Northwestern is your typical private college campus in the 21st century — rising in the rankings, incorporating technology in classrooms and going green. Trash cans and recycling bins come in pairs, dorm bulletins announce Green Cups, and your dining hall either discourages the use of trays or no longer has them. This year there is even a dorm-sanctioned Green House, a well-intentioned effort toward being eco-friendly. All across the nation similar steps are being taken toward being green. But since when has being a green campus had nothing to do with the landscape? That Northwestern is becoming greener has little to do with the amount of trees on campus, which has actually gone down in recent years. Instead, it has to do with following a new “green” trend.
Thoreau encouraged us to connect more with nature, sure, but how closely linked is simple living in Walden Pond to talks of campus solar panels and compost piles? It’s not entirely unlikely that if you think of “green,” your mind flashes to your refillable “Simply ECO Logical” SIGG bottle or reusable tote bag for shopping at Beck’s or Whole Foods. When did green become something other than a color?
While the concepts of conservation and environmental-friendliness have appeared in many facets of history (social commentary was known to exist about the effects of humans on nature in Ancient Rome) the use of the word was first used in accord with the ecological movement in the 1970s with a German political party that, like most political Greens, put significant weight on environmental concerns. The eco-friendly movement was already taking shape in the United States, but the Germans put the color of nature with the political views that would support it. For the German Green party the word drove home their purpose: to promote the green world, the natural environment. The word is now so well associated with ecology that searching for articles about “green” will find such examples as an Engineering News-Record piece that prefixes it to words like “building” and “school construction.” A green project doesn’t have to be fully defined in an article to be understood; the reader is expected to realize that green means ecologically friendly, even when the context is as far removed from nature as building construction.
Understandably, the conversation on a particular color can vary greatly depending on context. If you ask a student what comes to mind when they hear “green,” often the response is about natural things that are that color. If you ask them about “being green,” their answers change, and on the whole responses have evolved into something entirely other than Kermit quotes. Green has become a state of being environmentally conscious. There’s even a significant number of buzzwords that stem from green in eco terminology, such as green tech and green audit (both things that Northwestern probably took into account when making their 50-year plan, to evaluate current environmental impact and future sustainable technologies).
The Oxford English Dictionary makes no mention of the non-landscape environmental connotation until the 11th definition. Listed before it are obsolete uses that explain terms our now-dead relatives used, like “greenhorn.” But there are few novices to the concept of being green in the current generation. Children are being taught in elementary schools how to be green, with the world’s largest environmental education program being called the “Go Green Initiative.” Society is starting them young. In the rush to beat the learning curve, you have to be careful not to get “greenwashed” in the process. That term had to be created to account for the disinformation provided by companies that hope to trick consumers into believing their products are eco-friendly, aka green.
The benefit of the widespread meaning of green as an ecological trend is the evident growth of environmental consciousness. In order to be considered progressive, companies and institutions are pushing themselves to become green. Being green is a competition, considering the growing availability of green products and food options, as well as laws and business expectations. The word has developed from a description of the natural environment to a reference of concern for it. The indirect invocation of grass and leaves becomes more and more distant as the term is convoluted with its own technical terminology and additional meanings. Still, the purpose of the word is to support the environment it alludes to.
Whether Northwestern students have bought into the green trend merely as consumers, greenwashed or not, the basic environmental effort is still there. I fully expected to find that the development of the word green removed it almost entirely from meaning something natural, but instead I found that the green grass and tree campus is still on the minds of the students and of green society.
Of course in a competitive market there will be those who don’t follow the rules, such as the companies pretending to be environmentally conscious, but it speaks highly of the times that companies are driven to such ends because society favors the eco-friendly. Northwestern’s Green House is still working on getting their solar panels, but the point, as with the general culture, is that the seed of concern is already planted. The future, as well as the 50-year plan, looks fairly green in both senses of the word.