shooting, the prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of nine witnesses, including Mr. Coles, who identified Mr. Davis as the gunman the day after it happened, with a lawyer by his side.

Mr. Coles could not be found for comment this week.

But in an affidavit filed later, one of the witnesses, Antoine Williams, recalled his testimony that Mr. Davis was responsible for the crime.

“Even when I said that,” Mr. Williams said, “I was totally unsure whether he was the person who shot the officer. I felt pressured to point at him because he was the one who was sitting in the courtroom.”

Ms. Correia said that as the day of the execution drew near, some of the people who testified against her brother were feeling remorse.

“These witnesses, they are calling my brother and asking him to forgive them,” Ms. Correia said. “They thought if they told the truth and signed a piece of paper saying they lied before that’s all it would take. He would go free. They can’t believe he might die because they lied.”

The Shelf Life of Bliss

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: July 1, 2007

FORGET the proverbial seven-year itch.

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BYE-BYE HAPPINESS Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston’s live-in relationship turns sour in “The Break-Up.”

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Not to disillusion the half million or so June brides and bridegrooms who were just married, but new research suggests that the spark may fizzle within only three years.

Researchers analyzed responses from two sets of married or cohabitating couples: one group was together for one to three years, the other for four to six years.

While the researchers could not pinpoint a precise turning point — the seven-year itch, as popularized in the play and film about errant husbands, was largely a theory — they found distinct differences between the groups.

“We know the earlier ones are happier,” said Prof. Kelly Musick, a University of Southern California sociologist. “The initial boost that marriage seems to provide fades over time.”

Research also showed that the median duration of first marriages that end in divorce remains a little more than seven years, which means that those couples will likely spend more than half their married lives less happy than they were when they cut the first slice of wedding cake.

“Some folks start getting less happy at the wedding reception,” said Larry Bumpass, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote the study with Professor Musick.

Is there a three-year itch?

“There is not necessarily anything magical about year three,” Professor Musick said. “We know that typically when marriages end in divorce, half end before seven or so years and half end after. This is the same idea.”

Their analysis, which included unmarried, cohabitating partners but not gay couples, was based on the National Survey of Families and Households, a national

sample of 9,637 racially diverse households conducted by the University of Wisconsin Center for Demography and Ecology. The research, coupled with a survey released today by the Pew Research Center, provides an intriguing look at an ethereal part of marriage. Everyone knows the first blush of love is the strongest, but measuring how long it will last and whether that bliss is unique to marriage has always fallen more into the category of “here’s what my mother says” than something quantifiable.

In an academic paper they completed last year that analyzed earlier findings from the national surveys, Professors Musick and Bumpass compared responses to questions about how couples described their relationships, how often they fought and over what, and how they would envision their lives if they separated.

The research doesn’t address whether blissful 21st-century relationships are any more or less enduring than they were in the 20th century, so it may be that happy coupledom always came with a three-year expiration date. With nonmarital childbearing more common and women more economically independent, “What’s keeping people together is their love and commitment for each other,” Professor Musick said, “and that’s fragile.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the findings have some foundation.

Bart Blasengame, a 33-year-old freelance writer from Portland, Ore., was with his former fiancée for three years. “I felt like, by year three, we were both forcing it,” he recalled.

“It’s the whole cliché of pursuit,” he said. “Your dates are planned out like some Drew Barrymore romantic comedy with unicorns and rainbows. By year two, we were cruising along, living together, relatively happy. But from a growth standpoint things had started to atrophy. We were happy, content is a better word, but there was no spark.”

But the evolving rules of marriage provide both opportunities and pitfalls, Professor Musick said. “There may be greater potential to find fulfillment in relationships,” she said, “but that possibility and the expectations that come from it may lead to greater disappointment for some” if the expectations aren’t fulfilled.

Her bleak statistical assessment of the durability of enchantment is one of several new findings about relationships and marriage in America. In a word, the State of the Unions is precarious.

