StarSportsBlog

“Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of a good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.” — Pierre de Coubertin

From the very moment the International Olympic Committee awarded Games of the 29th Olympiad to the City of Beijing, there has been a concerted effort by the International Olympic Committee, the organizers, some athletes and most advertisers to selectively airbrush the history of Olympic Movement by reframing the Games as only that … games.

“I view the Olympics as a sporting event.” U.S. President George H.W. Bush. 2/26/2008

If only it were that simple. But if only fun and games, why would red-blooded Americans be thrilled by the footage of Jesse Owens in Berlin or the 1980 Winter Games’ “Miracle on Ice”? It has very little to do with the finer points of sprinter’s form or kick saves and everything to do with a black American beating the Master Race and American college amateurs beating the Rusky soldier-pros.

If the Olympics were only a sporting event, why would the U.S. boycott the 1980 Summer Games and the Soviet Union return the favor in 1984?

So now, with Ides of March upon us, there are two political realities Chinese Olympic organizers cannot escape. Tibet and Darfur.

Tibet

An already tense situation has been exacerbated by China’s sensitivity about its human rights image ahead of the staging of the Olympic Games in Beijing in August. Some observers argue that what appeared to be carefully planned and executed protests — the first on such a scale in nearly two decades — were likely deliberately timed to take advantage of the media attention focused on the upcoming Games. — Time, 03/14/08

China ordered tourists out of Tibet’s capital Saturday while troops on foot and in armored vehicles patrolled the streets and confined government workers to their offices, a day after riots that a Tibetan exile group said left at least 30 protesters dead.
“There are military blockades blocking off whole portions of the city, and the entire city is basically closed down,” said a 23-year-old Western student who arrived in Lhasa on Saturday. “All the restaurants are closed, all the hotels are closed.” Associated Press, 03/15/08

Criminals who do not surrender themselves by the deadline will be sternly punished according to the law,” stated the notice on the Tibetan government Web site (www.tibet.gov.cn). It added that those who “harbor or hide” them also face harsh treatment.

The government offered rewards and protection for informers.03/15/08

Darfur

In a statement sent to the Chinese ambassador and the Beijing Olympic committee on Tuesday, Mr. Spielberg said that his “conscience will not allow me to continue with business as usual.”

“Sudan’s government bears the bulk of the responsibility for these ongoing crimes but the international community, and particularly China, should be doing more to end the continuing human suffering there,” the statement said. “China’s economic, military and diplomatic ties to the government of Sudan continue to provide it with the opportunity and obligation to press for change.” NY Times, 02/13/08

“I was shocked and surprised that Steven stepped back from his work with the Beijing Olympics. It’s clear that the Olympics is all about sport and nothing to do with politics,” said (Vision Beijing contributing director)Lau Wai-keung at the news conference. 02/25/08

“To link the Darfur issue to the Olympics is a move to politicise (sic) the Olympics, and this is inconsistent with the Olympics spirit and will bear no fruit.” — China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman 02/13/08

In response to Spielberg’s decision, current I.O.C. president Jacques Rogge told broadcaster France 24 that the I.O.C. is “a sporting, not a political association.” (02/16/08) Yet at www.olympic.org, “the official website of the Olympic Movement“, one finds:

His (Pierre de Coubertin — founder of the International Olympic Committee) definition of Olympism had four principles that were far from a simple sports competition:

1. To be a religion i.e. to “adhere to an ideal of a higher life, to strive for perfection”;
2. to represent an elite “whose origins are completely egalitarian” and at the same time “chivalry” with its moral qualities;
3. to create a truce “a four-yearly festival of the springtime of mankind”;
4. and to glorify beauty by the “involvement of the philosophic arts in the Games”.

It is clear that the concept of the Olympic Games is far from a simple sports competition.

A handy summation of humankind’s “rampant human ecological dysfunction” from William Rees, the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept.

… in the 20th century alone the human population quadrupled to over six billion, energy use (mostly fossil fuel) increased by a factor of 16, fish catches (but not fish) increased 35-fold, industrial production expanded 40-fold, agricultural output exploded, etc., and all corresponding waste streams ballooned by equivalent multiples. Result? Soils erode 10 to hundreds of times faster than they develop, the oceans are emptying and acidifying, biodiversity is imploding, natural gas and petroleum are being depleted, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are a third higher than in pre-industrial times and the climate is going into convulsions.We also know at least the crude dimensions of the solution: for example, our best science tells us that to avoid a potentially catastrophic 2 (degree) C increase in mean global temperature, the world community needs to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 80 to 90 per cent by mid-century.

