Toward Greenness Studies: Materials – Metaphors – Media – Misunderstandings

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the urgent need for interdisciplinary greenness studies that engage philosophy, art, art history, science and technology studies, the natural and the medical sciences, in order to fruitfully critique the pervasive greenness trope, and its inherent contradictions emerging with its migration across different cultures of knowledge

‘Green’ has become a pervasive trope across a broad range of disciplines. But far from having universal meaning, it marks a dramatic knowledge gap prone to systematic misunderstandings: Engineers brand ‘green technologies’ as ecologically benign, while climate researchers point to the ‘greening of the earth’ itself as the alarming effect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. ‘Green growth’ aims to reconcile economic and ecologically sustainable development, while in philosophy ‘prismatic ecology’ rebukes the use of green to represent binary ideas of the other-than-human world as an idealized nature. More concept than colour, ‘green’ is frequently being reduced to a mere metaphor stripped of its material, epistemological and historical referents.