Greenwashing Sport

Toby Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317333463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Professional sports promote their green credentials and yet remain complicit in our global environmental crisis

Sports are responsible for significant carbon footprints through stadium construction and energy use, player and spectator travel, and media coverage. The impact of sports on climate change is further compounded by sponsorship deals with the gas and petroleum industries—imbuing those extractive corporations with a positive image by embedding them within the everyday pleasure of sport. Toby Miller argues that such activities amount to "greenwashing".

Scrutinizing motor racing, association football, and the Olympics, Miller weighs up their environmental policies, their rhetoric of conservation and sustainability, and their green credentials. The book concludes with the role of green citizenship and organic fan activism in promoting pro-environmental sports.

This is a must-read for students and researchers in media, communications, sociology, cultural studies, and environmental studies.

1

Introducing greenwashing

This little book examines sport’s complicity with our environmental crisis. I wrote it as a provocation, to myself as well as to you, in order to think through the issues that dog attempts, through spectacle and science alike, to convince the world’s public of the reality of our ecological crisis. Two introductory chapters cover the basic theoretical concepts and material histories of the environment and sports. The remainder address motor racing, association football (known to 4% of the world’s population as “soccer”), the Olympic Games, and alternative ways forward.

We are standing over an abyss. Our climate is changing in ways that imperil us, our fellow animals, other forms of life, and the very Earth itself. Past and present industrial processes have exposed the planet to potentially irrevocable harm. We have entered what the world’s scientific community announced in 2016 as the Anthropocene—an epoch characterized by major geological and ecological changes wrought by human activity (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, 2016). Yet despite the evidence, the contours of this abyss are far from clear to many people. How can that be? Shouldn’t something so portentous, and lying directly in front of us, be pretty obvious?

Like scientists in general, climate scholars emphasize the need for patience in undertaking and understanding their work, which relies on the steady accumulation of data. After all, climate is the average of weather. It is history (Chakrabarty, 2014). And, in addition to the complexity of ordinary research, they confront another obstacle: the systematic distortion of climate science by the Anglo media. Wealthy polluters and their servants in public relations feast on occasional, entirely ordinary, scholarly disagreements among climate experts, which are assiduously and duplicitously reported as proof of a putative underlying weakness in the evidence of climate change (Maxwell and Miller, 2016; Lewandowsky et al. 2015: 2). Bourgeois public discourse is dominated by ideologues and pundits for hire. Climate change scientists are rarely invited to their party.¹

But while media distortions are central components of the propaganda that fills us with doubt as we confront the abyss, they are only part of the cultural blockade erected by capital against the truth: there is seduction through kindness and affinity as well as bald-faced mendacity.

And sports are complicit in two ways with both climate change itself and our failure to deal with it. On the one hand, they are directly responsible for significant carbon footprints and ecological crimes,² via stadium construction and energy use, player and spectator travel, animal mistreatment, and media coverage. They endeavor to legitimize the harm they cause by promoting themselves as good environmental citizens. On the other hand, they accept sponsorship from the supremely craven gas and petroleum industries, thereby imbuing those extractive corporations with a positive image by embedding them within the everyday pleasures of sport. Taken together, such activities amount to serious greenwashing.

So sports leave their own ecological mark and provide symbolic cover for more significant polluters—a dual problem. As we’ll see, several groups stand against these tendencies. Progressive fans and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) resist complicity; scientists disclose its impact; a few journalists report the ensuing controversies; and civil servants broker conflicting stakeholders’ points of view. But before examining the greenwashing of sports, we must understand core terms in the debate.

Philosophy

A complex heritage underpins world views that focus on the interests of human beings (anthropocentrism) versus the planet as a whole (ecocentrism). From anthropocentric perspectives, Bacon avowed four centuries ago that “commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things … is more precious than anything on earth” (Bacon, 1620) and Descartes argued that “reason or good sense … exists whole and complete in each of us, … the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the lower animals” (Descartes, 2007: 1). A century later, Kant also regarded people as uniquely important because they were conscious of themselves and their place in the world. As a consequence, “through rank and dignity” they were “an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one like” (Kant, 2006: 15).

