[Written for a client of the Vega Project]
****
March 14, 175 A.D. – Marcus Aurelius, a bit drunk after an epic feast, jumps into the bathhouse with a handful of green olive branches, reputedly muttering, “Viridium ab uno ad omnes!” (”green from one to all!”) and, “Alea viridis iacta est!” (”the green dye is cast!”). The olive branches dye the water green, and, within a week, every Roman senator, and his toga, has a faint celeste hue. Until the end of his reign five years later, senators give Marcus a hard time for his maneuver. On his deathbed he whispers, “Cedant arma togae viridi” (”Let arms yield to the green toga”).
December 16, 1773 – Massachusetts colonists, fed up with British taxes, dump tons of green tea into the Boston Harbor, starting a revolution, and, in the process, temporarily turn the harbor mild green. Samuel Adams, inspired by the sight, proclaims, “Beside a green sea lies a free land!”
November 20, 1794 – During a solar eclipse, Enrico Verdi, an Italian astronomer, discovers a green planet, more than two hundred light years away. Incredibly, Verdi finds that the green light emitted from the planet is so intense that it gives the whole galaxy a green tint. He names the planet Verdi, which, not uncoincidentally, means green.
May 21, 1854 – At 3:07 p.m., one of the holding tanks at the Acme Ink Company’s Philadelphia factory springs a leak. Unable to stop the flow, employees evacuate the factory. Within minutes, the tank bursts, and 600,000 gallons of green ink flow down main street in a 10-foot tall wave of goopy greenness. Aside from some permanent discoloration, nobody is injured.
September 2, 1897 – An exotic strain of Northern Mongolian grass seed arrives on the Maiden, a ship en route from Japan to San Francisco. Once it sprouts, it spreads eastward, up and over the Sierra Nevada, at nearly 20 miles a day, covering everything in a blanket of green. The hardy northern plant thrives in harsh, dry climates; in parts of Nevada, cattle ranchers report shoulder-high fields of the silky smooth grass. Two months later, when rain arrives, the plants perish, and green returns to brown.
February 17, 1947 – Martha Dalton, a far-sighted cook at Lincoln Elementary school in Eugene, Oregon, misreads a cookbook, and accidentally adds 100 times too much canned spinach to a lasagna recipe; few students complain about the taste of their lunches, but, within 5 hours, parents begin complaining that their children’s skin has “turned green.” The green fades within a week, and appears to leave no other symptoms.
October, 20 1962: New-age French artist Henri Michelle-Blasseau begins taking photos using a specially-formulated green film, giving white objects — particularly socks — an intensely green tint. Thirty-two years later, on the opening night of a MOMA retrospective on Michelle-Blasseau’s works, five hundred guests arrive wearing nothing but green cotton socks.
July 4, 1968 – Hundreds of thousand of hippies — driving green Volkswagen beetles/buses, wearing green bell-bottoms, and smoking green grass — invade Washington, DC. Tim Leary’s saying, “Green on, green in, green out,” becomes a popular slogan, and is chanted non-stop for 48 in front of the White House. The revolution is not televised, and things fade back to normal soon enough.
June 23, 1977 – A potent, chemical-resistant lime-green mold invades bathtubs, sinks, and nooks and crannies across southeast Georgia. Governor Paxton Greene declares a state of emergency, and, as a protective measure, wraps Atlanta’s capitol building in plastic. It works — the capitol stands tall in a mess of green slime — and in the meantime, scientists from the CDC figure out how to eliminate the green sludge. Governor Greene is henceforth known as “the Greene Wrapper.”
March 3, 2003: At 3:33 a.m., a glitch in in a computer in Memphis, Tennessee’s Department of Transportation turns every traffic light in Memphis — approximately 33,000 of them — green at the same time. Transportation engineers, who spend $3 million to fix the problem, later determine that the “all-green” only lasted for 3 minutes, and that no drivers were injured during the screw-up.
January 26, 2005 – While brewing a midnight cup of coffee at the Akron Daily News printing press, James Milligan unknowingly trips a fuse, which in turn melts the fuse box, and shuts down all but one of the ink presses. Unable to fix the problem, Milligan is forced to print all 700,000 copies of the day’s newspaper entirely in green ink. Akron residents are amused, but Milligan is fired. After thousands of readers complain (it was an honest mistake, after all) he is re-hired. Once a year, now, the paper is printed in green.
February 14, 2008 – TK, the global management and techology consulting firm, acquires TK, the West’s premier environmental consulting firm. Joined together, they’re greener than ever — and offer an expanded array of integrated services in environmental planning, natural resource management, especially in the transportation, energy, climate change, and water resources sectors.