It’s no surprise that the American public gets so excited about “going green.” After all, what’s more reflective of the American Dream than the idea of taking immediate action (go!) toward progress (green!)? 

Still, a solid understanding of what it means to go green on a national, let alone global, level is unclear. Like the phrase itself, the concept of going green is vague, existing for most as the potential to, somewhere down the line, arrive at some undisclosed greener, grassier side. But when we go green, where are we actually going? Better yet, how do we get there?

Unfortunately, there is no shared, concrete understanding of what it means to go green. While multifaceted efforts should be embraced, without a clear, universal understanding of which practices constitute environmentalism, how can we ever hope to collectively go green on a scale large enough to effectively counter the efficiency with which we’re depleting our resources?

The green movement, at base, is a feel-good one. It’s built on and perpetuated by the notion that we can, as individuals, recognize, appreciate and protect the value of Earth’s resources. It is understandable, then, that much of “going green” discourse focuses on what each of us can do personally to protect our environment. And that’s good. 

But if we really want to combat the threat of self-imposed extinction, we’re going to need to supplement our personal efforts to go green with some hefty policy changes at the national level. It’s absurd to assume industry giants will adopt green practices out of the goodness of their hearts. Until it becomes unlawful to avoid the inconvenience of implementing green practices, most larger corporations will. 

Thankfully, at the end of the day, the U.S. corporate world answers to government. And as history tells us, if the public creates an issue-based ruckus of considerable-nuisance proportions, the government will implement policy changes, if only to shut us up. 

As is, we’re doing green-reluctant industries a favor; by confining environmental discourse to slogans that only work well on bumper stickers and T-shirts, we’ve effectively silenced the environmental movement. 

But protecting our resources isn’t just a slogan — it’s a right we have as inhabitants of this planet. We live here, we enjoy these resources, and we can protect them if we want to. And until the general public learns to take “going green” this personally, the government and environmentally unfriendly industries will never take it seriously. 

The concept of “going green” will succeed only when we rheotically reconstruct it to represent the defense of our fundamental human right to protect our access to clean resources.