A hundred years on, Hegel, too, exalted in a world dominated by human beings’ physical and symbolic mastery, avowing that one can put one’s “will into everything,” such that an object or place “becomes mine.” Because people are unique in their desire and capacity to conserve objects and represent them via semiosis, a strange dialectical process supposedly affords them a special right to destroy as well. Such willpower is independent of simple survival and sets humanity apart from other living things. As per Kant, the capacity to transcend our “spontaneity and natural constitution” supposedly distinguishes us from animals. These semiotic abilities permit the destructive use of power, what Hegel called “the right of absolute proprietorship.” As a consequence, “sacred respect for … unused land cannot be guaranteed.” The necessary relationship between people and nature asserts itself at the core of human consciousness as a struggle to achieve freedom from risk and want. Nature’s “tedious chronicle,” where there is “nothing new under the sun,” is correctly disrespected and disobeyed by progress (Hegel 1954: 242–43, 248–50; 1988: 50, 154, 161). Hence the anti-indigenous, antiflora, antifauna doctrine of terra nullius (empty space), which denied land title to native people, fantasizing their ideological and pragmatic lives to harmonize with nature rather than transform it.³

Hegelian discourse remains powerful today. It incarnates two baleful certainties: the rightness of human sovereignty over the world and a paradoxical guarantee that its exercise will not fundamentally challenge the basis of life. Of course, such anthropocentric positions have been challenged, not least because nature can be so comprehensively altered by technology and labor that it eludes human control.

For all his privileging of consciousness, Kant gave an impassioned account of the natural world as equally beautiful and sublime, aesthetic and awesome. That paradoxical amalgam forced him to confront a space beyond both nature and human semiosis alike—a terrifying place where “the shadows of the boundless void into the abyss before me.” This raised a horrifying specter: an apocalyptic vision that one day we may realize there is nothing left, nothing else, nothing beyond (Kant, 2011: 17)—akin to William James noting later that “nature is but a name for excess” (James, 1909: 63). Such anxieties obliged Kant to recognize that the objects of natural science had a history and hence, perhaps, a limited future. Yet he remained anthropocentric, convinced that “to know the human being … deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth” (Kant, 2006: 3).

Bacon, Descartes, Hegel, and their kind do not rule the philosophical roost. Contra the dominant anthropocentric perspective, Hume maintained that animals, like people, “learn many things from experience,” developing “knowledge of the nature of fire, water, earth, stones, heights, depths, etc.” in addition to processing instructions as part of their domestication (Hume, 1955: 112–13). Rather than being merely sensate, some of our fellow creatures apply logic through inference—what Hume called “the reason of animals.” More simplistically, if empathetically, Bentham asked of our duty of care to animals: “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (Bentham, 1970). Even Kant acknowledged their capacity for reflection (Kant, 2000: 15).

But it took Engels, a hundred and fifty years ago, to recognize the fundamental truth of environmentalism: that “nature does not just exist, but comes into being and passes away” (Engels, 1946: 9). He noted anthropocentrism’s peculiar faith in “the absolute immutability of nature. In whatever way nature itself might have come into being, once present it remained as it was as long as it continued to exist … everything would remain as it had been since the beginning” (Engels, 1946: 6). In that context, Rosa Luxemburg criticized “bankrupt politicians” who “seek refuge and repose in nature” without observing that its very existence was compromised and shortened by industrial capital (Luxemburg, 1970: 335).

As Engels poignantly put it, the emergence of human beings marks the evolutionary point where “nature attains consciousness of itself” (Engels, 1946: 17). Despite this debt to Hegel, he realized that people therefore had the ability and responsibility to observe and speak for those without voices, and to protect those without power. While our fellow animals are capable of transforming their living conditions, they do so without an evident, deliberate, and elaborated codification of what this achieves or means. But that does not make us and our interests superordinate: with special capacities come additional expectations. That leap can take us beyond a simple Hegelian hierarchy with consciousness atop it.

Human labor’s transformation and marshaling of nature has immiserated as well as sustained the many workers who service capitalism’s growth and profit. An equally material impact of the ideology of growth has been to undo nature, in a way that is laden with unimagined consequences. That mythology of innovation and adoption mixes the sublime—the awesome, the ineffable, the uncontrollable, the powerful—with the beautiful—the approachable, the attractive, the pliant, the soothing.

