Going green

Everybody talking bout protecting de planet […]
When yu get hot under de collar
Yu suddenly discover dat yu going Green all over.
- ‘Me green poem’ (1992), Benjamin Zephaniah

Phil Mapas, in his photography book Capturing Colour, invites us to consider the impact of colour on our lives. ‘Colour is,’ he quotes psychoanalyst Marion Milner, ‘on the evidence of language alone, very bound up with feelings’. We see red in anger, says Mapas, and feel blue when we’re sad.

Framing it this way, Mapas suggests our pursuit to capture colour through photography is better understood as a propensity to be captured by it. What exactly colour captivates in us – in other words, how we feel when we see colour – is not straightforward, then, but a complex interplay of colour theory and psychology.

‘“Green” became the buzzword of the 1980s’, notes Pauline Madge in ‘Ecological Design: A New Critique’. It signalled a new form of environmental consciousness. Everybody was going green all over. Green parties formed, so did an economy of green consumerism. In ‘Our House is on Fire’, Finis Dunaway gives a comprehensive picture of this socio-economic movement, from the early 2000s through to policies like the Green New Deal in the United States.

So, what does it mean to go green?

In ‘Me green poem’, British poet and activist Benjamin Zephaniah explores different shades of meaning. Riffing on themes of health, wealth, party politics, and environmentalism, Zephaniah uses the idiom ‘going green’ to collect our competing preoccupations associated with the colour. In her chapter ‘Green: Thoughts on Sustainability’, Rebecca Houze outlines the sheer breadth of some of these preoccupations:

The color green […] describes bright new plants that burst forth from the frozen ground in springtime, as well as the fresh foods we like to eat. In Islam, green is the color of Paradise, symbolized as a lush and verdant garden. Exotic emerald and other deep mineral greens often suggest riches and luxury, a signification that echoes in the color of the United States one-dollar bill. But green has also been recognized in history and folklore as the color of sickness, envy, and poison.

For Houze, as in Zephaniah’s poem, the proximity of springtime’s verdancy to ‘sickness, envy, and poison’ is inescapably ironic. If green evokes the natural world, it also reminds us of pollution and the unsustainable extraction of natural resources. Contrast this with Paul Barolsky’s description of ‘the green world’ of the Italian Renaissance: our modern evocation is no ‘the immense extension of nature herself’, but a curtailed horizon inscribed with human interference and jeopardy.

Houze analyses oil company BP’s adoption of the green-and-yellow ‘Helios’ logo in 2002, prompting us to consider the green of greenhouses gases contributing to global warming. In ‘Post-Petroleum Consumers’, George Elvin projects an alternative future divested from fossil fuels. This future only possible if we go green in good faith. Doing so in name and appearance only – what we call ‘green-washing’ – is little more than camouflage for unsustainable practice.

In Tricky Design: The Ethics of Things, for example, Jeremy Kidwell investigates a claim to ‘green architecture’, where vegetation is planted in the roofs of buildings. ‘It may be possible to design a green roof to be quite literally green’, writes Kidwell, ‘and by extension decorative – but not habitable. In this way a green roof may represent a literal form of green-washing’.

For ethical claims to green architecture, discover Sherry Ahrentzen’s entry on ‘Sustainable Design’ and architect Chinwe Ohajuruka, ‘one of the chief architectural innovators of green housing in her native Nigeria’ (both are featured in the newly launched Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960-2020).

Later in his poem, Zephaniah shifts emphasis to underline an inconvenient truth, to coin Al Gore’s famous phrase. ‘Fe years’, Zephaniah writes,

Yu have been fighting wars an destroying de scene
An now dat yu dying
Yu start turn Green

Are we ‘going green’ or ‘turning green’? The choice slips from us as the idiom changes. Going green, we endeavour to determine by what means we address the climate emergency. No longer a destination we choose to arrive at, ‘turning green’ happens to us involuntarily. It is the green about the gills, the colour of sickness – and in this case, Zephaniah suggests, it’s terminal.

For more on visual culture and environmentalism

Art and the Natural World: An Entangled Life

Read our featured content inspired by artist Hans Arp, now available on the Bloomsbury Visual Arts hub. Envisioning the artist as a kind of fruit-bearing tree, Dadaist painter-poet and sculptor Hans ‘Jean’ Arp conceives of art as an extension of our bodies. We produce art, he suggests, in the literal sense, as we move and grow, sprouting artworks like berries in season… Read more

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Image credits: Dusan Stankovic via Getty Images, Nan Goldin courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Sycikimagery via Getty Images, Dedraw Studio via Getty Images.