You may know what it means to you, or you may be totally confused by it.

If you attended the recent San Francisco Green Festival, you could not have left without a better notion of the immense possibilities the green movement offers.

"This is the tipping point," said Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange, festival organizer with Co-op America.

"As the environment gets destroyed, and it's in the paper and on the radio, it gets easier to recruit people into the green revolution."

The three-day event, billed partly as a green marketplace, was in full swing Nov. 10 at the Concourse Exhibition Center, which, despite the rain, was packed with people weaving along the corridors of booths and taking in the full schedule of seminars. About 41,400 people attended this year, up from the 13,000 that attended the first one in 2002.

The plethora of ecologically mindful clothes, foods, body products, health remedies, building systems, materials and services gave the festival the air of a bazaar of righteous consumerism.

And so it was.

"People are here shopping," said Mark Spellun, editor in chief of Plenty magazine in New York. "They want sustainable alternatives in every aspect of their lives."

Spellun, whose magazine shows new products as well as do-it-yourself alternatives, said young people are not likely to protest toxic dumps or drop out but are likely to take responsibility for their actions.

He pointed behind him to an early Plenty cover depicting a buxom blond cartoon character who remarks to herself, as she catches sight of her dream guy in an auto, "He could be the one. He drives a hybrid, but does he compost?"

"That says it all," he said. "Simplifying our lives is something we all struggle with."

Caryn Prince ventured from Sonoma to attend a seminar on solarizing the home and to find books on vegan cooking as well as a source for online fair-trade coffee. Being green is all about "learning to change your habits," she said.

Kevin Johnson, the owner of an environmentally aware general store in Arcata, said lessening one's impact on the earth was the point. "You are not creating more havoc and waste as you go."

Johnson said he recalled getting started during the first wave of the green movement in 1990, but this second wave may be permanent. His circle of once-isolated and eccentric product suppliers has felt the shift. One woman who melts down used crayons and makes new ones "has been getting tons of orders" since Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, he said.

Global Exchange's Danaher broke the green movement down to three aspects: social equity, environmental restoration and financial sustainability - "the triple bottom line," he called it.

"The main terrain of the struggle is right here in the skull," he said. "If you can change consciousness, then you can change history, and the political will and capital will shift."

His advice was to "lower your spending on stuff, but make it better stuff"; to eliminate the need for harmful chemicals, air pollution and sweatshops; and to buy "closer to where you are."

"If you have a choice between local and organic, take local."

Green rhetoric was just beginning to penetrate the minds of brothers Emilio, 17, and Gabriel Corpus, 15, of Danville, who had paused to drink organic Santa Cruz sodas.

Global warming? "I do worry about it. I don't really know what to do, but I try to recycle here and there," Emilio said.

"My mom makes me gather all our bottles together," said Gabriel.

Both said they were most impressed with some of the fashionable bags and accessories they'd seen made from hemp, recycled sails or plastic potato chip bags.

Tisa Smith was standing by the recycling bins helping visitors decipher where to put cups and plates. She knew green meant doing things that "are not detrimental" to the planet, but she also understood its social meaning. Smith, an AmeriCorps volunteer, said she had started a recycling program at Elsa Widenmann Elementary School in Vallejo, where she was helping children learn to play games through the national Sports for Kids program. "We are promoting getting kids active and a healthy community, and we provide organic snacks."

Artist and activist Pam Pam Gaddies asked, "What is this green thing?" at a seminar called "Urban Roadblocks to Health and Prosperity," as she pointed out that many more thousands of people have been killed in city drug wars than in Iraq and that many in deprived neighborhoods are looking for hope and healing first.

Fellow panelist Sudeep Rao of the Literacy for Environmental Justice project in Hunters Point answered the question of what can be done partly by noting that everyone can push for better housing, education and environmental conditions in poor neighborhoods.

"Every single person has a sphere of influence," he said. "If you flex your spiritual and emotional muscles hard enough, you can create a tectonic wave."

To Doug Vincent of Sacramento, standing at the booth for his Earth Tones Internet and phone company, the question of being green was simple: You give back.

His company compensates for the effect of using cell phones and their towers, he said, by recycling phones, making employees bicycle to work and donating to environmental groups, even those that push for restrictions on phones and towers.

"We all have a social responsibility to take care of the Earth," he said. "You cannot go through life and be completely green. You can only do your part."

E-mail Laura Thomas at lthomas@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle