Keeping the Fun in Staying with the Trouble: Green Suits and Environmental Activist Pleasure

It started with an early morning outing in London, in January 2016, wearing a full-body, Spandex green suit with a leafy sash. Beth Osnes, professor of Theatre and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado (CU), was in England touring a climate change show, Shine, in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities Initiative, and the green suit and sash were part of the costumes for the performance (Osnes 2017). Sneaking out into the early morning before her travel companions had awoken, an all-green Osnes asked an elderly passerby to take a photo of her seated on a wall ledge in front of the Thames, one green arm gesturing upward toward the barren tree above. He did so with piqued interest and asked Osnes about her motivations. She explained that she was in town doing a performance project to support youth in greening their city, and that she came outside dressed in green and with her camera to picture what "greening" might look like literally, yet playfully (fig. 1).

Encouraged by their delightful conversation, Osnes tucked a green suit into her backpack and donned it for other photographs in Paris near the Eiffel Tower and in Barcelona. In order to quickly get in and out of the suit in public places, she wore leggings and a tank top beneath an easily removeable outfit. Tourists asked to have their photos taken with her, and children gawked. Not only were these impromptu performance activities fun and exhilarating, but they prompted unlikely conversations about environmental issues, such as "You know, I remember how much milder summers used to be," reflected one passerby in Paris. Osnes posted these photos to social media to convey and invigorate what greening could look and feel like.

These initial forays eventually became a photographic performance project titled Green Suits that has taken four different forms. Since 2016, hundreds of similarly green-suited participants have contributed their photos representing every continent on Earth. This essay illustrates how performance can "stay with the trouble" by navigating between the tricky dualisms of eco-activism: using fossil fuel–based materials to critique fossil-fuel culture, addressing serious matters with frivolity, interceding at individual levels in service of what must eventually be a structural-systemic shift.

Green Suits has been used in a variety of settings to support participants in having fun and experiencing pleasure while playfully embodying green's homophony as a verb and adjective. Through common usage, the adjective green has morphed into a transitive verb, to green, indicating the act of protecting the environment (Macmillan Dictionary 2022).

The Oxford Learner's Dictionary defines the verb green in the political sense as "to make somebody more aware of issues connected with the environment; to make something appear friendly towards the environment" (2022). To enact this awareness-raising, friendly idea of green in various ways between 2016 to 2022, Green Suits has taken four different forms between 2016 to 2022: 1) Green Cities, an online collection of hundreds of photos submitted by photographers representing every continent on Earth hosted on the Inside the Greenhouse website and displayed at the University of Colorado Art Museum; 2) Green Suits Boulder Valley School District (BVSD), a district-wide school competition in Boulder exhibited at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); 3) Green Suits Your University, university residencies at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Barnard College, and University of Colorado (CU); and 4) Green Suits Your Fashion, a student assignment communicating sustainable fashion.

Fig. 1.

Photo titled "London Beth Osnes." Osnes seated near the river Thames in London for the first of many green-suit photos. (Photo: Anonymous [a passerby].)

All participants in Green Suits costume themselves in a full-body, Spandex green suit with a leafy sash, physically embodying their own idea of green within their chosen context, submit a photograph of themselves doing this, and have that photo publicly displayed to an audience through some format. Both the process of taking the photos and the photographs themselves have sparked unlikely...