Being Green (and having it easy)

The colour is clear enough – a mixture of blue and yellow, combined in different quantities to create a varying hue that can either belong to the warm or cooler shades, and can be dark or light in nature. But it is the symbolism of green, the use of its name that attracts us. What I mean to say is that green is now the new red – you say it and people understand you mean “clean,” or “energy efficient.” In the same way that red moved from “revolutionary” to “commie bastard” after the Russian Revolution, green has moved from its previously complex, and often contradictory array of mixed meanings including “luck,” “inexperience,” “growth,” “sickness,” and “jealousy” to symbolize love for the planet earth. Green, after all, is the same colour of nature: fresh budding leaves, pastoral mounds of grass, with mossy valleys cradling burbling brooks.

The problem with green is not necessarily the use of the colour to symbolize conservation, but the increasing loss of the terms “environmentalism” and “ecologically friendly.” Green was a prominent colour in this movement from its very beginning, but this change in rhetoric indicates a number of things which lead us to question the direction of the environmental movement, or “Green Politics,” of the early twenty-first century. One is that the use of green in reference to ecological preservation caters specifically to those who are reluctant to do so. The rhetoric of the “Green” movement avoids association with two of the main killers of the public’s interest in the environmental movement: eco-terrorists and, worse yet, tree-hugging hippies. It’s like referring to gay and lesbian activists as “Rainbows” – remove the part we feel uncomfortable with, that whole weird sex thing, make the movement visually appealing and the “normal” public will support it. (I wonder if feminism has something like that – perhaps if feminists were referred to as “Yellow” (a nice non-gendered colour in North America) then we could forget about the derogatory images we have concocted in the media of bra-burning hairy man-hating women and see them for what they really are. Most likely we’d just support the colour.)

Green is a euphemism and one easily associated with other meanings - money, freshness, organics - making it attractive to a wide array of people. It has become a code word used by marketing powers to indicate to capitalist individuals that they can indeed dabble in the mysticism and lore of liberalism and leftist politics while still feeling good about their choice of car, bank, washing detergent, camera, etc. The environmentalist has now become, without any extra hassle, the average North American: aware of the planet but in no way connected to the hemp-clad long-haired mother-earth lovers chaining themselves to trees far removed from society in the dense rain-soaked west coast forests.

Times have indeed progressed. Growing up in a logging town it was an oddity in the early 1990s to bring Tupperware lunches to school. My mother, a student of environmental studies, installed recycling bins at my elementary school, saved wrapping paper, and brought cloth shopping bags to the grocery store, much to the annoyance of the cashiers. She was seen as a little strange, particularly in an era of prosperity which did not call for reducing, re-using, or recycling. Thanks to the progression of the “Green” movement, however, I can smugly refer to her sensible actions as “before their time,” and thus far removed from the present capitalism-induced pseudo-concern for the well-being of planet earth (which, despite being the actual focus of environmental movements, now seems to have been lost in the sea of Green Politics).

Factiousness and self-degradation aside, the term “Green” indicates not a love or concern for the planet; it is a business venture, much like nutrition. Calling a car “Green” is like calling Wonder Bread nutritious. This is an advertising scheme purely for profit, and one which makes the consumer feel just a tad bit more like a healthy and helpful citizen without the cost of any true effort.

It really begs the question – what is with this fascination with colours? They are indeed the most basic symbols (that is, for people who have the optical ability to gather all hues), but they are by no means pure in meaning. Colours have been around for a long time and humans have done their best to label them and, lest we forget, label each other with them. The thing about “Green” is that it is a trend. This concern for the “Green” movement is not that it will die like all other trends but that we will be distracted by the colourful shades and flashy movements, continue to be righteous with our consumption and remain ignorant to the issues the movement is apparently making us aware of: the preservation of our resources, saving water, buying locally, walking and using communal transport. And just as trends die colours remain to be colours – they have no meaning, they are simply broken fractures of white light, mixtures of paint on a palate. And finally, symbols lose their meanings over time, particularly when the meaning was never truly there in the first place.