Play It Green

What’s cooler than girls’ baseball? From a family of four girls with a devout baseball-loving father (Yankees, in the era of Mantle and Ruth), the idea of not-being-able-to-be-a-baseball-player hung over us. Not me, so much, since I was the sort of kid who got polite applause for merely connecting with the ball, but for my sister, who hung a Ricky Henderson poster on her bedroom door and had a throwing arm like a speeding bullet. Sometimes, for kids, its the possibility that sustains you. Not to knock softball, but I’ve never understood why girls couldn’t simply play girls’ baseball. It turns out they have always played baseball, nearly as long as men, and to this day there is still a North American Women’s Baseball League. Who knew? Softball was started in the late 1880s as a balled up leather glove, that evolved into a way for men to play baseball inside. When time came to fund women’s and men’s sports equally under Title IX, women’s softball was seen as the equivalent to men’s baseball. There are a lot of historical tidbits on all this fascinating history here.  

 The most famous of the women’s baseball leagues, of course, was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, begun during WWII and with an 11-year history that only ended when the popularity of televised men’s baseball shuffled it out of existence. A League of Their Own, is, of course, an amazing tribute to this era of women in sports. Anyway, there is a green point in here. The company Vintage Blue has a whole line of tribute shirts to that great league, along with other shirts that echo the 40s and 50s, all made sustainably with 100% organic cotton, including chemical-free printing. And they donate 5% from every sale to the third-world loan program Kiva or Women Thrive Worldwide.

No Comments »

This is the sentence Christopher Shaw wants readers to take away from his tear-down of the Olympics: “The Olympic Games at the local level are all about real estate” (emphasis his). The Canadian professor and activist behind the No Games 2010 Coalition is particularly concerned about Vancouver’s successful bid for the 2010 Olympics in his book Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games (New Society Publishers, $19.95), but the corporate corruption and ecological destruction inherent in the games is pervasive in every host city, he writes. While he blasts the slick marketing inherent in “selling” a city on the Olympics by the part of a big developer (Bid Corp, in Vancouver’s case), Shaw goes too far by blasting the athletes, too. “The athlete stories [leading up to the games] had a universal slickness,” he writes. He also compares Olympic fervor, on the part of both athletes and audiences, to the brainwashing of Nazi Germany and the rigid uniformity of Communist China. This is the writing of a man made bitter by his struggle against a perceived corporate enemy.

As an environmental argument, however, the book makes a convincing case. Continue Reading »

No Comments »