Source.Paul Raskin, initiator of the Great Transition essay series offers this:

On the one hand, we inherit the harbingers of a future that is rife with conflict, crisis, and misery—a dangerously damaged biosphere, extreme social and economic inequality within and among nations, deep geopolitical and cultural fissures, and a culture of consumerism that erodes meaning and well-being. On the other hand, we are bequeathed immense aggregate wealth; the power of science and technology; an ethos of equality and freedom; democracy, constitutional frameworks, and law-governed institutions; and the liberation of the human imagination. These assets are the preconditions for a global future based on human solidarity, human fulfillment, and ecological sustainability—a vision we refer to as a Great Transition.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors released the result of a Zoby poll conducted in December, 2007 showing “most Americans believe local efforts to be environmentally sensitive by ‘going green’ will pay off for their communities by attracting new businesses and development, creating ‘green collar jobs’ and boosting the local economy.”

• 56 percent believe their local government should “go green” and make environmentally friendly and energy efficient changes throughout their local community, even if they may have to significantly change their lifestyle.
• Majorities also believe that if their local communities adopt more environmentally friendly policies, there will be a positive impact on the local economy.
• They think green technology will create new local jobs make their communities better places to live.
• 48 percent say they would be willing to pay higher taxes if the increase would fund environmentally friendly improvements in their community.
• 53 percent say they would be willing to use mass transit if it were easily accessible from their homes and where they work

So if you are, say, the president of major league baseball team and the league sends you memo saying “we think it’s time we all get green“, maybe you should think about calling DoRight.

And we don’t mean Dudley.

DoRight Enterprises is scaling-up sustainability consulting firms run by local 12 to 15 year-olds. They go into places like the visitor’s center of the Queens Botanical Garden and develop energy and other sustainability plans. (Did you know that so-called “livng Institutions” like botanical gardens outdraw all U.S. spectator sports combined? You can look it up.) They do the work and are provided with real world opportunities to apply the stuff they are learning.

So should a front office really call the kids? Cha’ yeah.

Squeamish about trusting such work to kids?
Then let them work with local mentoring “adults” (who will surely learn a thing or too.)

Too much ahead of the curve?
Au contraire. Totally locked in. Because what founder Scott Beal has done is combine urgent business CSR necessity (even for privately held companies) with a left-behind notion of “project-based” and “experiential” learning. Something that puts kids into the community to solve “authentic questions” for which neither teachers nor anyone else has the easy answers. Yes, it all harkens back to — dare we say it — progressive education. And guess which way the U.S. education reform pendulum is swinging 20 years after “A Nation At Risk?

Easy? No. And that’s the point.
It would actually involve helping DoRight replicate its innovative program in a team owner’s home town. A baseball front office would have to work with local schools systems, involve their community relations peeps and reach out to strategic partners to lead the establishment of such an effort. (Star•Sports can help, of course.)

Why bother?
Great PR. (Important, perhaps in the Steroids Era?) Part of the comprehensive corporate social engagement winning brands will need to stay in front.

And, oh yeah. The experience might let kids (and society at large) develop the the right dynamic for the new frontier.

Wednesday’s E-Day, a British campaign to raise awareness on energy saving and climate, didn’t go over so well. The campaign asked folks to switch off electrical devises they didn’t need — especially those drawing “phantom power“. It featured a website by which UK residents could see real-time changes in national energy consumption. There was no shortage of “strategic partners”. The campaign was backed by the food giant Tesco with its Greener living campaign, Greenpeace UK, Christian Aid and the RSPB (comparable to the US Audubon Society), the umbrella group Stop Climate Chaos, and from major energy companies such as EDF with its savetodaysavetomorrow.com, E.On with its FA Cup-based “carbon footprinty” campaign and Scottish Power. Several national religious leaders urged congregations to participate on moral grounds.

The final tallies show a one percent increase in energy use.

I am afraid that E-Day did not achieve the scale of public awareness or participation needed to have a measurable effect… I will do my best to learn the relevant lessons for next time.” — E-Day’s organizer Dr Matt Prescott.

