Why are we called Blue & Green Tomorrow?

We received an email this week, asking why our magazine was called Blue & Green Tomorrow. The writer said their friend – a Green party member – had refused to visit our website because the ‘blue’ in our name meant we had links to the Conservative party.

It’s a rare but not unheard of query.

If the writer’s friend were in the US, we would be associated with the Democrats (40% of our readers are in the US). If they were in Scotland, it would probably mean Rangers & Celtic Tomorrow. In Ireland, green is the colour of Republicans. Associating any common single colour with a single political party in a small windy island off the coast of Europe is a slightly GB-centric perspective.

We live on a blue and green planet – “a pale blue [but not Tory] dot“, according to Carl Sagan. Actually more of a blue planet than a green one. The ‘green’ label discounts that most life on Earth lives in the blue wobbly bit: the sea. This is far too land-based and anthropocentric for our tastes.

The actual name itself has a really simple explanation and comes from a sentiment of the unrivalled Douglas Adams. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he wrote Earth is “an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy“. We adapted this to, “We want to live on a planet that is as blue and green tomorrow as it was yesterday.”

Another post-rationalised explanation that has bubbled up over the last three years is that the green is to do with the environment (the planet) and the blue to do with ethics (its people). Similarly, my eyes are blue (but I’m not a Tory) and my wife’s are green (she’s roughly left-of-centre). Another subconscious hint towards the name?

We have no interest in adversarial ideas between the outdated concepts of left or right, but whether a party is proposing sustainable policies or not. A sustainable coalition of Green Tory, Green Labour, Green Lib Dem and Green Green would be our ideal.

Further reading:

We need Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats and nationalist parties that get sustainability

The people’s manifesto

Green policies beat brown’s (reds, blues and yellows)

If we voted for policies at elections, and not parties, the results might surprise us all

Green party leader Natalie Bennett: ‘We must do more to preserve our world’