Even with the nation’s population increasing, the number of married Americans age 21 to 54 has declined slightly since 2000 — apparently for the first time, as measured by the Census Bureau. In the first decade of the 21st century, the proportion of Americans in every racial and ethnic group who were never married has continued to grow by double digits.

The United States is far from embracing Europe’s postmarriage model or its much higher rates of nonmarital births. Most Americans surveyed this year by the Pew center, in fact, still say marriage is an ideal, if a more elusive one.

While roughly 9 in 10 American adults eventually marry, the time they spend married has declined sharply, in part because they are marrying later and living longer as widows. Moreover, the Pew survey found that 79 percent of Americans say a woman can lead a complete and happy life if she remains single. The comparable figure for men was 67 percent.

While married couples generally say they are more satisfied with their lives, younger adults are far less likely to stigmatize alternatives such as living together and having children out of wedlock, according to the Pew telephone survey of 2,020 adults, which is available at www.pewresearch.org.

The Pew survey found that nearly half of Americans in their 30s and 40s have cohabitated. Among all adults, a minority (44 percent) said that living together without getting married was bad for society (only 10 percent said it was a good thing), although the Pew survey concluded that “by providing an alternative to marriage, cohabitation for some appears to diminish rather than strengthen the impulse to legally marry.”

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In general, married people are presumed to be happier and better off, but Professor Bumpass, who found that most marriages nowadays are preceded by cohabitation, and Professor Musick questioned whether those benefits were unique to marriage and whether they are stable over time.

“We conclude that the boundaries between marriage and cohabitation may become increasingly blurred,” Professor Musick said.

As for the three-year itch, Byron Lester, a 49-year-old information technology administrator from Bloomfield, Conn., is well suited to consider it. Married three years and two months ago, he said the secret to success is often in the details. “Little things really do mean a lot,” he said.

Mr. Lester said he abandoned his cherished newspaper reading during dinner because that is when his wife most enjoys conversation. “And I think she’s adapted to watching more sports,” he said.

Marriage rates vary widely by race, ethnicity, education, income (63 percent of white women over 18 who make more than $100,000 are married; 25 percent of poor black women are). Soaring divorce rates have leveled off, most experts agree, but one reason may be that the dissolution of live-in relationships are not taken into account.

Raoul Felder, the celebrity divorce lawyer whose favorite aphorism is that marriage is the first step on the road to divorce, says marital longevity has fallen victim to the velocity of our suped-up society.

“We’re all addicted to a television-clicker lifestyle,” he said.

But a dissipation of that all-enveloping rapture is no reason to give up on a relationship, many people insist.

“At times, sure, I’m bored,” said Sean Meehan, 51, a therapist from West Hartford who has been married for 14 years. “Who isn’t? But you talk about it with your spouse and you can switch things up.”

“People are so used to everything being disposable,” he said. “They throw out diapers, lighters, coffee cups, so they can throw out a marriage.”

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex adviser, cautioned, too, that the notion of a three-year itch can become self-fulfilling. “How dangerous it is to say something like that,” she said. “From now on, everyone who’s getting married will say it will last three years and then I will have to look for someone else.”

Or, as Paul D. Neuthaler, a divorce mediator in Westchester, said: “The fizzle tends to bubble out within a three- to five-year period when the basis for the marriage was purely physical or related to some attraction not closely associated with each partner’s essential character.”

Another new study, by Prof. Evelyn Lehrer of the University of Illinois at Chicago, contradicts the chestnut that women who marry later are more likely to divorce. She found that with both men and women marrying later than ever, later marriages seem to last longer.

Stephanie Coontz, director of and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a research group, said: “We’re getting close to a 180-degree turn in many of the rules about what makes marriage work and not work. The marriages of college-educated couples are becoming more stable.”

Professor Musick is happily married herself — “mostly,” she says — and will celebrate her third anniversary this fall. “My honeymoon,” she mused, “is almost over.”

Whatever the trends, marriage and relationships are in an unusual state of flux, as they were for baby boomers. With so much room to maneuver, younger couples have fewer firm markers to guide them.

