You won't find a "scuppie" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

But you might find a few loading free-range, organic, air-dried chicken into their SUVs at the local Whole Foods parking lot or putting photovoltaic solar panels on their $500,000 houses with a bamboo kitchen floor or recycling a single malt scotch bottle with a graceful toss of their Rolexed wrist.

Scuppie, short for Socially Conscious Upwardly mobile Person, is the latest "ie" label trying to enter our national lexicon.

First there was hippie, then preppie, then yuppie, followed by buppie and guppie.

But scuppie?

Now before you cry foul on a label, consider that the man behind the stereotype -- a 39-year-old Manhattan investment banker named Charles L. Failla -- is an Armani-wearing, card-carrying scuppie himself.

In fact, he has penned "The Official Scuppie Handbook," a self-deprecating guide on how to be green and have your stuff, too. Scuppies can be urban or suburban, young or old, men or women.

"If Janis Joplin and Gordon Gekko would have had a love child, it would have been a scuppie," Mr. Failla said. "It's part hippie and part yuppie."

Mr. Failla, who says he has offers from two publishers for his book, coined "scuppie" because he was tired of the cumbersome term "green socially conscious consumer." He thought of the word after someone in his office said she was surprised to learn that "yuppie scum" like him was doing pro bono work. Hey, I have a social conscience, too, he thought.

"To be socially conscious doesn't mean that you have to sustain yourself on tofu and bark and have a composting toilet," Mr. Failla said. "If you are willing to do that, that's fine. I am not. Scuppies are striving for a happy medium. They want to do good things for the world, but are not willing to give up too much. Hey, I would love to go to that protest march, but I have a tee time" at the country club golf course.

So just in time for Earth Day today, we asked people what they thought of the "scuppie" label, which may or may not become a household word but nonetheless speaks to the trendiness of going green.

"I'm a borderline scuppie," said Bob Sendall, a high-end party planner. Last Saturday, he was preparing an organic food feast for "Ecolution," an avant-garde Earth Day fund-raiser, featuring edgy eco-fashions and green-themed entertainment, at the Mattress Factory on the North Side.

"I haven't gone there 100 percent. When I get my hybrid car, I will be there. But I am waiting for a big hybrid car."

Mr. Sendall, owner of All in Good Taste Productions on the North Side, didn't mind the scuppie label. "It's interesting."

But in other quarters, the term went over about as well as asking for double plastic bags at the grocery store checkout.

"Everything is a cliche -- scuppies, yuppies. We don't need that," said Bob Cook, a 61-year-old who lives on the North Side. "It infantilizes everything."

Then he stopped himself as he loaded his organic food into his Ford Explorer SUV -- "but a 10-year-old one" -- in the Whole Foods parking lot in East Liberty.

"I am a cliche," he said with an exasperated sigh. "I know that."

But labels, he said, ignore larger issues. "Look around here. You got to have a lot of money to shop at a place like this. They can't even get a food market in the Hill District."

Hard-core environmentalists weren't crazy about the scuppie label, but they said it spoke to trendiness of being green.

The word scuppie reminded Doug Johnson, a manager at the East End Food Co-op in Point Breeze, of an article he had read, "What to do when your lifestyle becomes trendy."

Mr. Johnson, 28, is so committed to environmentalism that he and his wife sold their car and use only bikes, using a bike trailer for their 2-year-old boy.

He's all for people being environmentally conscious. "The more, the better," he said. "But it is a little disheartening that it is a trend. Trends have a way of going away."

Mr. Johnson definitely is not scuppie material. Neither were his customers, including a man walking out the door with ropey limbs and long, flowing hair, looking like he stepped out of the original Earth Day in 1970.

Mr. Failla said he was attacked on the blogosphere by the "greener than thou" crowd who called him an elitist liberal and worse. "Some of them have some anger issues. My mother was reading it and said, 'Why are people so mean to you?'"

But local environmentalists weren't bashing scuppies.

"If these people are doing little green things and feeling good about it, that's nice, but not enough," said Maren Cooke, a board member for Group Against Smog and Pollution. But she said a scuppie might make a real impact by changing corporate environmental policy.

Admittedly, scuppies and hard-core environmentalists can be strange bedfellows, and the two groups don't always mix well socially, said Don Gibbon, program and environmental education coordinator of the Sierra Club Allegheny Group.

"But we will take their help. I don't demand moral purity. I am not morally pure myself. We are all sinners."