Sport neglecting the big green issues

Jul 21 2008 By Brian Dick

There are not many weekends during the summer when I pine for the football and rugby seasons and the daily frustrations they bring.

It’s not that I don’t love our winter pastimes. In their purest form, such as the two hours spent witnessing West Bromwich Albion’s Great Escape or Pertemps Bees’ Powergen Cup shock over London Wasps, they offer an eloquent reminder of why I consider myself fortunate to work in sports journalism.

But the multitudinous problems concomitant with trying to extract information from the region’s centres of sporting excellence and then transmit it to our audience can sometimes be wearing.

Not on Sunday, however. I positively craved a teeth-clenchingly difficult telephone conversation with an unresponsive press officer who simply could not countenance the prospect of me talking to ‘The Gaffer’.

As I flicked from one channel, where some of the world’s best golfers and several thousand people had flown and driven to Royal Birkdale to tramp all over a beautiful Site of Special Scientific Interest, I happened upon another, to find boy racers in their souped-up uber-cars being howled on by even more spectators, most of whom had rolled up at Hockenheim through the indigenous forest, in their own high performance vehicles.

The episode jarred and made me wonder whether sport hadn’t been allowed to dominate the landscape to too harmful an extent.

Is nothing, neither the sea nor woodland, allowed to stand in the way of our indulgent pursuit of instant gratification and our desire to part with considerable amounts of money for the privilege?

That is not to equate the environmental impacts of golf with those of Formula One. Green concerns, no not worries about the putting surface, form only a constituent part of my antipathy towards good walk spoiling.

Golf has its issues and while it has dealt with many of them in a Western context, it remains a rapacious industry that has taken its hunger for the dollar to less well regulated, developing countries.

In a local setting The Belfry seems to have given genuine thought to minimising its ecological footprint, and to a lesser extent its carbon legacy. They grow their own produce for the kitchen, have energy saving light bulbs in the hotel and, most importantly, recycle water consumed on their premises for use on their three courses.

Even if the PGA National looks as though it has been dropped into the West Midlands from Barbie Land, it is not too much of a drain on the local supply. Many golf courses cannot make that claim.

Indeed in countries like Spain golf facilities use more water than nearby communities. That might sound a relatively arbitrary fact but when that consumption becomes too great it can lead to the salination of land and affect its fertility.

According to Tourism Concern an average course in a tropical country such as Thailand uses as much water as 60,000 rural villagers. Worryingly it also needs 1500kg of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides per year.

Such considerations mean that when Donald Trump is knocked back in his attempt to build two links courses, a five-star hotel, a golf academy, nearly 1,000 holiday homes and 500 private houses on unspoilt Aberdeenshire coastline, I allow myself a smile.

Golf, in this country at least, is the very definition of environmentally-friendly exercise when compared to motor racing.

This is a sport that produces cars which consume 75 litres of fuel for every 100 kilometres driven and flies them and their thousands of hangers on around the world for nine months of the year.

When they are not in the air they spend three days tearing round an utterly artificial tarmac circuit using more fuel in one hour than a family would in a week.

Incredibly they seem proud of the fact that the time spent racing is responsible for ‘only’ one per cent of their total carbon emissions.

Some of the teams have made an effort to appear green. Honda announced a new ‘Earthdream’ public relations assault earlier this year, seemingly unaware that the positivity of their new green colour scheme was more than negated by the fact their entire raison d’etre encourages people to get into cars and drive them quickly and uneconomically.

Formula One talks of becoming carbon neutral but instead they mean carbon off-setting which effectively allows the perpetrator to do what they want as long as enough trees are planted.

If the sponsored traffic is serious about reducing its impact it should stop taking oil out of the ground in the first place.

Give me the No 7 bus to Villa Park or a snotty thought policeman any day of the week.

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So Aston Villa’s season has started and the club has been forced to do so without their one-time inspirational captain Gareth Barry.

He is deemed to be too short of fitness in both mind and body to represent the club that gave him an England career. But let us not make the mistake of going down the dead-end marked, This Club Made You, on football’s map.

Barry could quite easily have gone to Portsmouth when Martin O’Neill needed him most - during a potentially tricky first season.

Instead he opted to stay and give the new regime the fillip it needed. However, he is now unable to contribute to Villa’s InterToto cause.
Both player and club are losers, but who is to blame?

Liverpool, whose summer-long coquettish overtures have so unsettled Barry.

In normal circumstances, if one business willingly damages another’s stock they are made to pay. Indeed, if I went into a shop and broke a vase, then I’d expect to compensate the owner. 

Having done much the same thing with Barry, Liverpool really should be compelled to buy him or recompense Villa for their loss.

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Let’s go all Radio Four and play a little News Quiz. I’ll provide two, genuine, quotations from men in charge of prominent British organisations and all you have to do is guess the story.

1. “[We are] delighted to announce this principal partnership, which will have an immediate impact on the development and nurturing of UK grassroots athletics talent. This is a partner that shares the same vision as UK athletics – that of a healthier Britain.”

OK so we have UK Athletics whose thoughts were mouthed by their chairman Ed Warner. The governing body were rightly proud to announce a new £5 million, five-year sponsorship deal for their Young Athletes League and UK Challenge events.

Any ideas on the partner? ‘Healthier Britain’? Surely some Leisure Centre multinational or sportswear firm. Here’s the second clue.

2. “Our consumers understand that we make good, simple food. We feel we have a role to play in promoting a healthy balanced lifestyle to our consumers, ensuring that they are leading an active life as well as enjoying good food.”

So says Nick Vermont, regional CEO at fast food monolith McCain, a company that flogs chips and sundry potato-based products to our nation’s obese children.

The message? Eat our Southern Fries and Micro Chips and get running, fatty.