In the film “Knocked Up,” Ben beseeches his father for advice after his one-night stand results in a pregnancy.

“I’ve been divorced three times,” his father replies. “Why are you asking me?”

Disability, the Insurance That Is Often Sadly Overlooked

By HILLARY CHURA

Published: June 30, 2007

It took just 17 days for Cindy Wrenn to realize that her disability insurance premium was not just another drain on her checking account. One-third of American workers are likely to be disabled for an extended period, and she became one of them when she had a stroke and brain aneurysm at age 28.

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Rollin Riggs for The New York Times

Disability pay helps Tammy Brown of Bradford, Ark.; her son, Jordan; and husband, Scott, deal with her Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Mrs. Wrenn signed up for her long-term disability insurance policy in February 2002, as a supplement to the one she had through her job as a licensed title agent. After her medical emergency, the policies paid 70 percent of her salary for the six months it took her to get back to work full time.

“We thought we were too young to have an illness and were pretty secure in our jobs,” said Mrs. Wrenn, of Knoxville, Md. “It wasn’t an outrageous premium, so we did it. Because of disability insurance, we got to follow through with the purchase of our house, and that is where we are living today.”

Disability insurance provides partial income replacement so that if someone becomes disabled, they need not dive into savings, sell a home or radically change how they live. Working people are more likely to become disabled than they are to die prematurely, even though twice as many people have life insurance as have disability coverage, according to industry statistics.

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, illness is a major factor in home foreclosures.

About one-third of 20-year-old workers today will become disabled before they hit retirement age at 67, according to the Social Security Administration. And the primary cause of disability is chronic disease — cardiovascular, musculoskeletal problems and cancer are leading diagnoses — rather than work-related mishaps or nonworkplace accidents, according to a 2007 study for the Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education, a nonprofit organization that informs the public about insurance needs.

While job-related expenses decrease if someone cannot work, other expenses can soar, especially if homes must be altered to accommodate a disability, said Craig Sampson, a lawyer in Richmond, Va. He bought disability insurance in 1999 when he was self-employed. He pays about $800 a year for $30,000 in coverage.

“Being disabled, you can go down the financial tubes fairly quickly,” he said. “Not only do you have regular living expenses you are unable to meet, but you have other expenses and all the uncovered medical bills. There’s a lot of stuff health insurance doesn’t cover.”

Tammy Brown of Bradford, Ark., signed up for short-term and long-term disability insurance after she started working for Wal-Mart Stores when she was 17. Fifteen years later, in December 2004, when she was 32, she learned that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and was told she had two to five years to live. She took the summer of 2005 off to spend time with her children, then 6 and 9, and received short-term disability. She went back to work in a wheelchair for about a year, then left on long-term disability in 2006. She receives about half of her salary now.

“Without disability, we would’ve lost our home, our vehicle,” Mrs. Brown, now 34, said. “We probably would’ve had to move in with my in-laws.”

The family bought a handicapped-accessible van and installed a handicapped lavatory complete with roll-in shower and rails around the toilet as well as two ramps to the house and a lift to help move Mrs. Brown around the home. Now unable to use her hands or arms to any degree or walk, she needs 24-hour care, either from relatives or someone they pay.

“As I look back on it, I don’t know what we’d have done without it,” Mrs. Brown said. “I never thought I’d ever use it. I thought I’d be working at Wal-Mart until I was 60 or 70.”

There are two major types of disability insurance. Short-term coverage, often offered by employers, covers the first part of a disability and may provide income for a week up to a year or two, depending on the policy.

Long-term insurance starts after short-term coverage ends and helps replace income for a predetermined period, usually two or five years or when the disabled person retires. It can be offered through work — though usually not free —as well as through private policies.

Even those with a policy through work should consider buying private coverage, as an employer’s policy may be bare-bones, could take a while to begin and will not continue when the employee changes jobs. It may also exclude pre-existing health problems.

