frankwork

Is this the way that you wanted to pay
Won’t you show me, please show me the way

Whether intended or not, the beautiful ambiguity to the lyrics of New Order’s 1981 single “Everything’s Gone Green” sure seem to speak to the challenge we face today: Do we pay with ever-increasing amounts of toxic byproduct, pollution, and ecosystem degradation or will somebody come along and show us a different — a greener — way?

To do so means we need leaders, and the good news is we have a growing number, people like Prince Charles with his vision for eco-towns or Julio Cusurichi Palacios, working for indigenous rights in the Amazon, or the Pachamama Alliance’s effort to make Ecuador into an environmental state. The job of such leaders is to pioneer new ways of imaging the world, develop new models for shaping our society, new ways to organize ourselves, new institutions for solving our problems.

As people have woken up to the urgency of problems like global warming, green has entered the mainstream big time, with every major magazine seeming to produce an annual green issue, newspapers covering the topic with regularity, even NBC celebrating Earth Week. With so much press, it’s no surprise some people are talking about a backlash, worried if not outright complaining about green fatigue. Such complaints are fossil-fueled with the amount of greenwashing going on now — witness TerraChoice’s evaluation of 1,018 environmental claims, with only 7 not committing at least one greenwashing sin. No wonder there’s so much doubt and suspicion.

But my contention is that green is here to stay. We are rapidly moving toward a point where the whole issue of green is part of our operating system, something we take for granted the way we take Windows or Mac OS X. In this sense, it’s also like the Internet, which had its memorable coming out part from 1997 to 2000 or so, then crashed — but stuck around, integrated into our lives. The press on green today shows that green, too, is enjoying its time in the spotlight, but even once it’s out of the spotlight, it won’t go away. Just like the coming generation can’t imagine living without ATMs, iPods, or text messaging, green is becoming one of the ways we interact with the world, and in time it will be more fully integrated into everything we do, into who we are.

So has everything gone green? Maybe not yet, but it will, and we won’t need a color to recognize it.