“I am building a fire, and everyday I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.”
– American soccer star Mia Hamm
I got out of my environmental writer’s box a couple of weeks ago and wrote my first-ever editorial about sports. Well, not sports per se, but an essay about what I considered to be the unfair media bashing of my local university’s head basketball coach, who was fired when the team failed to make the NCAA “March Madness” tournament.
After the coach, who had really been a credit to the university and its basketball program, was let go, nasty editorials and comments about him continued to appear in three local papers. Incensed, I came to his defense, and also to the defense of collegiate sports as a venue for building not just winning records, but also young people’s character – a skill the coach excelled at.
My opinion piece was published in my local newspaper, where this column also runs, and, man, did I get a lot of response. People wrote letters to the editor for and against my position; folks I bumped into thanked me; somebody even left a message of support on my answering machine.
Now, I usually write about issues I consider important: environmental threats to human civilization and our legacy to coming generations – that sort of thing. And the usual response is: Yawn.
The end of the world? “Whatever.” Resource wars? “Um, I’m busy at the moment.” Drought, famine, pestilence? “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” My columns elicit one or two responses each month.
So, dear reader, I’ve learned my lesson. It’s clear many folks don’t give a hoot about tedious topics such as climate change or their children’s futures. But basketball (football, baseball, etc.), now there’s something to get excited about. Who cares about hunger riots when you can read about sports riots?
But the silver lining to this cloudy lesson is that I’ve discovered a way to get people excited about environmental issues. I just need to couch them in sports terms, and people’s passions will flare. Make it a game, and global warming can arouse all the optimism and angst you feel when your home team is locked in a fourth-quarter tie.
I call my new game “Extinction,” an extreme sport pitting humanity against the biosphere. The human team’s name is “Saps,” from homo sapiens, and the biosphere’s team is the “Nats,” short for “Nature.”
The object of the game is the extinction of the opponent: The Saps destroy Nature, or the Nats doom humanity to extinction. The rules are simple: Anything goes.
There have been many games of extinction in the past, with the biosphere winning against all comers. The era’s dominant species die out, but life goes on. This time, however, although the Nats are generally favored, the outcome is in doubt.
The current championship game started about a million years ago when the proto-Saps emerged from their primate gene pool. For most of the game, it looked like a blowout for the Nats. Fiercely competitive, especially when it comes to eliminating new species, Nature brought her “A” game throwing hunger, disease and predation at the mostly rookie Saps.
But the Nats couldn’t quite finish off the Saps and let them chip away at the lead.
Then late in the fourth quarter, with only a couple decades left to play, the Saps came up with a new, industrial-strength strategy that literally tapped the Nats own deep reserves to use against them.
The Saps have set a fire called global warming that’s torching the whole of Nature in a few short decades and have built up a commanding lead. Forests will die, glaciers will melt, oceans will become lifeless, and the entire planet could become a sterile desert. With just a few decades left to play, the Saps can smell blood, taste an historic victory.
But, sports fans, you know it ain’t over till it’s over. And as they say, “Nature bats last” at our ecological house.
Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. Reach him by email through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.