BBC coverage of the disappointing day blamed poor publicity (despite all the slick websites cited above), a cold snap and a tangled on-again, off-again development history.

To hazard guesses of our own:

• A special day is just that. First, special: something “out of the ordinary”, not normal. Second, just one day. Cultural shifts take something new and make them ordinary…everyday…commonplace…”like the air“. Such change takes time and sustained effort, and the well documented march from innovators through early adopters and early and late majorities.
• A national effort might be too big. Not in the sense of an end-of-project aggregate, but in the sense of providing individual buy-in, performance and recognition. With a great big national meter, it is easy to believe that one’s individual effort doesn’t really matter. Would things have been different had the efforts of individual households or local businesses , or the neighborhoods of a city (Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire, had high hopes) been measured with a tad more granularity? That kind of performance system doesn’t happen overnight.
• Awareness-raising campaigns don’t change behavior. As previously noted, the best information predictor of behavior change is one person talking to another, backed up with ongoing performance tracking and somebody saying “good work”.

A major part of our current focus here at Star•Sports involves what we hope are transformative approaches for helping citizens be more aware of sustainability challenges and more engaged in solutions.

As we talk up this idea of sports for environmental change — with college and pro sports teams, major sports advertisers, foundations and fellow movement diplomats — two big themes are emerging. (David Gershon of the Empowerment Institute is the genus of this thinking for us.)

The first idea has to do with the evolution from “corporate social responsibility” to “corporate social engagement“. David refers to the first as “do not harm“. The high bar of such “operational greening” was set by the 2006 World Cup’s Green Goal™ — the environmental concept for the 2006 FIFA World Cup™.

The Green Goal vision was both simple and demanding:adverse effects on the environment, which would inevitably be associated with the organization of the World Cup in Germany, should be reduced to the greatest extent possible.

In Germany, the Local Organizing Committee, the UNEP Program for Sport and other partners did an amazing job addressing the economical use of water, the reduction of waste and increases in energy efficiency, sustainable transport and climate neutrality. (A legacy report of these activities — from which the above quote was taken — can be found in .pdf format here.)

The shift we and others see from CSR to CSE (corporate social engagement) is a shift from doing no harm to maximizing the good an organization can do. It brings greening to the next level by adding “inspirational greening” to the prerequisite (for credibility’s sake) operational greening.

The second evolution we are pushing has to do with “public awareness” and “public information campaigns.” In Creating a Climate for Change, contributor Sharon Dunwoody writes about the challenge of trying to make a difference using media messages.

“When social problems erupt, one classic response of governments and organizations is to wage an information campaign. The goals are often noble ones, the dollars spent gargantuan, and the outcomes all to predictable: Messages seem to change the behavior of some people some of the time, but have almost no discernible impact on most people, most of the time. This situation has so discouraged policy-makers in the past that the pattern was given its own dismal label: ‘minimal effects.’ …The best information predictor of behavior change is not seeing a public service announcement but talking to someone…. Thus, while mediated channels such as television and newspapers may reach millions of people and provide a cost effective source of information about global climate change, they may not convince individuals that such changes will influence them personally or that they can do something personally about the problem.”

So both our collegiate and municipal efforts to help sports teams anchor significant, measurable carbon reductions are based on community organizing — people getting together — reinforced by the awesome reach of sports media to present “a positive feedback loop to report drops filling the bucket” (local carbon reductions measured against the carbon reduction goal) by way of  “a web-based, highly graphic, interactive geographic information system” that enables a community and its communications multipliers (like TV weatherpeople or newspaper box scores or celebrity athletes) to know and celebrate its accomplishments.

Katie Kirschner is senior manager of business operations for the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox are doing great things: reducing their carbon emissions, recovering 50 percent of its recyclable drink containers, increasing the percentage of the stadium’s electricity from renewable sources, trying to keep at least 40 percent of stadium waste from entering landfills, powering their scoreboard with conspicuously placed solar panels. “Our hope is that we can influence our fans in their daily lives,” says Ms.Kirschner. Full marks to all Red Sox Nation is doing.

Our hope, however, is to take the chance out of the culture shift and conspicuously apply the power of sport to influence a new cool ordinary — diversified energy sources, commonplace greenhouse gas reductions, environmental justice and a national sustainability industry powering the next great American renaissance.

