Play It Green

It’s a bad-ass new world out there for sports fans, who appreciate a nasty brawl as much an impressive play. Witness the rising popularity of mixed martial arts, which offers all the blood, bruises and head-bashing lacking in a typical WWE matchup. Also known as ultimate fighting, it makes boxing look civilized and wrestling look silly and it’s the sport to watch for young guys and girls reared on ultra-violent video games and movies.

A perfect audience, really, to hit with a little environmental knowledge, since they’re the ones who might have a some power to enact changes down the road (assuming they remain safely on the sidelines, as MMA has a way of altering consciousness). The sport came from a Brazilian fighting syle known as vale tudo (Portuguese for “anything goes”), so rainforest awareness is an apt place to start. The MMA World League has Jungle Fight, held in Brazil each year (early April this year), which aims to spread information about the Amazon rainforest. They’ve also got a global warming page on their site with pictures and info that look to be lifted straight from a science textbook. It’s a start.

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If the batmobile were a speedboat, it would be Earthrace. The 100 percent biodiesel, $2.5 million boat is a futuristic vision that yesterday launched from the Vulkan Shipyard in Sagunto, Spain to set a new world record for circumnavigating the globe (the current record is 74 days). The boat is designed to win, with extremely narrow hulls to plow through rough ocean conditions at top speed. And Earthrace is a traveling environmental lesson, with parts made from hemp composite, vegetable oil lubricants and bilge water pumped through special filters. They’re purchasing carbon credits to offset whatever emissions they do produce, so they can stamp the whole effort “carbon neutral.”

Captain Pete Bethune (a New Zealand native and former oil industry engineer) is keeping track of all the race highs and lows in a blog, the first post of which ends with some inspiring words: “Everyone should experience this once in their life I say to myself, as I push the throttles fully forward, and 1080 horsepower of Cummins Mercruiser grunt roars into roar into life. Earthrace lurches forward and roars past the start line.”

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There are people who seem to have an unlimited amount of time and resources to follow their niche-y pursuit to its ultimate conclusion. From now on, these people will be known as yogaslackers, a rarified breed of yoga practitioner who does yoga postures while balancing on a slackline (similar to a tightrope, but thinner and with more give). The poses do make for some pretty intense photo ops, and the adventure racing team known as Team Yogaslackers are a versatile bunch who take part in things like snowkiting competitions which involve inflatable kites attached to snowboards or skis.

A major one is underway right now called 2XTM (To Cross the Moon), in which extreme athletes Sam Salwei, Jason Magness and Paul Cassedy are being dragged by wind power across 390 frozen winter miles in North Dakota, beginning at the Canadian border, to raise awareness for wind energy. And seriously, it looks like a cold, endless moonscape out there. The trip should take three weeks and they’ve got to carry all their gear on their backs. Slackers, indeed.   

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