About 42 percent of full-time workers have no short- or long-term disability, according to Michael Fradkin, vice president for disability product management for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Specialists agree that if you can afford only one type of disability insurance, buy long-term coverage since being without an income for several months would be a burden but being without an income ever again could be devastating.

Because independent disability insurance tends to be expensive — and becomes more so as people age — specialists urge workers to buy it as soon as they start working so they can lock in lower rates. Besides, young workers often have not yet developed health problems that will hinder coverage later.

Mr. Fradkin said many employers offer disability policies, but some have been shifting costs to employees. At the same time, insurers are changing policies to make benefits less generous. They also are becoming more selective in who is granted a private policy.

The policy should replace at least 60 percent of take-home salary and ideally up to 80 percent, if that level of coverage is affordable. Disability insurance will not cover the whole salary for fear that there would be no incentive to work if the entire paycheck could be collected for staying home.

Before purchasing an individual long-term disability policy, it is best to figure out monthly expenses as well as any income from employers, investments or the government. Realize, however, that Social Security payments tend to be minimal, have a five-month waiting period and apply only if someone cannot do any job. Payouts through work policies are subject to taxes, while benefits through independent coverage are tax free.

Bruce Block, a disability specialist with Jenkins Block & Associates in Baltimore, said few people really understood their coverage. Plans vary. Some pay if someone is unable to work in her own professions; others pay if a person cannot do any job, Mr. Block said. Some offer a combination. Others provide coverage for only a few years, some until Social Security begins.

Premiums vary depending on age, sex, income, health, whether a person smokes, what type of job they have and the exclusions they accept. Generally a young nonsmoking accountant who would not need a payout for two years would pay a smaller premium than a chain-smoking construction worker who would want immediate disbursements.

Cara J. Lovenson, an insurance broker and employee benefits consultant in New York City, said she recently sold a policy to a 45-year-old man in relatively good health who is paid about $200,000 a year. She said the policy cost him about $2,800 a year, covered 80 percent of his salary and started payments after 90 days.

Mrs. Wrenn said that when she and her husband, Matthew, discuss ways to cut expenses, dropping their disability is never an option.

“I’ll never let it go,” Mrs. Wrenn said, “well, not until I retire.”

Buying into the Green Mvt

Buying Into the Green Movement

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: July 1, 2007

HERE’S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.

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WORLDLY GOODS The 438-horsepower Lexus luxury hybrid sedan.

Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.

Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight— careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand — and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.

That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.

Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available under Home Depot’s new Eco Options program.

Such choices are rendered fashionable as celebrities worried about global warming appear on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green issue,” and pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Lenny Kravitz prepare to be headline acts on July 7 at the Live Earth concerts at sites around the world.

Consumers have embraced living green, and for the most part the mainstream green movement has embraced green consumerism. But even at this moment of high visibility and impact for environmental activists, a splinter wing of the movement has begun to critique what it sometimes calls “light greens.”

Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.

“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.

The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.

Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.

It’s as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell’s moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil’s food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.

The issue of green shopping is highlighting a division in the environmental movement: “the old-school environmentalism of self-abnegation versus this camp of buying your way into heaven,” said Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online environmental blog that claims a monthly readership of 800,000. “Over even the last couple of months, there is more concern growing within the traditional camp about the Cosmo-izing of the green movement — ‘55 great ways to look eco-sexy,’ ” he said. “Among traditional greens, there is concern that too much of the population thinks there’s an easy way out.”

The criticisms have appeared quietly in some environmental publications and on the Web.

GEORGE BLACK, an editor and a columnist at OnEarth, a quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently summed up the explosion of high-style green consumer items and articles of the sort that proclaim “green is the new black,” that is, a fashion trend, as “eco-narcissism.”

Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, said the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” he said. He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.

“We turn toward the consumption part because that’s where the money is,” Mr. Hawken said. “We tend not to look at the ‘less’ part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot ‘green’ homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or ‘green’ fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.”

He added: “The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.”