In philosophical aesthetics, the sublime and the beautiful are generally regarded as opposites. Yet the aesthetic and the sublime have blended in the “technological sublime,” a totemic, quasi-sacred quality that industrial societies assiduously ascribe to modern machinery, engineering, design, and marketing as simultaneously beautiful and powerful. The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to Japanese, Western European, and US achievements of the post-Second World War period, when the technological capacities of consumer products supposedly supplanted the capacity of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye, 1994; 2006).

This technological sublime produces a “Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of consumers, who lust after them as if they were “independent beings” (Marx, 1987: 77). These commodities elicit desire by wooing consumers, glancing at them sexually and looking pretty in ways that borrow from romantic love, but proceed to reverse that relationship: people learn about romantic love from commodified humanity, hyperextended beyond the norm. This is “commodity aesthetics” (Haug, 1986), a complex mixture of marketing methods, social signs, and national emblems.

Capitalists, technocrats, workers, consumers, citizens, and fans are all implicated in the environmental impact of this fetishism, and the cost is sizable: on an average day, each person in the world generates 1.2 kg of post-consumer waste. That amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes of garbage a year, a figure that doubled over this century’s first decade and accounts for 5% of greenhouse gas emissions (Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata, 2012).

Just “half a century ago, less [sic] than 12 materials were in wide use: wood, brick, iron, copper, gold, silver, and a few plastics.” Conversely, there is truly a comprehensive “materials basis to modern society”: the computer chip that enables me to type this paragraph contains more than sixty of them. New materials are taken as signs of progress. Developments in the alloys that bind them together and form new ones have frequently led to greater efficiency, and sometimes diminished greenhouse gas emissions. But the notion of endless growth and progress fails to acknowledge that unearthing these things is a drain on natural resources. There is a finite supply of the basic ingredients of modern material life, and potential substitutes rarely deliver equivalent quality (Graedel et al., 2015).

Fortunately, we have a corrective to the technological sublime, and it originates from the very heart of this beguiling discourse. Testifying before the US Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the group that developed the atomic bomb, talked about the instrumental rationality that animated his colleagues. Once they saw what was feasible, the device’s murderous impact lost intellectual and emotional significance for them—overtaken by its “technically sweet” quality (United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1954: 81). Just such technological saccharine is the lifeblood of the technological sublime, but, as Oppenheimer showed, even its closest adherents may sometimes step outside their immediate circumstances and pleasures to provide us with critical insights into the emotional appeal that can underpin instrumental rationality—albeit too late, in this case.

Heidegger argued that technology makes “the unreasonable demand” that nature “supply energy which can be extracted and stored,” bending seasonal rhythms to the demands of work, growth, and competition (Heidegger, 1977: 288, 296, 299; also see Swanton, 2010). For Baudrillard, “the human race is beginning to produce itself as waste-product, to carry out this work of waste disposal on itself” (Baudrillard, 1994: 78). Latour says that “while we emancipated ourselves, each day we also more tightly entangled ourselves in the fabric of nature” (Latour, 2015: 221). Here again, the impact of technology is not merely a human problem, but one shared by all inhabitants of the Earth. There is a duty of care to the weak on the part of the strong as denizens of shared space—and a recognition that the ultimate technological fix to counter ecologically destructive conduct may not be found.

The lesson is clear. Nature’s duality—that it is simultaneously self-generating and sustaining, yet its survival is contingent on human rhetoric and despoliation—makes it vulnerable, even though its reaction to our interference will strike back, sooner or later, in mutually assured destruction. Without nature, there can be no humanity, as changes in the material world caused by people and their tools compromise the survival of the planet’s most skillful and willful, productive and destructive, inhabitant (Marx, 2008).

There is hope: Plato referred to the power of natural disasters to destroy social and technological advances, which he called “crafty devices.” When these “tools were destroyed,” new inventions and a pacific society, based on restraint rather than excess, could emerge (Plato, 1972: 119–22). And for Engels, Marx, and Luxemburg, recognizing oneself as a species could not only generate class consciousness over consumer sovereignty, but expand...