The term "green jobs" might conjure an image of workers operating the turbines in a wind farm, such as those just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Somerset.

For David Foster, the term has a broader meaning, one that includes the steelworkers who help to make the blades for those turbines.

Expanding the understanding of what it means to go green is part of the thrust of "Good Jobs, Green Jobs," a conference starting tomorrow at the David L. Lawrence Conference Center. Mr. Foster is executive director of the Blue-Green Alliance, which is coordinating the gathering, billed as the first national conference on green jobs.

"There are green products, and there are green processes," Mr. Foster said. A green product is one specifically designed to address environmental issues. But a green process is simply "making products in ways that don't have a harmful effect," a criterion that could apply to virtually any product. When manufacturers learn to use green processes, their employees' jobs become green jobs.

"The green revolution isn't just creating new and different jobs," Mr. Foster said. "It's revitalizing and creating new investment in a lot of the jobs we already have."

He cited M.A. Mortenson Co. as an example. The Minneapolis-based company completed its 50th wind power project in January, installing a 205-megawatt wind farm in Chandler, Minn. That made Mortenson, already one of the nation's largest contracting companies, the nation's largest installer of wind turbines.

Nearly 800 people have registered for the conference, which will offer presentations on such topics as "Public Policies and Private Investments," "The Potential and Growth of Biomass in Rural America," and "The Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement: Can Climate Protection Drive Job Creation?" Presenters will include representatives from government, nonprofit organizations, academia and labor.

Indeed, the alliance itself is a partnership, which some might deem unlikely, between two of the largest labor and environmental organizations -- the United Steelworkers union and the Sierra Club. The two organizations worked together on several policy initiatives in recent years, and, "we discovered that we had a lot of common values," said Mr. Foster, a former USW district director.

"We found ourselves advocating the same kinds of investments in green energy," and as a result, they formed the Alliance in June 2006.

Mr. Foster said the Alliance hopes to produce two outcomes from the conference, one general and one quite specific. As a general outcome, it hopes to "heighten the public discussion about the green economy"; more specifically, it plans to produce a "green jobs policy book" from the conference proceedings, to be released on Labor Day, that will provide legislators and business leaders with guidelines for developing environmentally friendly policies.

Mr. Foster foresees a day when thinking green will become the norm in the world of business.

"I think that we've reached a point at which not just the efficiency with which we produce products in the global economy, but the manner in which we produce them, has become key to our survival as a human civilization," he said. "We're in the dawning of understanding that that has to become second nature to our economic activity."

He pointed to the American automotive industry, which has been in tumult for the greater part of a decade, as an example of what could happen to companies that fail to accept the green paradigm soon enough.

"Those companies that have been slow to pick up on the importance of fuel efficiency and have been resistant to making that a cornerstone of what they do are suffering the consequences of that," he said.

America's chemical industry faces a similar danger, Mr. Foster said, as European chemical companies transform their operations to comply with European Union regulations on chemicals that became law in June. The regulations require companies to submit information about the chemicals they work with to a European Chemicals Agency database, and to substitute less dangerous chemicals for more dangerous ones.

Leaders of the American chemical industry "ought to think about the long-term environmental impacts of substances that they manufacture and make use of," he said. "If we choose to resist ... we'll lose" to European companies.

Conversely, thinking green can open up opportunities, he said. For instance, a national effort to retrofit existing buildings to green standards "can rebuild an entire manufacturing infrastructure."

The alternative to taking global leadership in the greening of business is that instead of benefiting from it, "we can be the people that come knocking on the door with a tin cup," he said.

For more on the conference, visit www.greenjobs

conference.org.