The Color Green
by Don Miller
I am old enough to recall a time when green was just, … well just a color. Do you remember the Captain Kangaroo show and his buddy, Mr. Green Jeans? Was it just that his jeans were green or was his name Mr. Jeans? I never really figured that out. The family TV back then was a black and white set. On it his jeans looked gray, not green. That is how I feel about the word green today; its usage is as gray as Mr. Green Jeans’ jeans, on a black and white TV.
I see green used in all kinds of marketing schemes now, green footprints, green business, green this and green that, it is almost endless. I Googled green and got 1,975,132,456 hits. I looked green up in my old Webster’s dictionary and the first definition stated it as a… color. There is a surprise. I had to read through seven definitions until I could get the one that suggested, “concerned with or supporting the environment.”
I have recently heard people referring to green as being “in” or “hot.” My thought was, oh boy, I recall disco being “hot” and “in” once. Hot and in albums, some mirror balls, and maybe a closeted white suit or two? Disco didn’t last because it wasn’t embraced as a way of life in society. (Some things we should be grateful for.) Green needs to be raised past the level of “hot or “in” to a level of consciousness in society. Maybe parameters and guidelines need to be established as to what is green and what is not.
When I was a sixth grader, there was this kid who was always dropping big, “thought bombs” on me. While I was wondering about why the bubblegum in baseball card packages didn’t stick to the cards, this kid was asking me, “You know how when we look at let’s say grass, we decide to call or label it green?”
I say, ”Um, yea?”
Then he said, something like, “Do you think that what you see we call green, but that my green, might really be your blue, but we call it green?” (Picture my young face starting to go blank at this point.)
He went on, “And when we call the sky blue, it might really be green to me, but we call it blue. We see different colors but have them labeled so we can communicate. It is about perception and labels.” (At this point don’t even picture the look on my face.)
To quote the late Harry Caray, “Holy Cow!” Not knowing anything about the chemistry or the mechanics of the eyeball at age 11, this thought made my head spin. In fact it is spinning right now. Can we possibly agree on what green, not the color, but the concept is? Or is your green my pink or purple?
Maybe the definition doesn’t have to do with green itself, but we need to determine what is good for the Earth and if we label it green then we better define it. Is there any way that selling something that we import all the way from China can really be green? Just because a car gets two miles a gallon more than another car, does that make it greener? If we are calling it green, then it better be environmentally friendly, but by whose definition? There are no standards to measure green. The word green is being abused. It used to be my favorite color, but now it is just confusing; from now on orange is my fave. I’m beginning to think that what is going on here is possibly some greedy economic “blue” spilled over into some mass marketing “yellow” and when they mixed together we get this shade of green that we are now dealing with, “hot and in green.”
Remember the art project when you colored with crayons a whole bunch of colors on a plain white page and then took the black crayon and covered it all? Next you scratched the black off in some artsy way and all the colors would show? I think we need to scratch some of this green cover off to see what is really under it. This piece isn’t written to be some sour grapes thing, but more like green grapes. This movement I hope is one giant step toward a healthier and livable planet. It needs some fine tuning however. There are things that I believe truly should carry the green label. But who am I to decide what is green or not?
Have you seen the new M&M’s yet? They are green and have the message that states, “Green, the new color of love.” There is a theory bouncing around the SD office that they are truly more green than just in coloration. The conspiracy theory is they are recycled from the left over Christmas holiday M&M’s and now marketed for Valentine’s Day with the love/green theme. Isn’t recycling green? I think there may be something to the love thing however. That is what it will take to really make wiser environmental decisions. Love…love of the land, love for all life on this planet, and love of knowledge and of wonder. Let’s not let this green be just a fad. Let’s make good decisions on life styles and healthy choices for all things on Earth, no matter what we label it. Let’s make it last. Ad infintium.
After all, are we not all trying just to keep “stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive?”
