Going, Going Green
As global warming changes the planet, it is changing the sports world.
To counter the looming environmental crisis, surprising and innovative
ideas are already helping sports adapt
Posted: Tuesday March 6, 2007 2:08PM; Updated: Wednesday March 7, 2007
11:56AM
By Alexander Wolff
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/more/03/06/eco0312/
The next time a ball game gets rained out during the September stretch
run, you can curse the momentary worthlessness of those tickets in
your pocket. Or you can wonder why it got rained out -- and ask
yourself why practice had to be called off last summer on a day when
there wasn't a cloud in the sky; and why that Gulf Coast wharf where
you used to reel in mackerel and flounder no longer exists; and why
it's been more than one winter since you pulled those titanium skis
out of the garage.
Global warming is not coming; it is here. Greenhouse gases -- most
notably carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, oil and gas -- are
trapping solar heat that once escaped from the Earth's atmosphere. As
temperatures around the globe increase, oceans are warming, fields are
drying up, snow is melting, more rain is falling, and sea levels are
rising.
All of which is changing the way we play and the sports we watch.
Evidence is everywhere of a future hurtling toward us faster than
scientists forecasted even a few years ago. Searing heat is turning
that rite of passage of Texas high school football, the August
two-a-day, into a one-at-night, while at the game's highest level the
Miami Dolphins, once famous for sweating players into shape, have
thrown in the soggy towel and built a climate-controlled practice
bubble. Even the baseball bat as we know it is in peril, and final
scores and outcomes of plays may be altered too.
Because of the melting of glaciers and polar ice, and because water
expands as it warms, oceans are rising. Researchers expect an increase
of up to a meter by 2100, enough to drown wetlands. In the last year
and a half, scientists have noticed that once indestructible ice
sheets on Greenland and Antarctica have begun to creep toward the sea.
If we continue to spew greenhouse gases as we are, the Earth could
become five degrees warmer this century. The last time Earth was that
warm, three million years ago, sea level stood 80 feet higher than it
does now. Scientists don't foresee such a rise for centuries, but they
agree that a damaging change in sea level will occur by 2100.
Global warming is also leading to more dramatic swings in the weather
in some areas. Since the early 20th century, the amount of rain
dropped in the biggest 1% of storms each year has risen 20%. A warming
planet doesn't create hurricanes, but it does make them stronger and
last longer. Tropical storms become more powerful over a warmer Gulf,
turning a category 4 storm, for example, into a category 5, like
Katrina, which transformed the symbol of sports in New Orleans, the
Superdome, into an image of epic disaster. In addition to more intense
storms, higher seas, and droughts and floods, ocean flow patterns
could change, leading to the extinction of marine species. Warmer
temperatures could devastate agricultural economies around the globe,
and diseases such as malaria now confined to the tropics would spread
to other regions.
Unlike many other pressing environmental concerns -- pollution, water
shortages, overpopulation, deforestation -- global warming is by
definition global. Every organism on the planet is already feeling its
impact.
"There are many important environmental battles to be fought," says
Bill McKibben, the Vermont-based writer, activist and passionate
cross-country skier. "But if we lose this one -- which we're doing --
none of the others matter. It's crunch time."
Sports condition us to notice first those things that happen at
scatback speed, and until recently climate change took place in
world-historical fashion, the way a nil-nil soccer match unfolds. But
that perception is changing fast, especially for skiers, whose season
has endured a whipsaw of extremes: One day in November enough snow
fell at Colorado's Beaver Creek to cause the cancellation of practice
for the men's downhill at a World Cup event. A day later on the other
side of the globe, officials at the French resort of Val d'Is่re
called off another World Cup event on account of too little snow, as
well as a forecast of prolonged warm temperatures -- one of seven
World Cup events in Europe this season to have all races canceled for
the same reason.
When the U.S. Nordic ski team returned home early from the European
circuit after a December race was rescheduled four times in one week,
it left behind resorts desperately trying to lure tourists with
promises of spa weekends, Christmas markets and hiking to be enjoyed
during this "extension of autumn."
Indeed, the world's signature dogsled race, Alaska's Iditarod, hasn't
begun at its traditional starting point in Wasilla since 2002 because
of too little snow there. The Elfstedentocht, an 11-city skating
marathon that the Dutch stage whenever the canals freeze over, has
been run only once in the past two decades. The highest ski slope on
the planet, Bolivia's Chacaltaya (altitude 17,388 feet), will soon be
unskiable for lack of snow, and the Swiss are wrapping an age-old
glacier in an insulating blanket as if it were a foundling. Meanwhile
backcountry skiing in North America and ice fishing in the upper
Midwest are in jeopardy, and any ski resort below 4,000 feet is
worried. Winter in Vermont is now the equivalent of winter in Rhode
Island a generation ago.
Humans are accelerating global warming, and we can at least minimize
its damage, if not reverse it. By acting quickly, the two countries
that emit most of the world's carbon dioxide, the U.S. and China,
might be able to avert that forecasted five-degree temperature
increase, slowing the rise of the seas enough to allow for the
development of new technologies to redress the problem. What would it
mean to act? Decrease the burning of fossil fuels, improve fuel
efficiency and conserve energy in our daily lives.
