By Dr. Robert Thorson
My wife often reminds me that I take things too literally. Of course, she’s correct. Nonetheless, the phrase “going green” bugs me like a pebble in my shoe. The naturalist in me knows it’s unethical, the scientist knows it’s inaccurate and the writer laments the ruination of yet another perfectly good word.
What gives humans the right to decide which natural color is best? Assigning one wavelength a higher value than others is as wrong in the realm of modern environmental politics as it was in the realm of racial politics scarcely half a century ago, when northern European countries and their colonies promulgated laws and policies based on skin color. In our polychrome world of earth and flesh tones, using one color to signify a commitment to environmental responsibility is akin to using white, black, red, brown or yellow to signify a commitment to racial equality.
Black – or very dark gray when the moon is full – is earth’s most common color. I refer to the hemisphere facing away from the sun. This is the color that bats and moths like best: Most wouldn’t stand a chance in the sunlit world of birds. Blue is the dominant color on the sunlit side of Earth: It’s favored by all manner of marine creatures, ranging from tunas to tunicates.
Green is next in abundance. It covers the surface all year in moist equatorial regions, but switches on and off with gray-brown and snow-white at higher latitudes. The dry subtropics are dominated by rusty shades of yellow, brown and red. The highest latitudes are white. There, a green polar bear would be a dead polar bear.
Be careful what you wish for. Staying green for one geological epoch would ruin Earth’s most striking scenery because neither glaciers not deserts could exist.
America’s most scenic peaks and valleys, from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Yosemite Valley in California, could not have formed. America’s tens of thousands of glacial lakes and ponds would not be with us. Our most beautiful coastal bays and harbors would be mud-filled deltas. The red-rock canyons of the Southwest would have disappeared under a continuous vegetation cover because the wash-dominated rainfall processes responsible for linear and planar slope elements would have given rise to creep-dominated soil processes responsible for the complex curved slopes of humid regions. If the Colorado Plateau went green and stayed that way, it would soon resemble the equally lovely but less dramatic landscape of the Ozarks or West Virginia.
At even longer time scales, and even if restricted to the terrestrial part of Earth, a monochrome Earth would be bad. If white like new-fallen snow, most of the solar radiation that powers life would be reflected back into space. If black like freshly chilled lava, the Earth would broil with heat. If green, as has been the case in previous geological epochs, regional geography would be boring and regional climate muggy.
The word “green” comes from the Old English “gre’ne,” which comes from the old Teutonic root for “grow” or “grass.” In optics, this series of colors is intermediate between blues and yellows. By the end of middle school, most kids have learned that white is the color you get when all wavelengths of the visible spectrum are reflected, and that black is the color you get when all are absorbed. Hence, a truly white person or a truly white landscape has no color at all, whereas a black person or a truly black landscape possesses every conceivable color.
Perhaps my hang-up with going green is an embedded psychological response to growing up in Minnesota. This is the home of Paul Bunyan to the north and the Jolly Green Giant to the south, both icons of unsustainable land use. Going green in that state involved an application of pesticides, fertilizers and irrigated water tantamount to aquatic suicide.
I urge you to balk at becoming a color chauvinist! Embrace the chameleon for its spectral inclusiveness, not the leprechaun for its monochromatic point of hue.