What is green? Green is the part of the colour spectrum you should aim for with every decision you make in life. Green is not just a colour, it is a way of life.
The term green is an easy way to label and signify that something you’re looking at is environmentally friendly. As the most abundant natural colour in temperate climates, it has a presence huge in our photography and daily live. Green, the colour that represents life even in the driest, most inhospitable landscapes would be chosen to represent a healthy environment.
Dictionary Definition
The dictionary tells us that green is a colour between blue and yellow. Green is the colour of grass. But how else could you describe the colour really?
A secondary definition relates it to the environment, like politics and green campaigners.
Further definitions found here, are for things like landscapes that are covered with trees and grass. Green also refers to a state of not being ready yet. Fruit that’s green isn’t ripe, wood that’s green isn’t dry enough to be used to make a fire or make things and when describing people, it means they lack experience.
Green In Reality
As a colour, green also makes us feel relaxed and so, so refreshed. That’s something backed up by science, so if you live around greenspace, you could well be one of the healthier people who visit nature more often.
Verywell mind have six key things to takeaway about what the colour green means in western culture. Their colour psychology emphasises that green is calming, green is natural, green is motivating, green is optimistic, but green is also envious.
Most of us can probably agree that green surroundings make us feel calmer and fossil fuels being pumped into the atmosphere make us feel more anxious. One ironic thing bout the Verywell list is when they mention money being green in the United States under the heading for optimism, it made us think what a shame it is that people don’t value creating more natural green as much as they value an item that often drives them to make poor environmental decisions.
Green Environment
The green environment is an important way we define the word green. Thoughts, feelings and experiences with nature often involve the colour green, but although we may think of our planet as being green, it isn’t really as green as we think it is.
Does the automatic association with green hold up in reality? In reality, about 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water, then around 8.4% is desert and other types of barren land like desert and glaciers. 15% of the earth is forest, wild grassland and shrubs. Agriculture takes 13.3%, which leaves 0.5% for our urban areas.
Wow, our sprawling urban areas with polluting factories and extensive road networks account for less than one percent of the total area on our planet! Yet they are home to almost everything that is destroying our planet.
So the point is, 15% of the world is actually really green, the rest is a whole assortment of other colours. Even so, we’ll still see a lot of green from space in contrast to the blue that surrounds it. Of course, since we live on land, not the sea, we can really feel the vastness of the forests and green areas we look at.
What we see around us, what affects our mood and plants that nourish us are green, so now we associate that colour with nature and life itself.
Green Politics
Green politics is a huge consideration when defining what green means. We have political parties like the Green Party who use the name explicitly directly associate green with the environment.
The Green Party want to create a just, equitable and sustainable society. Their website is full of green including the links and social media icons. With a philosophy that values taking care of the environment and championing social justice because parties of that political ideology generally believe both of those things go hand-in-hand.
Overall, green politics is all about creating a better world for everyone by focusing on improvements to our environment. Green parties worldwide are focusing on civil liberties and social justice alongside environmental issues. Fact is a more just society would also be one that values our environment.
Green Marketing
Specifically for green marketing, a business slapping the word green on the start instantly puts them in the same basket as the green environment, feelings we have about the colour. The primary driver behind companies using the word green to market themselves and their products is to open up more opportunities for financial gain.
Organisations now know that there’s an opportunity to market their products and services using the colour green because consumers are more sensitive about protecting the world around us. The message is getting through to people that we can’t go on treating our planet the way we have been.
Campaigns about CFCs throughout the 80s and 90s, campaigns to save the whales, talk of deforestation, the knowledge we have about plastics and the waste that ends up in our oceans. We all know there’s a problem and if companies can provide a solution that makes us feel better about the problems we know exist, the more opportunity they have to sell their wares.
It’s all about promoting environmental and socially responsible products, practices, and brand values using the word green. Adding the word green to things may encourage people to spend more on them because they’re ‘sustainable’ or locally sourced, or made from 100% recycled materials or they are 100% recyclable. Green cars, Green energy, green campus, green palm, green initiative, Green Corps.
Instantly, people are drawn to anything labelled green because they feel guilty about what we’re doing to the planet. People who aren’t invested in improving life on our planet will instantly feel better about themselves like they’re actually doing something good for the environment. Or at least that’s how companies make them feel with that use of the word green. Are the benefits there or not? We always have to look deeper to find out.
Green Mobiles
Green mobiles are what we’re here for, so let’s address the elephant in the room. We believe that our company Greenermobiles.com can be a great example to everyone of how making our lives greener can help save the planet.
Mobile phones are not inherently green, and that’s a fact and we’re not trying to get away from. Yes it’s true mobiles are actually made by digging up the innards of our green planet at great environmental cost to give us these little communication wonders.
Mobiles have become essential to our existence, so we’ve dedicated our lives (or just the working part of it) to finding you greener mobiles. Mobile phones that use less new rare earth metals, less harmful chemicals in the production of screens, less energy to run their operating system giving you more use time with every charge from a renewable energy provider.
We want mobiles to be green of course, but the origins of the Greenermobiles.com name is in the idea of improvement. Totally green mobiles don’t exist, and likely never wil, but we can make them greener. We can go with a network that is carbon neutral, we can go with manufacturers that recycle old phones and use recycled materials in new phones as much as possible.
We can even be like the Green Party and acknowledge that human rights are an issue bound up with the changing climate. In green mobile phone manufacture, that means using companies that help make sure the entire mobile phone supply chain is as equitable as possible.
For Greenermobiles.com, green is looking at the ways we can waste less energy and finite resource found on our planet. Green is the future.
Conclusion
Green is the best outlook to have on life and we should understand exactly what it is and how we can make more things in our lives green.
The pigment of grass and trees, it’s that colour that makes us feel a connection with the natural world. The personification of the colour green is through its presence as the base of our food chain merging into representation of everything natural and not man-made. Its use as a word to instantly make things more appealing because of an association with preserving the green parts of our world demonstrates its marketability.
Rather than a business or financial choice, to those of us who are really passionate about saving our planet, the opportunity to make sure our children can all experience greenery for generations to come is exactly why green is our way of life.