[CLICK TITLES TO READ THE ENTIRE POSTS]  During my Junior year at the University of Washington, I took Elementary Botany in order to fulfill the distribution requirement for natural sciences. Most of my friends recommended Astronomy or Geology, but I chose plants for that last required class outside my major. Two months later I was ready to change majors, and though I ultimately stayed in the School of Art, I never looked at green in quite the same way again. There were weekly labs and lectures about various aspects of plant growth, use, and biology. We took field trips to look at a hydroponic tomato greenhouse. We dissected leaves and flowers under the microscope. We grew coleus plants from a single leaf and discussed alternative to clear cutting forests. One of our textbooks was notable for simplicity, many photographs, and the green leaf on the cover. I still have it on my shelf. During a lab, we dissolved chlorophyll, which makes leaves green, into alcohol. Light shining through through the liquid was transparent red like the ruby glass in a cathedral window. In pigment, green is opposite on the color wheel and thus the compliment of red. It is created through combination of the two other primary colors: yellow and blue. In optics, green is just to the left of middle.

Less than two percent of people in the world have green eyes. More than half the people in the world have brown eyes and so do most dogs, cows, horses, and many other mammals, but green eyes are typical in domestic cats. Cats’ eye color comes from more than pigment in the lens, the result of the two layers combining to give the appearance of green—the underlying layer is most often gold to brown and the clear layer refracts blue—like a pale translucent blue marble placed over a rippled and gilded surface. This is how some albino cats have violet eyes—the pink is overlaid with blue refraction making pale violet. This is also why all kittens are born with blue eyes—the color of the iris has not yet produced the gold to brown pigment found in most adult cats, and which we see overlaid with blue, creating green. Oddly, green frogs appear that color as a result of two layers in their skin, one blue and the other yellow.

The green-eyed monster is not a cat, but a jealous person, and the term probably originated with Shakespeare’s: How all the other passions fleet to air, / As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair, / And shuddering fear, and green-eyed jealousy!” from Portia of The Merchant of Venice in 1596 and from Iago: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on.” from Othello a few years later. The color represents a long history of paradox.

U.S. paper money is green on one side, but real value has always been in the land where we live and where the green grows. Scarlett O’Hara’s crazy dad was on to something when he warned her that “land is the only thing that matters, the only thing that lasts.” Now, with global warming, we understand it may not last forever, as that Irishman once thought. But on a human scale, it is green that keeps us alive.

Eat your leafy greens, we are advised, and yet people may choose a vegan diet and gain weight because they fail to follow that sage advice by eating too much of everything but their green vegetables. Green leaves are, and likely always have been, a critical staple in the human diet. I know people who defensively claim to be “carnivorous” when vegetarians show up at the table. They are not carnivorous, they simply like eating meat. Protein is an essential part of any human diet, too, but most of the nutrients we need to survive and thrive come from plant sources.

A quick survey of our biology proves that humans are omnivorous—like bears we can and will eat almost anything. Our teeth are more suited to grinding than to tearing flesh. Our gut is long enough to digest grain, though not complex enough to digest raw grass. The enzymes in our mouth a gut are suited better for fruits and vegetables than anything else.

In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, journalist Michael Pollan regards the irony that humans seem to thrive on most any diet except the one Americans eat. He is mostly right, but recent genetic testing reveals that populations surviving on a genuinely carnivorous diet, such as the Inuit, have a genetic adaptation that allows them to thrive on an all-meat and high fat diet. Most humans cannot eat their diet and remain healthy. That’s because the chances are slim that people whose ancestors evolved outside the Arctic Circle possess necessary genetic adaptations allowing us to digest omega-3s and other fatty acids as efficiently as the Inuit in Greenland. The Inuit’s adaptations have likely been around for thousands of years, allowing humans to live in the far north. In exchange for these particular adaptations, Danish researchers found the Inuit are uniquely healthy, living on a very high fat and animal protein diet, are leaner and shorter, and almost never suffer from heart disease. It seems those fad diets that tailor diet to body type may have been on to something.

