Are Green Plants Truly “GREEN”?

 

Are Green Plants Truly “GREEN”?

I looked at and snipped a single frame of the advertisement of the company “GreenLine” (ESSAR promoted) that showed a long trailer truck (not quite a semi-, an eighteen wheeler). The name was painted in white with the field in dark green. 

Then, I hit my head against the wall at the stupidity of some people and the dishonesty of some others; there seem to be more of the latter.

Anyone who fancies herself–you would be able to spot her from half a mile away, wearing green skirt, blouse, ear drops (jade), bangles, foot ware, getting out from a green colored gas guzzling sedan–a “Green” promoter seems to have misunderstood the term.

 Both photographs above show a single betel leaf, the top one being the topside, and below it the underside, in which you may see the ridges. There is a difference between the two greens: the top side is of a darker hue. Does this mean the single betel leaf carries two different “GREEN” tags? I had no other way of bringing out the stupidity of assessing “GREEN”ness of something through the darkness of the color green as one sees it.

Get back to the ESSAR truck mentioned in the opening paragraph. The word GreenLine is painted in white on a dark green background, I mentioned. Does the underside of the betel leaf, the paler green, belch out CO₂?

Here is my left hook. As far as I know there is no green plant that can be called fully “GREEN”. There is some inevitable “RED” in it. Plants respire as well as photosynthesize. In respiration, in plants as well as in animals, the emission is CO₂. In photosynthesis, CO₂ is the input necessary, and for sugars to be produced.

I think I have made my first point – saying something is Green does not make that something “GREEN”, at least indisputably.

Yes, the blue-green algae were truly “GREEN” because it reduced the CO₂ rich atmosphere to carbon dioxide and sugars and also oxygen. And life could truly blossom, as we understand it now.

By the simple act of living, humans are doing precisely the opposite of photosynthesis (though not in terms of chemistry). We are consuming carbon and oxygen and belching out carbon dioxide. This we cannot help doing, unless we go on a mass homicide in scales unimagined! Even then, other animals would take up the slack! The earth is doomed. Do we care? I thought not.

Does this mean we ignore all those doom-sayers and go on doing what we have been doing unchanged?

I will tell you an instance. I was doing my Ph.D in the then college-town (the only other large employer, IBM Electric typewriter plant, had shut down) Lexington, KY. On Earth Day (if I remember right) some well-meaning people thought of raising awareness among the public about the then (late 1980s) fledgling concern, global warming. The shindig was organized at Shilito Park; which meant people had to cut across the town or take the ring road to reach the venue. And, people did. How? Using their cars and there was a huge traffic snarl, yes drivers had become canines and each was snarling at the others! The collective noun, “traffic snarl”. Gas consumption and CO₂ belching sky-rocketing, on Earth Day! Go figure.

Why couldn’t the organizers have arranged for bus transport (with subsidized user’s fee) for the function from a number of places to and fro? That would have reduced the emissions. It would also have shown to people that they have it in themselves to come together for a cause. Missed opportunity, all round. By the way, on the above, I wrote a letter to the local newspaper and it got published. But, habits of people did not seem to have changed.

To conclude, we do not wish to be like the Cyanobacterium (blue-green alga). We would rather willingly take on the task of breathing of the betel leaf rather than task of photo synthesizing! Yet, we would advertise our behaviour as GREEN! such as the trucks at the beginning of this write-up. Let the others do the more difficult job.

Going “GREEN” means to appear greenish, in color!

Raghuram Ekambaram