The good news is that stadiums and arenas, if built with green
aforethought, can be more than symbolic Valhallas that remind us that
we're all in this together. Site one near a public-transit line, and
there's less need to build that most Earth-hostile of features, the
vast parking lot. (The greenest ballpark in the country may be Fenway
Park, because only an idiot would try driving and parking there.)
Turbines mounted on upper decks would catch the same wind that plays
whimsically with pop flies, turning it into the source of power to
offset at least some of the energy demands of a ball game. Gillette
Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., features a water filtration and reuse
system that collects and recirculates "black" and "gray water" to make
the most of all that beer and all those flushes.
A very familiar sports facility is already poised to help the cause: A
golf course is by definition conserved green space. If not turned into
a repository for pesticides or a pretext for building strips of
single-family homes along its fairways, it can serve as a huge filter,
with the water draining from it cleaner than the water flowing in.
Meantime, an eco-consciousness is leeching ever so slowly into the
jockosphere. You'd expect environmental awareness among extreme-sport
athletes like the snowboarders and BMX riders who belong to the Action
Sports Environmental Coalition, or from surfers whose vocation and
avocation depend on the health of the seas. But less likely candidates
are thinking globally and acting locally.
Saints safety Steve Gleason runs his Dodge Ram pickup on processed
vegetable oil -- biodiesel.
NASCAR driver Ward Burton's foundation is pledged to habitat
management, land conservation and environmental education in his home
of Halifax County, Va.
The Philadelphia Eagles may have some of the most discourteous
followers in sports, but their management is a leader, having launched
an environmental initiative replete with catchy slogans like Go Green
and Time for Some Serious Trash Talk.
Two years ago the men's lacrosse team at Middlebury College
calculated its "carbon footprint" (the amount of global-warming carbon
dioxide its daily activities generated) and raised money to purchase
enough renewable-energy credits (investments in wind power) to offset
those emissions. The team thereby became carbon-neutral -- a status
also claimed by last summer's soccer World Cup in Germany, cycling's
Team Clif Bar Midwest and the Vermont Frost Heaves, this writer's
American Basketball Association team, which rides in a
biodiesel-powered bus.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is working with the NBA
and Major League Baseball to help their teams get greener. Scientists
told the NFL that Super Bowl XLI would put one million pounds of
carbon dioxide into the air -- not counting air travel to Miami -- so
the league planted 3,000 trees around Florida in an attempt to pull at
least that much of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.
By going green, motor sports could have the quickest impact on public
awareness of the planet's fate. The Formula One circuit has already
discovered hybrids and biofuels, and Indy cars are mixing ethanol into
their fuel. NASCAR is poised to phase out leaded gasoline, a
neurotoxin. (The Clean Air Act of 1970 included an exemption for race
cars even as the public was barred from buying cars that ran on leaded
gas.) It's only a short jump from a NASCAR driver with a raised
consciousness to a NASCAR fan with the same.
"In the environmental movement there's way too much preaching to the
choir," says Ken Rakoz of Centralia, Wash., who built the first
biodiesel-powered dragster. "There are people sitting on the fence,
and Joe Sixpack doesn't really know about [biodiesel] until we do
something like racing." Whereupon we'll be that much closer to a
future in which we define a winner as not merely the team that holds a
lead, but one whose arena holds a LEED (Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design) certification from the U.S. Green Building
Council.
From his home in Ripton, Vt., McKibben, who sounded an early warning
about climate change in his 1989 book The End of Nature, surveys this
disfigurement of the world as we've known it with as much melancholy
as indignation. "If I were a deeply moral person, I should be kept
awake at night by the thought of hundreds of millions of Bangladeshis
fleeing rising waters and dengue and famine," says McKibben, who's
helping to organize a nationwide call to action on climate change for
April 14 that will include iconic outdoor and sporting sites Mount
Hood and the Key West coral reefs. "But at some level I feel this most
acutely in the winter, when I realize I've had fewer and fewer chances
to put on my skis."
And therein may lie the great value of sports. What happens in an
arena so familiar and beloved may sound an alarm we will hear and
heed. At a time when so much in our lives is linear and digital, from
the economy to technology, sports still run in graceful cycles,
marking time in rhythm with the seasons.
"It's the last of the semipagan calendars we keep," McKibben says,
"and a lot of it is going to disappear. All that Bart Giamatti stuff"
-- the pastoral invocations of the former commissioner of baseball --
"has a different valence if we're not going to Florida for spring
training, but to St. Paul. We're still so used to the idea that we can
deal with the forces of nature that we think nothing of naming our
teams Hurricanes and Cyclones. In 10 years, that will be like calling
a team the Plagues."
Ten years. That's two-and-a-half Olympiads -- enough time for our
teams and athletes to take the lead, galvanize attention and influence
behavior. When they do, per usual, may we cheer and may we follow. But
as we watch, let us remember that this game is different. We don't
have the luxury of looking on from the sidelines. We must become
players too.
--
There may come a time when the CO2 police will wander the earth telling
the poor and the dispossed how many dung chips they can put on their
cook fires. -- Captain Compassion.
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
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