TREELOGY. Why I can’t stand ‘green’

I feel slightly hesitant saying this, but it’s come to a point where I must — I cannot bear to hear the word ‘green’ anymore. The bureaucracy that has come to be attached to the word has become a cliché in a way that is detrimental to what it seeks to protect, preserve or nourish. There’s a kind of fuel named after it (green energy), a tax and among several other such things, perhaps, also a ministry. Now, if it hasn’t been christened already, there will perhaps be a genre called Green Writing. It’s a disservice to ‘nature’, of course, and to my mind it’s almost wrong. Reducing an ecosystem, and then plant life, to the colour of its leaves, seems like a metonymy on overdose.

The immediate reason for my annoyance is my recent encounter to two of these usages: First, in a tourism brochure thrust into my hands by a volunteer; the other a series of panel discussions at literary festivals. The brochure advertised green tourism — quite obviously, the term is an oxymoron. If anything, we need to protect the world, particularly what once used to be the wilderness, from tourists. The second was the use of ‘green’ in panel discussions about the environment. Now, anything related to the environment seems to invoke our best selves, a mix of guilt and the ambition to be good, even as we’re somehow aware that it’s a temporary emotion. I should’ve maintained a log of the number of times ‘green’ was mentioned during these discussions. At one point it began to seem to me that the word had become the equivalent of ‘amen’ or ‘namah’, as if it had the power to conjure a greener world into being. And each time the word had exactly the same effect as the parroting of statistical data — both seemed to anaesthetise the discussion.

I typed ‘green’ into my Google search box, and this is what appeared: Green Park (the name of an apartment complex near where I live, where there is not a single tree in its compound), Green Ply (if the ply hadn’t been produced, then things might have been green!), Green Point Academy (clearly a school with only EVS — environment studies — in its curriculum to claim ‘green points’), Green Planet (now an oxymoron, also a tired and bureaucratic ambition), Green Palace (a restaurant), and so on. The only two truly green things that the predictive choices showed were ‘green peas’ and ‘green parrot’. I forget to mention ‘Greenpeace’. It’s not really my fault — its place is such a given that I might not as well have noticed it.

What author and scientist Matthew Hall said of plant blindness — that we have become conditioned to not notice plant life, not only because it’s in the background, but because it really doesn’t affect our consciousness the way humans, animals, even material objects do — is related to how we respond to the bureaucratic usage of green. Reading John Gage’s book Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism , I came across a passage that made me think of the subject in a different way.

Gage writes: “One of my favourite episodes in recent research into colour-language is the arrival in 1971 of the Danish anthropologists R. Kuschel and T. Monberg, armed with their sets of Munsell colours, on Bellona Island in Polynesia, only to be told by an islander, ‘We don’t talk much about colour here’. In the event, their report seems to me to be one of the best modern investigations of colour-usage within a given culture, but it makes clear that colour as hue is not everybody’s interest, and in many contexts we can, of course, do perfectly well without it. The black-and-white photography which in Charles Darwin’s day seemed to offer a new touchstone for the precise visual representation of the real world was only the latest phase in the history of monochrome reproduction which goes back to Classical times. Darwin himself...as content to use black-and-white engraving even to illustrate his discussions of the highly coloured plumage of exotic birds, for example in his Descent of Man (1871).”

It might have been the voltage of Darwin’s name, along with the mention of black-and-white photography, that made me wonder about the relationship between science and the colour green. The use of green as colloquial to talk about plant life owes to a tradition in art of course — at first, expectedly, to realism, but it is also tied to the inevitable question of representation. In a world where identity politics of race has become inextricably tied to colour, is it not pertinent to ask how the lazy use of ‘green’ is responsible for perpetrating a dull indifference to plant life?

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became A Tree; @SumanaSiliguri