Still, for most of humanity, Pollan’s opening advice is solid: “Eat Food. Mostly vegetables. Not too much.” Eat your leafy greens, just like Mrs. Michelle taught me in seventh grade Home Ec.

Not everything that is green is healthy for your body. Tobacco was green leaves once. Marijuana, too. Oregon has recently legalized the possession and sale of recreational marijuana. The stores are everywhere. Now we are seeing enormous increase in demands for electricity to grow this newly legal crop in a climate that does not really suit it. In warmer nations like Pakistan, the drug is truly a weed, something farmers yanked from their fields like dandelions. Green.

The Green Revolution was the first great attempt in modern history to end famine. In the 1940s, Dr. Norman Borlaug, a biologist, developed a strain of disease-resistant wheat producing high yields. His goal was to end starvation by allowing crop yields to catch up with population growth, and he did this not through current practices of genetic manipulation but through old-fashioned selection, rushing evolution—breeding the best of the best of the best, backcrossing hybrids to set traits, and developing shorter and stronger stems to hold a larger ear of wheat. Beginning his work in Mexico, it would be the 60s before his improved wheat became a staple crop around the world. He would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his efforts and was honored many times before his death.

When I heard of Borlaug’s work in high school, I thought he had permanently resolved the problem of population outstripping food production. Dr. Borlaug was not so naïve. Wheat yields have quadrupled in developing nations since 1950, but populations have grown faster to eat them. In his Nobel speech, Borlaug warned: “The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the “Population Monster . . . ” He saw clearly into our future and one of his goals was to increase yields on the best agricultural land in order to avoid further deforestation. Ironically, his work has been criticized for increasing dependence on artificial fertilizers and pesticides.

Yes, what matters is the land and what we can grow on that land, but the greatest threat to green on this earth is us and our growing need for food. What matters is not just the green before us, but allowing the green to continue. Something else I learned in school is that population growth will always be always limited. It can be limited through deaths from war, disease, and starvation, or it can be limited by choice. One reason I am a vegetarian is that my food leans a little lighter on the environment. But when the kale goes bad in the crisper, as mine did and had to be tossed yesterday, then I become part of the problem. Some 40% of food in America is thrown away. We are fat in America, fat and wealthy enough that we can afford to throw food away.

What we value impacts the ways we use language. People who have lived in tropical forests all their lives see many greens and can name each one. People who expect to see a shape and color together will, when faced with a mismatch, first see the color and assume the shape, rather than the other way around. The green circle repeated makes the next green thing appear round even when it is a square. Color is prime. Leaves are green. Shown a dozen leaves that are yellow and red and purple, we are still certain that all leaves are green.

The word for green in English derives from the German, to grow. Other languages show similar associations between the words describing green and notions of growth, meadow, grass and to flourish. Yet, like other colors, the color green has different associations in different parts of the world. Japanese and ancient Egyptian cultures associate green with eternal life, and among Muslims it is a sacred color associated with the Prophet Mohammed. In the Renaissance, green was a color commoners were allowed to wear, but it was a sacred color of plumes worn by Aztec priests. Jade is a precious stone, as is the emerald, and both are valued above colorless diamonds. Green is a Sunday color among Catholics and the color of the Roman goddess of love, Venus.

The ocean I watch every day is most often green. It is green just now, that shade called celadon in Chinese porcelain from the first century. Burning heat turns some metals toward their opposite on the spectrum. The celadon glaze is translucent, pale gray-green and comes from a chemical reaction in firing the glaze with tiny amounts of iron oxide. Rust. Like iron, copper also turns green in some firings, but can also produce russet-redbrowns. Natural contamination of sand used to make Coke bottles is responsible for the green color. That is the green I see outside my window, and the colors most often in sea glass from my beach.

“Going green” requires us to tread lightly in the world, and green is also a color of mould and decay, the tint of white skin after death, a hue of disease but also of crops and food. Rare, treasured, dangerous obsession and envy, the color of money and heartache, the rich satisfaction of appetite and lush landscape. Green is a color we distrust and consume, both love and avoid. The study of plants and consumption, life and survival.

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