Stifle envy, set aside jealousy
and rise for a moment above
greed. For right now, when
we need it so badly, green
most definitely means
grow. By Ashley Hay.
Ode to
green
THROUGH THE
WINDOWabove my desk, I
can see dozens of greens. There
are seven or eight different tints
on the closest stem alone: different
colours for different stages of
growth. So many tones scooped in by
this one word, the vastness of hues and
tints and tones contained in it.
Our eyes can discern more greens
and more reds than any other chromas- we “prioritise” distinction of these
colours. One explanation for this is that
it’s an evolutionary constraint: the red
and the green cones in our eyes “largely
overlap”, perhaps because the gene
that codes for our green receptor and
the gene that codes for red were almost
identical and haven’t yet evolved enough
to differentiate.
Another is the evolutionary advantage
of being able to gauge the difference in
ripening fruit. Humans are trichromatics
(organisms with three separate channels for
distinguishing colour) who eat a lot of fruit
(like other New World monkeys), which
makes the importance of choosing which
fruit to eat a “plausible selection pressure”.
“How many colours are there in a field
of grass to the crawling baby unaware of
green?” asks the American experimental
filmmaker Stan Brakhage. As they crawl
through smaragd, through prasine, through
chrysoprase, through viridescence – and
that’s only imagining their journey in lesser-
used English. The Himba, an indigenous
tribe of around 50,000 in northern
Namibia, have the colour system most
distinct from any Euro-American systems:
it’s divided into language for dark, very
light, dry desert colours, and then vivid
green and blue, between which last two
they make no distinction – they register
AFTER A SUMMER
of heat, drought and
devastating fires, it’s
a poignant time to think
about green – the colour
most often associated with
life, with nature, with renewal.
Green stands for jealousy –
Othello’s “green-eyed monster” –
and for envy and for greed. But green
for growth, and green for go now, too.
This hasn’t always been the case. The
first standard lights chosen by railways in the
1830s used red for stop – picking up on its
long associations with danger – but white for
go. Green, originally, was chosen to signify
caution. Problems occurred if the coloured
lenses fell out of any of the warning lights,
leaving the white light source exposed...
and giving an apparent signal to proceed.
Problems occurred, too, if bright white
signals were mistaken for stars – or stars
themselves were mistaken for those early
“go” lights. And so the system was recast.96 – COSMOS Issue 86
ZEITGEISTGREEN