An engaging post-Kzoo post by Jeffrey Cohen, with help from Liza Blake & Lowell Duckert, this morning has me thinking in colors. He speculates about broadening the chromatic spectrum of eco-thinking by adding a rainbow to my binary hobbyhorse of green pastoral and blue thallasic —
fire (orange)
animal (red)
water (blue)
field and forest (green)
light (yellow)
dark materials (black)
storm (purple)
built environments (brown)
stone (gray)
ice (white)I’d also like to leave room for the unexpected: would a queer ecology be pink?
This bright expansion reminds me also of what Gil Harris said to me after my blue Macbeth talk at Columbia last month, which was to ask whether that play”s famously obscure oceanic line about making “the green one red” might muddle the color of my blue ocean. Especially since the image I used in that talk, of the India Company ship Experiment in a storm in 1673, shows decidedly un-blue water. 
The answer then was that I wanted blue as a positional color for ecocriticism, a way to respond to the overwhelming green-ness of our eco-discourse, a green that so seldom resembles, it seems to me, the green in Edward Barlow’s manuscript drawing. But the ocean is green, too, and the grass is blue, as Dolly sings. Colors mix, always.
I like a fuller spectrum for eco-poetics. Looking forward to playing with the details. Makes me wonder about the fantastical patterned or polka-dotted hinterlands of Kzoo, not so far from that “fresh coast” of the Great Lakes.
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