All Your Green Blog

Now, not to pick on these paint makers, but their google adsense ad is the pinnacle of what's happening to environmentally friendly language. With a surge in attention directed at something called "the green movement" by the media and blogosphere, everyone is trying to get on the bandwagon. Some of these companies are completely full of it, and "greenwash" their corporate image. Others have some legitimacy, but the diversity of these companies and organizations is beginning to blur the public's view on the very words the companies are working to be associated with.

Our fine paint manufacturers here, for example, have a primarily health-oriented spin on "green." Their paints are designed to minimize the amount of potentially hazardous fumes released in your home. It has nothing to do with climate change, litter, biodegradability, carbon footprint, or most of the things I think of when I hear "green."

Healthy things aren't necessarily "green" things. The problem here is that both types of things appeal to similar audiences. People who are concerned about what goes into their body are often the same ones who think about what they are putting into the environment. That doesn't make the two types of concerns the same! "Natural" foods aren't environmentally friendly unless they also have less of an impact on the environment. Interestingly, the food output of the crops that "natural" foods are competing with often result in a net lower carbon footprint per unit of food produced! My point is that "green" no longer just means "environmentally conscious."

And what happens when a word is stretched to accommodate more and more ideas? It slowly becomes worthless. If "green" can mean environmentally responsible, healthy for humans, inefficiently manufactured, biodegradable, absorbing red and blue spectrum light, and simply not inherently disgusting, then the term begins to mean nothing at all. You might also find a great deal of academic and pseudo-academic spear rattling over what "green" means. These efforts, while they might appear to be helping, are actually completely vacuous. A word means what ever people are using it to describe. Having a forum to discuss it won't help narrow it down, it can only broaden it further, by forcing the opinions of the participants into the helpless word.

So, where does AllYourGreen fit in the green spectrum? We like organic stuff as much as the next eco-geeks, but if we don't see a direct benefit or advantage for the earth as a whole, we don't really care how tastey or comfy it is for a human. Sorry, folks, that's the way we approach it. No matter how clever your double entendre adsense ads are, you're confusing us and the subject. There were already two definitions of green in our niche already! (See here for an example of both).

Green is the color of chlorophyll, which absorbs mostly light in the red and blue regions of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. As chlorophyll is associated most strongly with plant life, the color green has an inherent tie to nature and specifically non-anthropic life. So, unless you're far more photosynthetic than I am, that means the natural environment of the Earth first, humans second. I've even seen claims that hand-made stuff is "green" just because it was hand made. Only if the hand manufacturing process involves less natural resources and produces fewer byproducts than an automated alternative! Usually, an efficient process uses fewer resources, so that always rubs me the wrong way. No matter how healthy a product might be, or how many humans they have doing easily automatable tasks, unless there's a net benefit to the environment, they should get their own adjective, and stop polluting existing ones.

Since a lack of paint vapor has nothing to do with the color green, how about "scratchy" or "obtuse"? They're just as valid arbitrary adjectives! "Go Obtuse!" must not have the same ring as the completely over-used "Go Green!" has. Where exactly is Green, anyway?