Environmentalists say some products marketed as green may pump more carbon into the atmosphere than choosing something more modest, or simply nothing at all. Along those lines, a company called PlayEngine sells a 19-inch widescreen L.C.D. set whose “sustainable bamboo” case is represented as an earth-friendly alternative to plastic.

Rick Friedman for The New York Times

A second home, complete with solar panels and constructed with salvaged lumber, in Edgartown, Mass.

Manjunath Kiran/European Pressphoto Agency

Laptops and desktop computers said to be good for the earth.

But it may be better to keep your old cathode-tube set instead, according to “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” because older sets use less power than plasma or L.C.D. screens. (Televisions account for about 4 percent of energy consumption in the United States, the handbook says.)

“The assumption that by buying anything, whether green or not, we’re solving the problem is a misperception,” said Michael Ableman, an environmental author and long-time organic farmer. “Consuming is a significant part of the problem to begin with. Maybe the solution is instead of buying five pairs of organic cotton jeans, buy one pair of regular jeans instead.”

For the most part, the critiques of green consumption have come from individual activists, not from mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. The latest issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, has articles hailing an “ecofriendly mall” featuring sustainable clothing (under development in Chicago) and credit cards that rack up carbon offsets for every purchase, as well as sustainably-harvested caviar and the celebrity-friendly Tango electric sports car (a top-of-the-line model is $108,000).

One reason mainstream groups may be wary of criticizing Americans’ consumption is that before the latest era of green chic, these large organizations endured years in which their warnings about climate change were scarcely heard.

Much of the public had turned away from the Carter-era environmental message of sacrifice, which included turning down the thermostat, driving smaller cars and carrying a cloth “Save-a-Tree” tote to the supermarket.

Now that environmentalism is high profile, thanks in part to the success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary featuring Al Gore, mainstream greens, for the most part, say that buying products promoted as eco-friendly is a good first step.

“After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, “you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants.”

John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, argued that green consumerism has been a way for Wal-Mart shoppers to get over the old stereotypes of environmentalists as “tree-hugging hippies” and contribute in their own way.

This is crucial, he said, given the widespread nature of the global warming challenge. “You need Wal-Mart and Joe Six-Pack and mayors and taxi drivers," he said. “You need participation on a wide front.”

It is not just ecology activists with one foot in the 1970s, though, who have taken issue with the consumerist personality of the “light green” movement. Anti-consumerist fervor burns hotly among some activists who came of age under the influence of noisy, disruptive anti-globalization protests.

Last year, a San Francisco group called the Compact made headlines with a vow to live the entire year without buying anything but bare essentials like medicine and food. A year in, the original 10 “mostly” made it, said Rachel Kesel, 26, a founder. The movement claims some 8,300 adherents throughout the country and in places as distant as Singapore and Iceland.

“The more that I’m engaged in this, the more annoyed I get with things like ‘shop against climate change’ and these kind of attitudes,” said Ms. Kesel, who continues her shopping strike and counts a new pair of running shoes — she’s a dog-walker by trade — as among her limited purchases in 18 months.

“It’s hysterical,” she said. “You’re telling people to consume more in order to reduce impact.”

For some, the very debate over how much difference they should try to make in their own lives is a distraction. They despair of individual consumers being responsible for saving the earth from climate change and want to see action from political leaders around the world.

INDIVIDUAL consumers may choose more fuel-efficient cars, but a far greater effect may be felt when fuel-efficiency standards are raised for all of the industry , as the Senate voted to do on June 21, the first significant rise in mileage standards in more than two decades.

“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.

“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.”

In fact, those light-green environmentalists who chose not to lecture about sacrifice and promote the trendiness of eco-sensitive products may be on to something.

Michael Shellenberger, a partner at American Environics, a market research firm in Oakland, Calif., said that his company ran a series of focus groups in April for the environmental group Earthjustice, and was surprised by the results.

People considered their trip down the Eco Options aisles at Home Depot a beginning, not an end point.

“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”