Yesterday, I read this great blogpost from The Wild Green Yonder about the differences between environmental movements in terms of shades of green.  K-Co, you’ll be happy to see that you were spot on. 

Their shades are reposted below.

It’s very obvious that our world has issues with the environment that need to be dealt with.  The growing problem has created these different greens that are each looking at the issues from different perspectives.  Everyday more facts indicate that our world is sick with the damage that has been done to it, with the green community hotly debating which level of illness we are dealing with (Some Peak Oil proponents might, for example, state that our situation is terminal and it will take a virtual miracle to survive.)  Wild Green Yonder makes it pretty obvious where they feel we should be heading, as if the greens are three levels of environmental enlightenment. 

However, I’m not so sure that it is so bad to have these three different shades/perspectives in existence together, instead of having to shed one to move onto another.  And no, it isn’t my love of Lime Green as a color that makes me cling to it so. 

Certainly for the present they are a welcome change from the past.  There was a time when every person who cared about the environment was viewed as what I could deem the shade of  Olive Green -  the color of hippies, eco-terrorists and tree-huggers, cargo pants and worn out fatigues, good for all those earthy types, but not something the general public should be concerned about.  It symbolized resale shops, composting and marijuana - and really gave the impression that these people were out of touch with society, relegating environmental issues to the backburner.

I’m just very glad that we’ve moved beyond this into a spread that reaches more people.  Lime Green still espouses consumerism, which still has its negatives to the environment, and many environmentalists are very skeptical and deroggatory about Lime Green’s achievements and methods.

But Lime Green is getting people to embrace the idea that environmentalism is accessible…and desirable.  I think Lime Green is the ground floor that most people climb from to get to Grass or Forest Green levels.  So we need Lime Green to be the turning point, the launch pad for expansion into the other realms.  It wasn’t until I started trying to be more ecologically conscious in what I purchased (aka, Lime Green) that I started to really recognize the deeper aspects of ecology (Grass Green).  It is almost as if Lime Green is the first level at which you can see the other greens in the horizon. Once you’ve reached Lime Green, Grass and Forest Green seem actually attainable for oneself, instead of being the realm of the Olive Greens.

At least in American culture, if you create a holier-than-thou atmosphere, you’ll never get buy-in.  And buy-in (a telling term at that) is what we need from the American people to support green initiatives.

So Lime Green is an integral step towards building the ecological perspective.  Lime Green is Whole Foods, Co-Ops and local farmer’s markets, Hugger Mugger, Gaiam, Real Goods - companies that have feet in both the Lime Green and the Grass Green worlds to offer sustainable options to both - and facilitate the movement of Lime Green perspective into Grass Green perspective.  Consider that these companies are often the only way the public is even made aware of many current issues.  Many people read about an eco-friendly widget and learn about the issues behind the non-eco-friendly one - for the first time, the message about an issue is getting through.  Lime Green is, therefore, also an educational stage that preps for the other stages.

I also feel that not all of society will ever move totally to one color, and that there will be standards of living that still require Lime Green responses, highlights among the darker, richer colors of Grass and Forest that make up our worlds.  In the end, perhaps we can achieve sustainability through employing a wide array of shades to work together. 

So, what shades do you fall into?

 From Three Shades of Green:

Lime Green is the color of green consumerism. It aims to make environmentalism cool, continuing to provide the ever-higher standards of living we’re used to, only with a green twist. Hybrid cars, clean coal, corn-based ethanol and CFLs are some of the Lime Green topics circulating in the news these days. To companies with a Lime outlook, sustainability is a consumer trend that may or may not go away, but it’s certainly worth capitalizing on for now. The system is working great, say the Lime Greens – if anything, it just needs a little tinkering. Lime ideology is summed up with quasi-green oil giant BP’s slogan: “It’s a Start.”

Fortunately, the Lime Green ethic is fast being eclipsed by something a little more substantive. Grass Green, the middle shade, treats climate change, habitat destruction, and water pollution as real and dangerously pressing issues, and recognizes that we’ll have to make some serious changes to business as usual if we want to survive much longer. This is the shade of green espoused by popular environmental advocates like Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Bill McDonough, who call for a “new industrial revolution” that will transform our economy from one of inequality and great material waste to one of efficiency and abundance for all. How will this happen? Through ever-improving technology, social entrepreneurship, and sensible government regulation: think Cradle to Cradle, micro-loans, bike boulevards and carbon taxes. A fringe movement only a few years ago, the Grass Green philosophy is fast gaining ground in board rooms across the States: execs from top corporations like Whole Foods, Staples and Wal-Mart have been saying some remarkably Grassy stuff recently, and the cover story of the latest edition of BusinessWeek posits a near future where environmental responsibility is at the top of the corporate agenda.

Finally, there’s Forest Green. Inspired by the Deep Ecology movement of the 70s, Forest people claim that another industrial revolution is the last thing we need. The anthropocentric heritage of western civilization is what led to our current predicament in the first place, and any attempts to make our current system more sustainable are, to use ecophilosopher Rudolf Bahro’s term, “cleaning the teeth of the dragon.” We don’t have a chance at creating a truly sustainable society, Forest Greens argue, until we value the well-being of the planet over and above the flourishing of any particular species – including our own.

What would a Forest Green society look like? For one thing, it would be much smaller than the current one: a couple billion people at most. Levels of consumption would be far less than those we’re accustomed to in the overdeveloped world, with each person’s ecological footprint averaging a hectare or two. Our shelters and possessions would be modest but of high quality, and the production of food would be integrated into our cities and landscapes through design techniques such as permaculture. How we arrive at a Forest Green society is another question entirely; answers range from the enviro-anarchism of Derrick Jensen to the grassroots utopia-building of the ecovillage movement.