Felicity Barringer, writing in today’s New York Times, chronicles the struggles of cities, towns, and counties to make progress on carbon reductions. Some 780 U.S. mayors have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement which pledges communities to “Kyoto targets” of “7% reduction from 1990 levels by 2012″ — commitments oddly absent from the Times report.

(Since hardly anyone knows what 7% of 1990 levels really means, here are some alternative approaches. With the Kyoto treaty in 1997, nations agreed to reduce carbon emissions by 5.2% by the year 2010. At the time, the European Union pressed for 15% reductions by 2010. Most climate scientists agree that these numbers are wholly inadequate and developed nations like the U.S. should be aiming at 80 to 90% reductions by 2030 (Monbiot) or approximately 3.5% reductions every year for the next 22 years. In 2004, U.S. carbon emissions rose 3%. In 2006, U.S. carbon emissions fell 1.5%. 2007 U.S. emissions are expected to rise as a result of increased use of coal. Emissions from U.S. power plants rose 3.3% in the first 49 weeks of 2007, compared to a similar period on 2006. Source)

Meanwhile, as the Times reports, “Constraints on budgets, legal restrictions by states, and people’s unwillingness to change sometimes put brakes on ambitious plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions.”

Ann Hancock, the executive director of the Climate Protection Campaign, a nonprofit based in Sonoma County, a wine-growing area north of San Francisco, said that the county and its nine municipalities signed climate-protection agreements with enthusiasm more than five years ago, committing to bringing down greenhouse-gas emissions. Then they tried to figure out how.

“It’s really hard,” Ms. Hancock said. “It’s like the dark night of the soul.” All the big items in the inventory of emissions — from tailpipes, from the energy needed to supply drinking water and treat waste water, from heating and cooling buildings — are the product of residents’ and businesses’ individual decisions about how and where to live and drive and shop.

“They’ve seen the Al Gore movie, but they still have their lifestyle to contend with,” she said.

Currently, Star•Sports is piloting plans to help local sports teams anchor municipal efforts to reduce household, neighborhood, and small business carbon emissions by 20% or more over a three year period.

Duke University’s Focus the Nation activities will culminate when the Blue Devil men host NC State in a game to be nationally televised on ESPN2.

The Cameron Crazies, the pep band and the Blue Devil mascot will be given green t-shirts emblazoned with the Green Devil and the slogan, “Bleed Blue. Live Green.” Attendees will be encouraged to sign the Duke Sustainability Pledge, recycle any waste they generate and use alternative transportation to come to the stadium. Duke will also be offsetting the carbon footprint of the game.

World class standards for event greening established by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, and partner organizations. It is drawn from the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the WSSD’s 22,000 delegates.

The basic principles of greening” major events that should be incorporated by the host organization include:

• Environmental best practices – reduce negative environmental effects by employing technologies and behavioral practices that minimize waste, energy usage, and air and water pollution, by utilizing resources sustainably and conserving biological diversity;
• Social and economic development – select options that raise public awareness of environmental issues, involve communities in all levels of decision-making, create local jobs, and stimulate urban economies;
• Education and awareness – communicate and explain greening plans and their benefits with the aim of changing public attitudes and future actions;
• Monitoring, evaluation, and reporting – assess the effectiveness of greening activities before, during, and after the major event;
• Leave a positive legacy – ensure that both the short and long-term impacts of decisions and actions in producing a major event lead to a substantial improvement in environmental sustainability.

UNDP website description of the resource
2.3MB .pdf

The Hartford Courant

With an urgency — and a sense of irreverence — reminiscent of the anti-war movement of the 1960s, a group of activists from Portland, Ore., has recruited students at more than 1,000 college campuses, K-12 schools, civic organizations, church groups and private companies to conduct a massive “teach-in” on global warming Jan. 31.

Inside Higher Ed

At most participating campuses, pledges are coming from many professors — in some cases 50 or more — who are planning to modify their lectures, create shorter presentations or attend the panel discussions. Rather than planning evening rallies, professors are being asked to do the teaching during regular class hours.

Grist Magazine

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we will do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”
– Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

All American Patriot

We are at a critical time when decisions need to be made on tackling the threats imposed by global warming,” says Gus Speth, Dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “Today’s youth who are inheriting this crisis need serious education on the issue and Focus the Nation has created a forum for learning and interaction with law makers.”