Green’s the way to go… if you’re colour blind

I often wondered when we Cree crossed over the fine line of being natural environmentalists and leaving virtually no carbon footprint to leaving a telltale trail of empties and white plastic bags while driving by in big SUVs. I also wonder why we often tout ourselves as being champions of the environment and saving our lands from irreversible damages due to development since we seem to be fairly careless ourselves when we do our own development.

I know why we’re brown, not green. Brown is the colour of earth and mud, the colour of sand and rocks, the colour of most animal fur and well-cooked meats. Green is a temporary colour that shows up for a few months a year, before changing back to brown for the rest of the year. Green is a colour of greenhorns, the unqualified, the untested. Green is also a colour associated with bad meat and rotting food. Green is a colour that teems with other colours during flowering season, but during harvest time, it’s back to brown.

Green is also symbolic of environmentalists, such as Greenpeace, who often associate and combine green space with the dangerous colour of blood, which is 100% recyclable and turns brown anyways when it dries. Greenpeace would rather we wear outfits made from artificial materials based on petroleum products, which are manufactured in factories that pump tons of toxic wastes into the air, water and land. Our brown way consumes everything, one animal at a time and if there are any waste products, it’s usually brown anyway. So what’s with all this green hype?

Green is good if you’re a politician. After a good old round of praising mother nature at international conferences usually held in large cities, those same politicians ride off in their stretch limos to fly off in their private jets to go and pollute another city with hot air. Green is a handy word to repeat to those hard of hearing (or tired of hearing) of the virtues of turning off the lights, turning down the heat, walking instead of driving to the corner or across the street. Green is supposed to be a metaphor for those with an environmental conscience and who are so tuned into the world around them that they can feel the concrete under their plastic shoes and polyester shirts. Green is also another phrase for money and who can live without that?

Sometime I wonder if anyone really understands the implications of going green. I think Canadians are so green and intrinsically entwined through policy and legislature that we can’t squeeze any more good out of the term. But other countries should follow suit. Can you imagine all the greenhouse gases that could be prevented from entering the upper atmospheres if India were finally to turn into meat eaters, for example? Or if Saudi Arabia realized that you can’t drink oil and you can’t buy water when the oil price falls too low.

It doesn’t take much education for us to pick up after ourselves and to become leaders in this massive green movement to save the earth. But we were trying to do that decades ago, until the green money flowed instead of the rivers.