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Your silver Toyota Prius? It's green. Your indigo-blue bamboo jeans? They're really green. Your black recycled-tire bag? Also green. Your off-white organic-cotton sheets? Green. And many things that we don't think of as having any color at all are now green: architecture, power, tourism, blogs..... The word green (you can't help but have noticed this) is no longer confined to the meager space between blue and yellow on the spectrum, with occasional unpleasant forays into jealousy and envy: Green has broken free and applied itself to all things environmental and ecological. Starting from the successes of environmentalist political parties in West Germany in the early 1970s (one notable example was Grüne Aktion Zukunft, or Green Campaign for the Future), green has grown to be one of the go-to adjectives of the 21st century. In fact, Thomas L. Friedman, author of the book The World is Flat and a columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote that if he were the editor of Time magazine, he wouldn't choose a Man of the Year; instead, he would run an all-green Time cover under the headline Color of the Year.
This largely positive meaning is something of a departure for green, which has had to labor under the weight of many negative meanings for centuries. In fact, green has been considered unlucky since the late 1700s, a belief that started in Scotland and spread across England and later to the U.S., with the two main anti-green superstitions being that wearing green brings death into a house, and that anything green is unlucky at weddings. The word green has been used to describe various insalubrious things: decaying meat; a sickly complexion; people who are immature, or inexperienced, or recuperating from illness; animals that are untrained. Foolish people are green; unhealed wounds are green; mothers who have just given birth-they're green, too.
To ask someone, "Do you see anything green in my eye?" is to say, "Do I look gullible to you?" To green someone is to tease him, and to green someone out is to swindle her. Greenmen are builders who take your money and use it for their own purposes, green goods are counterfeit dollars, and someone who wears a green bonnet has gone bankrupt. To give a woman a green gown is to seduce her (think of a literal roll in the hay, and grass stains), but to get the green gown is to be put in a grave, as is to be green in earth. A newly opened grave is green as well. Not a great track record for green!
Even though the non-spectrum meanings of green are now overwhelmingly positive-enthusiastic, even-they're also a bit, well, vague. The New Oxford American Dictionary gives, as one of the new meanings of green, "(of a product) not harmful to the environment." Which, of course, provokes the response, "Who decides what's 'harmful'?" One person's planet-saving greentech can be another's toxin-spewing nightmare: Just think of the battles over nuclear power, or biofuels. Is a company a real greentailer ("a seller of goods produced in conformance with environmental standards"), or is it merely indulging in greenwashing ("pretending to be environmentally responsible") by greenbaiting ("overstating the environmental benefits of a product") or, worse, greenscamming ("giving a green-sounding name to products that are not environmentally responsible")? Green, like pretty or smart, is clearly measured on a sliding scale.
The inherent vagueness of green hasn't stopped it from being incredibly productive, in linguistic jargon. Green is making lots of new words and phrases. The numbers guys and the politicians have their own green terms: They are calling for green accounting, so that the effects of production and consumption on the environment are measured, and want it to be reflected in a green GDP, reconciling a nation's economy with its environmental record. And many are the mayors who have announced their new green plans for their cities and towns by calling them greenprints for change. These greenprints often call for the planting of green roofs, whereby traditional building roofs are covered with soil and growing plants, over a layer of waterproof material. Environmentally aware cartographers are enthusiastic about the practice of greenmapping, in which people are encouraged to map the ecologically significant resources of their communities, especially those that cross political boundaries. Even credit-card companies are having a green moment: Citibank is about to offer "green rewards" for use of its cards, which can be redeemed for things like compost systems and recycled-milk-carton furniture. The health-care industry has fewer green terms (it seems that, in medicine, there are lots of things you don't want to see turn green), but there is green exercise, where people walk in natural areas or gardens, which supposedly helps combat depression.
There are even shades of green in the green movement itself: The more radical environmentalists call themselves dark green or deep green, while disparaging those they consider less committed as shallow greens. The most radical deep greens might find themselves in the middle of a green scare (on the model of the red scare of the 1950s) and rounded up by the FBI for questioning.
With all this greenery, is there any room for other colors in the environmental movement? Blue may end up being a contender, as more attention turns to the deep blue sea. One new blue term is blue revolution, which is supposed to address the critical shortages of drinking water and water for irrigation predicted for the next century, and to do so in ways that are ecologically sound. And, of course, there's Blue Egg!
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