Allen Hershkovitz

Amanda Little: Take me out to the (green) ballgame

November 19, 2010

Today’s guest column comes from Amanda Little (née Griscom), one of my favorite writers on energy and the environment, and it’s on a very timely topic–the greening of sports. Amanda is the  author of Power Trip: The Story of America’s Love Affair With Energy, and she was a long-time columnist for Grist.org and Salon.com. Amanda has also written for Outside, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Wired, New York, InStyle, O Magazine and the Washington Post. She is the recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for excellence in environmental journalism. Amanda’s now blogging for Forbes.com, where this column originally appeared.

Why is it timely? Because just the other day, the Philadelphia Eagles unveiled plans to install solar panels, wind turbines and a co-generation plant at Lincoln Financial Field, making the stadium quite possibly the “greenest” in the sports. The gridiron goes off the grid, you could say. And if you think sports is a sandbox, with little impact on the “real world,” think again, about, say, Jackie Robinson’s influence on the civil rights movement. If you want to change the minds of people at the grass roots, about climate or energy or recycling, there’s no better place to start than with sports.

As the San Francisco Giants celebrate their 2010 World Series triumph, they’re quietly coveting another, humbler feat—one that’s perhaps no less historic in the long run. The Giants are one of the greenest teams in professional sports, and they’re proving that sustainable practices fatten the bottom line even as they ease the burdens on the planet.

Their stadium, AT&T Park, which accommodates about 45,000 fans, runs its scoreboard on solar power, recycles and composts nearly 50 percent of its waste, sources eco-friendly napkins, containers, utensils, toilet paper and the like, and has enough efficiency features to cut the stadium’s annual energy and water bills in half. That amounts to huge savings, given that stadiums can consume as much energy as small cities.

AT&T Park: Green in more ways than one

The Giants are on the front end of a trend that’s quickly gaining traction in major league baseball and throughout the NFL and NBA. Teams are stepping up recycling and efficiency in their facilities, attracting lucrative corporate sponsorships with green messaging, and raising consciousness among fans. If the trend continues to build in the next two years, we may find that games do more to push environmental progress in the U.S. than politics.

Especially now, given the acrimony in Washington, professional sports may have a broader and more profound influence than any other single entity on American mindsets, slicing through socioeconomic and political divides. “More than 150 million Americans – half our population – regularly follow professional sports,” Allen Hershkowitz, Senior Scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. Hershkowitz founded the NRDC project greensports.org, a pro-bono consultancy that advises teams and leagues on environmental strategies.

For nearly a century, professional sports have galvanized social movements and ginned up American patriotism. Baseball, for instance, desegregated a decade before the nation did, helping catalyze the civil rights movement. Women’s basketball and softball leagues were organized before women had the right to vote. [click to continue…]

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Earth Day at the mall

April 18, 2010

AI-edhmug402222523486_5e1894e314Somehow Americans manage to turn every holiday—from Christmas to Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the 4th of July, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, so-called President’s Day and the rest —into a shopping opportunity.

Perversely, this is now happening to Earth Day, as companies try to persuade us that we can  shop our way to a cleaner, greener planet.

Crazy, isn’t it? Along with coal plants, gas-guzzling SUVs and climate deniers, the American way of producing and consuming and discarding, buying lots of stuff we don’t need that isn’t going to make us happy anyway is, not to put too fine a point on it, trashing the only planet we have.

This is not what the first Earth Day–40 years ago, in 1970—was all about. It was a political event. It was about building an environmental movement. It was led by young people and scientists and counter-culture types and it arrived at a time when support was building for other political and social movements as well—the opposition to the Vietnam War, the feminist movement and the gay rights movement, all of which were inspired by the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

None of these were mainstream, at least not at first. None were about shopping.

Earth Day led to the environmental laws of the early 1970s, which brought real and dramatic change: Our air and water are cleaner, parks and wilderness have been conserved, species have been protected.

Today, Earth Day is mainstream. An recent MBA grad I know says that’s a good thing. She told me by email:

I think it’s generally good if green is mainstream as more companies are offering environmental products.  That way we Berkeley types aren’t the only crazy ones!

I’m not so sure. Buying a T-shirt or tote bag won’t curb climate change or protect endangered habitat. That takes politics, organizing, hard work.

Here are some of the Earth Day products that have been brought to my attention  in the days leading up to the 40th anniversary.BagsinARow copy These are bhappybags — I’m not making this up — and they are described as an “attractive yet durable line of reusable shopping/tote, [click to continue…]

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