Green - another way to over-consume?

Green is such a versatile colour. 

It's my second favourite colour (after purple); it symbolises nature and the natural world. Green also represents tranquillity, good luck, health, and jealousy. It's an easy colour to live with.

Green is also a versatile adjective. Merriam-Webster provides ten different definitions just for the adjective form of green alone. It can mean the colour between yellow and blue on the light spectrum, covered in foliage, pleasant, youthful, unripe, envious, sickly, naive, unprocessed, and related to environmentalism. 

I want to talk about that tenth definition of green:

♦️ often capitalized: relating to or being an environmentalist political movement ♦️ concerned with or supporting environmentalism ♦️ tending to preserve environmental quality (as by being recyclable, biodegradable, or non-polluting)

Being green and supporting green ideas is becoming more mainstream. It used to be a fringe ideology, adopted by hippies and drop-outs. 

As green ideas have entered the mainstream, a new phenomenon known as greenwash has emerged. 

Greenwash involves pretending to be green in order to sell more.

But how can we detect this thin wash of 'green' over otherwise unchanged ideas and products?

Apology - not really sorry

When we feel wronged or hurt by someone, an apology can help make amends and go toward restoring the relationship. 

Too often though, what gets offered as an apology falls a long way short.

That non-apology feeling

When the other person is not genuinely sorry, this tends to add even more hurt and damage to the situation. We may not know exactly what we want to hear, but we know immediately when an apology is not wholehearted or not genuine. 

Recently, I was offered what I considered a sorry apology for an apology. It aggravated the situation, and I wasn't prepared to accept it.

Since then, I have been thinking about what goes into making a genuine apology.