The green and white colors symbolize “the pure air and
the green land”.The oval with a line
through the middle is a stylized symbol combining the initial letters in the
words “environment” and “organism”.This stylized symbol also resembles the Greek letter “theta” which is
associated with the Greek word “thanatos” (death).This symbol, therefore, implies mankind’s threat to the
environment.
Specific History
This flag is one of a number of “ecology flags”
developed in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.The first such flag was simply the Stars and
Stripes with its blue replaced by dark green and its red by light green.That design, made by the Paramount Flag
Company of San Francisco in August 1967, flew at the famous People’s Park
incident at the University of California in Berkeley.The colors symbolized “the pure air and green land tha was
America once and that can be ours again if we take the action necessary to recover
our heritage.”
On 25 October 1969 political cartoonist Ron Cobb
developed a symbol for the ecological movement based on an oval and circle and
on the initial letters of the words environment and organism.The resulting design, which he put in the public
domain, resembled the Greek letter theta.Look magazine (21 April 1970) widely popularized the theta
symbol, which it associated with the Greek word thanatos (death) in light of
human threats to the environment and atmosphere of the earth.
Look incorporated the theta –
in chartreuse (later often rendered as yellow or white) – in a flag with green
and white horizontal stripes and a green canton. Other variations were subsequently developed, but Look’s “Ecology Flag” remains the most popular design expressing environmental
concerns.
