Green

They say that the hot fashionable color this season is green.  Models cavort in vetiver sweaters, cozy up in pea green pea coats, extend dainty toes in acid green sandals, flutter coy lashes over emerald contacts, and frolic in jadeite kitchens wielding translucent green mini-vacs.  What accounts for this rampant kudzu of greenness?  Is it a longing for the living colors of spring in the midst of the black and white of winter?

If so, it's a longing that is not expressed in a Western idiom.  Here, in Southern California, green is the color of winter.  It is the color of the bright shoots of new grass that poke up after rains, the lush density of clover, the clean olives of the chapparal washed clean by the storms.  These Western greens are clear, bright or yellow-tinged greens, greens poorly represented in your typical box of Crayolas or colored pencils.  As a kid growing up in California, I was both frustrated and mystified by the crayon labeled simply "green" in the bright yellow box.  It was a color I'd never seen in the trees and plants around me, a weird waxy color that seemed to have more in common with food coloring than anything alive.  "Yellow-green" was adequate -- it bore some resemblance to the familiar local vegetation -- and "pine green" was acceptable too.  But according to the manufacturers, neither was the essence of green, just derivatives.  So I ignored the "green" and satisfied myself by drawing forests with lots of pine trees and sprigs of new grass.  It was not until a few years ago, when I lived in the upper Midwest, that I finally saw "green" in anything other than man-made objects.  There, the new-grown grass was that color -- and it felt weird and wrong.  Where was the cheerful new-grass green of my childhood?  Were generations of Midwestern children growing up looking at "yellow-green" disdainfully, or did they simply assume the universality of their "green"?

This unthinking alienation of the West, its peoples and environments, from national culture, is nothing new.  Explorers who first came to the West from the deep greenery of the humid East were stunned into uncomprehending silence when confronted with the red rock of the deserts, the olives of the chapparal, the duns and ochers of the California hills.  They shoe-horned what they saw into pre-existing categories, and preferred to ignore the parts that spilled over the edges.  Federal ignorance of local ecoscapes was profound; even knowledge of basic Western geography was flawed.  (I have on occasion had to educate relatives and acquaintances who thought that living in San Diego meant that I was only a few hours' drive from the Bay Area; in my research, I came across similar ignorance in a letter from one D.C. official who wondered if San Francisco was part of the local agent's daily rounds.  Similarly, I'm sure nearly everyone in the Bay Area has encountered tourists in tank tops and flip-flops freezing in "sunny" California's chilly summer fogs.)  Suspicion of historic Western resentment of the federal hands that fed them is common in my field, but it's hard not to sympathize, as a Westerner myself, with that feeling of irritation with those who make decisions knowing so little about this part of the country, and, worse, not realizing the depths of their ignorance.

It's at moments like this when I wonder about the extent to which my political beliefs have been shaped by this heritage and this environment.  Awareness of environmental limitations, suspicion of federal bureaucrats coupled with dependence on federal largesse, insistence on local input, independence coupled with frontier-esque pulling together -- these are integral parts of Western history and culture.  We are used to lumping the inland Western states with the rural South instead of the Pacific Coast, used to seeing the key distinctions as urban/rural, minority/white, secular/religious -- but by those standards, the inland West is less like the South than it is like the coastal West.  The West is a very diverse region, and historically highly religious (albeit in often weird, inventive ways), and its development has been, popular beliefs aside, an intrinsically urban one.  It is a highly federalized region, sometimes uncomfortably, but inarguably and of necessity.  The South historically viewed the world in racial black and white, spurned the federal government to the point of war and beyond, built its economy on agriculture from day one, and is religious but in a comparatively homogenous way.  It is not the most logical ally of the Western states (which may explain why Texas is such an odd place, partaking as it does of both regions and cultures), inland as well as coastal.  Perhaps the coastal and inland Wests need to rethink their political identity, not in terms of blue and red, but in terms of the bright green of new winter grass.

Comments

[Chris Clarke]

What an incredibly lovely set of ideas, and you connect them in ways I'd not have thought of but which make perfect and palpable sense.

I find myself recommending Brechin's Imperial San Francisco a lot these days. Sometimes as a counterweight to the notion of liberal cities going it alone without the reactionary hinterlands, sometimes as a source of information for all the transplanted Easterners in SF to learn about just where they really live (it's not a colony of Boston!), and sometimes just to get people to consider applying ecological analysis to the political-social world. I think I'll send them here too. Yours is shorter than Brechin's :-)

The miner's lettuce was out on John Muir's old ranch yesterday. we really need a whole new set of words to describe the seasons out here. "Fall," "Winter" and "Spring" don't cut it.

[LiL]

This is beautiful. I love how history and nature unite in this piece, and how organic and whole the way your describe the world is, in all this green, with all its politics, only hinted at but very present in the larger, whole picture.

It is so Zen, too, in the best sense of the word.

[Alir J. Black]

I have never thaught that way about the color green. Huh. I live in the North East, and the color green, in the north east is longs to see some green. Right now it it brown, soon it will be white, and then a long time from now, green will sprot from the earth and be found.