Go, Live, Be Green

by Adam Shake   

   Why do Society, Business and Brand Pushers want people who care about the planet to “be” something? Do we need to be green? Do we need to live green? If I were to “go” green, where would I end up?
   What is Green? What’s Greener than Green? Is Brown the new Green? Is “Recycle, Reuse, Reduce” old and busted? Is Precycling the answer? What about Minimalism? Should we bow down to political correctness and stop using the term “Global Warming” and use the term “Climate Change” instead? Should we stop using the word Green? How can Green become the norm as long as we use it as a separatist adjective? Should we stop calling things and people Green and start calling things and people in opposition Red? Should Organic foods just be called Food, while we label all the other food Non-Organic?
   As an environmentalist, writer and activist, these are some of the things about which I spend my time thinking. These are important because the answers define not only where we are, but where we are going.

   So how do we answer these questions? Let’s start by taking a look at the word Green and its meaning.
   The term “Green” started out with a very simple meaning: “natural.” But the intervening years have been anything but natural. Green has become a noun, a verb and an adjective. “The Greenie Greened his life by building a Green house.”
   Why did we need the word Green? Why did we need to identify something as other than natural in the first place? The word became necessary when things started to become “unnatural” by default. When we started to create, use, and discard more unnatural things than natural ones, natural became the minority. In our human need to classify, we classified the natural minority with the word Green.
   We did this in an attempt to make “natural” the majority once again. We thought, “We’ll call it green and everyone will see its benefit. Everyone will want to create, use, and discard the (natural) green things.” But the word never went away. It went from being a noble cause to a word used to identify a movement. It became a word to identify and classify a group of people. It became a word to label unnatural products in an attempt to fool the greenies into buying it.
   Let’s take away the word Green for a

moment. Let’s erase its noun, verb, and adjective meanings. In fact, let’s take away the words Organic and Sustainable, too. What are we left with?
   There is no more Green Architecture or even LEEDS Certification. There are no more

Green jobs. There are no more Organic tomatoes or eggs. There is no more Sustainable hardwood flooring. No one goes Green anymore or Greens their lifestyles. Green is dead.
   What’s left? Things that are good for the environment and things that are bad for the environment.  Utilizing this new bench mark, wouldn’t it make sense to label things “Bad” instead of “Good?” Wouldn’t it make more sense to label things as “unnatural” than “natural?”
   Wouldn’t this help shift our focus from buying something that will help the environment, to buying something that is bad for the environment? Given a choice, how many people would choose to buy something that is bad for the environment? Wouldn’t this help us realize just how important our environment is?
   Perhaps we should label those destroyers of our biosphere as Reds (the opposite of Green). The guy with the new SUV is going Red. Perhaps we should call any non-renewable energy “Dirty.” Perhaps we should have signs in our grocery stores that say “Tomatoes” and “Chemically Treated Tomatoes.”
   How about warning labels? We put warning labels on things that are bad for individuals, (like cigarettes) but not on things that are bad

Issue 2 | October 2009

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for all of us. How about warning labels on water bottles?
   Warning: It Takes Five Bottles Of Water To Make The Plastic For This Water Bottle.
   Warning: 82% Of All Water Bottles End Up In The Landfill.
   Warning: A Gallon Of Bottled Water Costs More Than A Gallon Of Gas.
   How about a warning label on your electric bill?
   Warning: 182,000 People Die Every Year In United States As A Result Of Breathing Fine Particulate Matter From Coal Burning Power Plants.
   We’ve been listening to the dry hollow sound of cold air sweeping through our floor vents and forgotten what a breeze feels like and what birds sound like. Our children know more about the Amazon jungle than they do about their own back yards. We have forgotten the intrinsic connection we have with nature, because nature has become unnatural.
   Do I consider myself Green? Not at all. I consider all those who do not care about their environments, those who leave a legacy of Global Warming to their children and grandchildren, those who place disposable consumerism above their own - as well as your health and mine as species traitors and enemies of mankind.
   Being planet friendly is not about being anything. It’s about doing what’s right, day after day, with an eye on preservation and health for us and our planet. That’s it. It sure beats being “Green.”

  

Adam Shake is founder of Twilight Earth.Com, a website dedicated to environmental issues, environmental world wide news and shared discussions. He also owns Eco Tech Daily.Com. You can follow him on twitter at @TwilightEarth