April 2009
Monthly Archive
Of Jocks and Treehuggers
Posted by admin on 22 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Athletes Take Action, PIGskin, Sports Biz, sportswriters
By Andrew Gardner
In all of sport, the greater environment is an unnamed opponent. Bowling to auto racing. Equestrian events to slow-pitch softball. Surfing to rugby. Sport is marked by a variance of control over a world that is carefully bordered out by pavement, ski runs, white lines and targets. From the earliest cave dwelling archers to David Beckham, those with supernatural abilities set the benchmarks of sport. Fans love when teams dominate, love it more when individuals stand out. We’re thrilled when actions are superhuman, never-before-seen, record breaking and epic. Similarly we like big personalities to go with big success, even if the bigger-than-life persona is manufactured. (Witness Michael Phelps on Saturday Night Live – the great swimmer is a goofy guy, regardless of his athletic abilities.) We demand agency over existence. This affects the athletes in how they live.
The average NFL player’s career lasts three years, upping the odds for personal bankruptcy and unemployment beyond the final season. Sustainability is an ethic that could inform professional athletes beyond the interaction between the player and the green.
Go Local
Posted by admin on 11 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Rounding the Bases
Ticket prices for Major League Baseball have reached levels of insanity never before imagined: the first nine rows for the new Yankee Stadium are priced between $500 and $2500, and that’s before scalpers get ahold of them. It may finally be time for baseball fans to launch a minor rebellion. There are some 190 minor league baseball teams playing in the U.S. (and 245 affiliated with major league teams) as opposed to just 30 MLB teams. That means there’s a much greater likelihood that you live closer to your minor league park, a park that can provide all the baseball-hotdog-beer-foam-finger-waving experience you crave complete with silly between-inning entertainment, wacky mascots and no residual feeling of depression after the team you just shelled out a paycheck’s worth of money to see bombed out or the over-enthusiastic fans started slugging each other and hurling expletives in front of your impressionable child.
Then there’s the question of travel. One mile driven alone in an SUV accounts for 1.6 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile, according to the Sightline Institute. In a car, it’s 1.2 pounds; 3 people carpooling equates to 0.4 pounds per passenger-mile. Baseball, as we all know, is a game of averages–and the average baseball stadium holds between 40,000 and 65,000 fans. All the recycling initiatives, efficiency lighting and solar thermal panels in the world can’t compensate for the fact that baseball fans spend a lot of time driving to and from stadiums, ratcheting up emissions as they go. Just as we’ve all become aware of “food miles” in recent years, meaning how far our produce has traveled from farm to plate, giving locally grown food an environmental upper hand, so going to minor league games has intrinsic green value. It’s also making a statement–that baseball is about the sport, the fun and the passion of the players. It’s not about who has the most money–players or fans–which is what it has, sadly, become.
My minor league team is the Bridgeport Bluefish who have a sweet little ballpark just ten minutes from my house in a formerly rundown industrial area in a struggling city. The Metro North train cruises past the outfield, blowing its whistle, ferries travel back and forth to Long Island behind left field, fireworks light up the sky on Friday nights and kids race around the bases between innings. The players come from all walks of life–some are teachers, construction workers, mechanics–others play baseball year round, in the Dominican Winter Baseball League during the off-season. They play through injuries, they play past their prime, they play here when the major leagues decide they’ve had enough of them. Yet there are often only a scattering of fans in the seats, while Yankee Stadium, over an hour away, is packed. A local revolution is in order.
Fields of Green Fraud
Posted by admin on 10 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Rounding the Bases
Now that we can settle into the long and winding road known as baseball season… there’s something I’ve been meaning to address. E Magazine, as it turns out, has a lot of special baseball coverage coming up in the May/June edition. It includes my interview with former left-handed Red Sox pitcher and counterculture icon Bill “Spaceman” Lee. But one thing Lee told me didn’t make it into the published piece—the nonprofit Fields of Green Team claims to be an organization supporting healthy outdoor opportunities for needy kids with the backing of former major league players like Lee, Darrell Evans, Jon Warden and Butch Hobson. They also endorse some product called the Ultimate ME2 which is some fuel additive that’s supposed to reduce emissions and fuel use. In fact, it’s the only product that’s ever been endorsed on the site, even though they claim it will be the “first of many Grand Slam Green products” Problem is, Lee says its a scam.
Here’s what Bill Lee said to me about the Fields of Green Team during our interview, before wandering into talk of canoes, speed and courteousness (as he’s wont to do):
“I’m not involved in that at all. I tried their product, we drove across the country, and it really doesn’t work. I think it’s a pyramid scam that was done by these guys that didn’t have any jobs, and they try to market and sell it, but as far as adding a little bit of extra water or hydrocarbon to your car, it sounds good in theory, but it’s still a combustion engine and that, in the long run, is not what I believe in.
I do not believe in the combustion engine—I kind of believe in a canoe with a paddle. Hand-carved. That’s as fast as I want to go in life. And as far as jet-skis, skidoos, I’ve never been on them, I never will be on them, and every time one of them would get out of control and hit the dam, my grandfather would applaud them. They’re going too fast. Stop and shake hands with everybody. That’s my theory. Don’t slip past people.”
The Greening (and Rise) of the Spartans
Posted by admin on 06 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Hoop Dreams
Tonight’s the night for college basketball fans—a culmination of the seemingly endless stretch known as March madness, which has by now left many disappointed, burned out and several dollars poorer. Rather than debate the individual prowess of the two NCAA teams left standing—Michigan State and North Carolina, I’ll put a wager on the winner based on environmental initiatives alone. Here goes:
University of North Carolina:
The Tarheels have a fully fleshed out sustainability program, part of which focuses exclusively on the athletics department. What’s that mean? A lot of recycling for one. So far, the college’s Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling has focused mostly on the school’s football program. In fall of 2008, they launched a Tailgate Recycling Program, with volunteers passing out clear and colored plastic bags for dividing garbage. On the launch, when the Tarheels faced the Wolfpack of North Carolina State, volunteers collected .68 tons of trash. They also diverted over 45% of trash from their 2007 football games thanks to collecting bottles, cans, plastic and recycling. Other athletic initiatives? The school’s Student Recreation Center has rubber flooring—which is renewable and up to 50% recycled content, as do many other buildings on campus. In fact, the school as a whole plans to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 60% by 2050—the town of Chapel Hill has made the same pledge.
Michigan State:
The home of the Spartans is considered one of the top five campuses in the nation for its green efforts by the National Wildlife Federation as part of the Campus Environment 2008 Report Card. In 2007, MSU announced that it, too, was beefing up its recycling efforts at football games, focusing on collecting and recycling all aluminum and plastic beverage containers. The school also has a nifty new site and initiative called Be Spartan Green that details all the ways the campus is getting their green on—recycling of course, energy-saving dorm wars, restroom upgrades—but none of the initiatives focus particularly on the school’s athletics. But they do keep regular updates on Twitter here, and have a tool for tracking energy consumption at any of the school’s buildings here.
The consensus?
Both schools are making serious commitments, around campus if not directly on the courts. But I call MSU, because they’re using technology better, laying the groundwork for a more interactive experience in monitoring campus energy use. Sorry, Obama. Editor’s Note: Oh, well. 50-50 shot. Good thing I’m not the gambling type.