I walked into my liquor store to discover that I can "change the world" if I "change my vodka."

If I purchase "The World's First Eco-Friendly Gift Set," which includes a 750-milliliter bottle made of 85 percent recycled glass I can "personally join this movement ... protecting the environment."

For double the cost of my typical Smirnoff, this opportunity comes in a box of various shades of green leaves and includes a Phillips CFL light bulb that lasts nine years. The box even provides the recipe for "Eco-Tea-Ni," a martini garnished with a mint sprig and utilizing the "new age" old favorite, green tea. Is America a great country, or what?

We've become the first culture in history able to purchase social and environmental responsibility with the flick of a credit card. We can save the planet from global warming with a ticket to a concert hundreds of miles away. We can "offset" our plane flight to Puerto Vallarta by sending $4.17 to some Web site that promises to plant enough trees in unidentified places to counter the carbon our trip produces.

And we can buy booze that makes us "a force of change for the environment."

If P.T. Barnum was alive today, he'd no longer be able to say, "There's a sucker born every minute." Now the frame's got to be nanoseconds.

Ever since "The United Colors of Benetton" began their brilliant ad campaign a couple of decades ago to sell social responsibility — instead of their greatly overpriced sweaters — marketers have discovered this wonderful tool called "guilt."

Today, after at least a decade of "democratizing luxury," we are convinced that doing the one surely unsustainable thing — purchasing more — somehow leads to sustainability.

In an age of extraordinary communications tools, like television and the Internet, marketing has successfully transcended the whole "let the buyer beware" economic system by making invention the motherhood of necessity, rather than the other way around. Marketers today provide something having no practical worth and then convince us we've got to have it. Americans have become so brilliantly trained that we leave our brains at home when we jump in the car, or onto the Internet, with our credit cards.

Our "affluenza" is so bad it's affected our physical and mental health, as books like UCLA psychologist Peter Whybrow's "American Mania" illustrate.

Whybrow maintains that most of today's stress and emotional trauma grow from a human body that nature designed for periods of scarcity conflicting with a mindset now trained for 24/7 purchasing.

Even before green marketing, Americans, though only 41/2 percent of the world's population, used 30 percent of the world's resources while, not coincidentally, having the highest obesity and stress rates in the world. Today, when America's per capita carbon dioxide emissions is twice the next-highest country and six times the carbon usage of the typical Chinese, we cavalierly drive across town and then pay extra to purchase something allegedly "green."

Adam Smith would, I think, be horrified. The father of capitalism was talking about a rational system where buyers and sellers knew each other and recognized that, as the good old boys say, "what goes around, comes around." He couldn't possibly find "self-interest" in conning ourselves into buying objects of no practical value and he'd likely faint if told about all the driving we do to get to those useless items.

Consider again my "Evolution of Vodka" gift box. Thankfully, the Earth Friendly Distilling Company's processing is "chlorine free," which means that the Missouri bottler must not use city water. Since most municipalities treat their water with chlorine to kill bacteria, the green marketer likely sucks water out of the Missouri River, certainly a pollution-free source, being downstream from Iowa's hundreds of feed lots and millions of square miles of corn doused in nitrogen fertilizer.

But the saddest concept in "Eco-Friendly Gift Sets" — of all products, not just vodka — is that selling "Eco-Friendly" masks reality. If we Americans are going to deal with our greenhouse emissions, our pollution, our obesity, our affluenza, our incredible usage of oil, we must address our overly consumptive living habits.

No matter how much we purchase, sustainability simply ain't for sale.

Randy Salzman is a former journalism and communications professor at Augusta State University now living in Charlottesville, Va.