When reading your thoughtful essay, I couldn't help but think of Hildegard of Bingen's extensive use of the term veriditas. From an herbalists perspective, it is the greening power within a person and within nature. Some people turn brown, wither, and need to have their veriditas healed. Hildagard would prescribe the color green for improved veriditas and instructed patients to go stare at a green meadow, or forest as what we look at can heal, or harm us. Which ties into nature vocabulary disappearing from a child's lexicon, as what we see impacts the words we know and our perspectives. Because most folks don't think through the lens of viridia/veriditas, we're a spiritually sick culture.
I'm a foraging instructor and have taught both adults and children to identify various trees and I've found that viridia can be cultivated within minutes. If it is of interest to you, I wrote about it here: https://divinenature.substack.com/p/redeeming-our-ancestral-awe
Two years ago, on turning 60, I got my first tattoo Viriditas with ivy vines accentuating the greening power of this word. Hildegard is a true icon of longevity and the blending of the natural world with the spirit.
Wonderful painting, conveys emotion and motion so imho it's not a 'still life'. And good article, helps with prompting seeing feeling experiencing anew which is actually old... timeless. And yeah with advertising, propaganda and such like, nothing sacred with language. Green is also the color of the heart chakra, i would say a bright glowing vibrating emerald green when clear and pure. Viridia also is close to vivid.
"Green has become a brand, a certification, a technology, and a signal of virtue that obscures the unwillingness to do anything to protect the natural world."
Your mind works in strange, remarkable ways. Viridia is a welcome wake up call to the distraction that the green branding has become. I remember all the branding that took place when our local county visitors bureau and the county council tried to pass the destination management plan (the tourism plan), with part of the plan being to get all of the businesses on the green certification band wagon.
I think the first, and maybe the worst, degradation of the meaning of green was back in the early 1960s when the petro-chemical companies began calling the use of their chemical products in industrial agriculture the "Green Revolution." Their lies are still widely believed, as shown in the recent talk about how the closing of the Strait of Hormuz could deprive the world of those "very necessary" products and lead to mass starvation. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (among others) has published several studies over the last fifteen or so years which demonstrate that small-scale, local, organic farming is a much better, healthier, and more efficient way for feeding our species. https://www.fao.org/common-pages/search/en/?q=small+scale+organic+farming
This magical fantasy may have been well-intended, but I believe cast the Democratic party as fallacious fools.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - 2-11-19 Green New Deal called for a "10-year national mobilization" containing 10 goals (see above link). Goal # 3 is an example of mindless demagoguery:
"Meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources."
This was a cornerstone of the Democratic Party platform that has not even come close to being achieved in 7 years - and never will be. And the average voter understood this was a meaningless goal.
I always support the Democrats but it really annoys me when they voluntarily shoot themselves in the foot. As you suggest, the whole notion of "Green" needs to be replaced with a strong dose of reality.
When reading your thoughtful essay, I couldn't help but think of Hildegard of Bingen's extensive use of the term veriditas. From an herbalists perspective, it is the greening power within a person and within nature. Some people turn brown, wither, and need to have their veriditas healed. Hildagard would prescribe the color green for improved veriditas and instructed patients to go stare at a green meadow, or forest as what we look at can heal, or harm us. Which ties into nature vocabulary disappearing from a child's lexicon, as what we see impacts the words we know and our perspectives. Because most folks don't think through the lens of viridia/veriditas, we're a spiritually sick culture.
I'm a foraging instructor and have taught both adults and children to identify various trees and I've found that viridia can be cultivated within minutes. If it is of interest to you, I wrote about it here: https://divinenature.substack.com/p/redeeming-our-ancestral-awe
Two years ago, on turning 60, I got my first tattoo Viriditas with ivy vines accentuating the greening power of this word. Hildegard is a true icon of longevity and the blending of the natural world with the spirit.
Wonderful painting, conveys emotion and motion so imho it's not a 'still life'. And good article, helps with prompting seeing feeling experiencing anew which is actually old... timeless. And yeah with advertising, propaganda and such like, nothing sacred with language. Green is also the color of the heart chakra, i would say a bright glowing vibrating emerald green when clear and pure. Viridia also is close to vivid.
"Green has become a brand, a certification, a technology, and a signal of virtue that obscures the unwillingness to do anything to protect the natural world."
Your mind works in strange, remarkable ways. Viridia is a welcome wake up call to the distraction that the green branding has become. I remember all the branding that took place when our local county visitors bureau and the county council tried to pass the destination management plan (the tourism plan), with part of the plan being to get all of the businesses on the green certification band wagon.
I think the first, and maybe the worst, degradation of the meaning of green was back in the early 1960s when the petro-chemical companies began calling the use of their chemical products in industrial agriculture the "Green Revolution." Their lies are still widely believed, as shown in the recent talk about how the closing of the Strait of Hormuz could deprive the world of those "very necessary" products and lead to mass starvation. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (among others) has published several studies over the last fifteen or so years which demonstrate that small-scale, local, organic farming is a much better, healthier, and more efficient way for feeding our species. https://www.fao.org/common-pages/search/en/?q=small+scale+organic+farming
The Green New Deal can bee seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal
This magical fantasy may have been well-intended, but I believe cast the Democratic party as fallacious fools.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - 2-11-19 Green New Deal called for a "10-year national mobilization" containing 10 goals (see above link). Goal # 3 is an example of mindless demagoguery:
"Meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources."
This was a cornerstone of the Democratic Party platform that has not even come close to being achieved in 7 years - and never will be. And the average voter understood this was a meaningless goal.
I always support the Democrats but it really annoys me when they voluntarily shoot themselves in the foot. As you suggest, the whole notion of "Green" needs to be replaced with a strong dose of reality.