After selling her Washington, DC-based communications company in 2001, Diane MacEachern spent a few years looking at the marketplace and researching how to use her advocacy and communications skills and environmental expertise to protect the environment and improve people’s lives. The result was Big Green Purse, a web-based consulting company she launched on Earth Day 2007. Her book, Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World, followed in spring 2008.

Why not title the book The Big Green Wallet?  “Eighty-five cents of every dollar is spent by women,” MacEachern explains. “I wanted to talk to the person who had the most clout!” The message of the book, which led Glamour magazine to call MacEachern an “Ecohero” and garnered her “The Image of the Future Award” from the World Communications Forum, is simple but revolutionary. If women shift their spending to greener products and services, they’ll change what and how companies manufacture – and protect themselves and their families as well.

MacEachern works with the U.S. EPA, ENERGY STAR, and many renewable energy companies to help motivate people to make the ultimate marketplace shift – away from fossil fuels, and towards solar and wind. She also helps green companies market their products and services to the same people whose spending shifts are making their new businesses possible: women.