The Green We Hunger For

I have been obsessed with green lately. Not in the way of emerald rings or St. Patrick’s parades, but in an unconscious, gnawing kind of way. I didn’t even realize the holiday was looming at the edges of my vision when I impulsively bought a clearance box of natural green hair dye at Whole Foods. My hair has been untouched by chemicals for years, yet something in me demanded green, insisted upon it, as though my body had made a silent decision before my mind caught up.

Then it hit me. This is an end-of-winter disease. A hunger. A deficiency.

We spend months under artificial light, walled in by concrete, consuming food that is more beige than vibrant. Our diets mirror our landscapes, depleted, stripped of color and life. We settle for the synthetic, the artificial neon glow of a world that once pulsed with chlorophyll. Even St. Patrick’s green, once symbolic of fertile lands, is now painted into beer foam and sugar-laden confections, a fluorescent mockery of the real thing.

We don’t just want green. We need it.

Our cells, our vision, our weary wintered bones crave it. It is not enough to see it. We must consume it, absorb it, let it seep into our bloodstream like sunlight through leaves. We mask our deficiencies with dyed eggs and processed spirulina smoothies, but the truth is, we are starving for something real.

And as we emerge from another winter, stepping out into what should be the soft awakening of spring, the hunger for green is met with an unsettling reality. There will be less of it.

With new policies pushing for increased logging, protected lands shrinking, and forests sacrificed for short-term economic gains, we are watching the lungs of our world thin out before our eyes. The green we crave, the green we depend on, is being stripped away in the name of progress. Ancient trees felled, habitats lost, biodiversity dwindling. All while we scroll through curated images of nature, forgetting what it means to be immersed in it.

Maybe that is why I am drawn to these images now, why I am sharing fragments of green from my Fragmented series. These photographs, woven from memory and modern algorithms, seem to understand something I hadn’t fully articulated. They piece together my subconscious longing, stitching together an image of a world where green is not just a color, but a pulse, a force, a necessity.

And so, in this space, I offer green. A glimpse, a breath, a reminder. That beyond our screens and filtered air, beyond the cages we build for convenience, there is a spectrum we were meant to live within. That if we are to thrive, truly thrive, we must fight to keep it. Because the hunger for green is not just personal. It is collective. It is urgent. And it is growing.