The Olympic Games and the Environment

J. Karamichas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349310180, 9780230228610
• eBook ISBN: 9781137297471
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the environmental credentials of Olympic Host cities and the opportunities afforded by hosting the Games towards the ecological modernization of the host nation by using perspectives offered by environmental sociology. It also sets out projections for the environmental legacy of London 2012.

1

Introduction

Olympics and the environment?

One of the questions that sprang to mind as I organized this introduction was related to the people who will decide to purchase this book. I realized that, unless the book was to be shelved alongside other books in the social sciences, prospective readers would be unlikely to guess the disciplinary approach adopted here. Even if it were shelved in such a unit, readers might still be surprised by its two themes: the Olympics and the environment. When people think and talk about sport events of great magnitude like the Olympic Games, they tend to think of their environmental dimension in highly restricted ways that don’t move beyond the beautification and restructuring of the Olympic host city.

Does this generalization cover those who are solely concerned about environmental issues? The truth is that environmentalists have shown an avid interest in each of the phases that comprise the evolution of sporting events, from their inception as ideas to their deliveries and legacies. Because of this interest, they have often acted as indefatigable monitors of the environmental dimension of sporting events and, in some of the most recent sport mega-events, in particular the Olympics, they have served as important advisors and facilitators.

Today, sport mega-events make an immense effort to showcase their environmental credentials (Hayes and Karamichas, 2012a, pp. 8–14). The core aim of this book is to compare and contrast the environmental legacies that have been bequeathed to four recent Olympic host cities and nations, beginning with Sydney in 2000 (host of the first Green Summer Olympics) and culminating with London in 2012, via Athens in 2004 and Beijing in 2008. This overall objective implies two related goals. First, this book will showcase the valuable role that environmental sociology can play toward critically examining the interaction between the ‘social’ and the ‘natural,’ as well as how this examination can complement insights offered by the green sociological imagination. For the purposes of the current study, the ‘social’ is composed of all of the issues surrounding the running of an Olympic Games, and the ‘natural’ is composed of all issues that are directly related to the environmental legacies of the Games. Second, the book will offer a detailed appraisal of the extent to which hosting an Olympic Games leads to the Ecological Modernization (EM) of the host nation, an outcome that is strongly promoted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The idea of an environmental legacy is all encompassing. It includes the impact of hosting the Olympic Games on the EM capacity of the host nations. Since at the time of writing the London Games have not yet taken place, the environmental legacy of London 2012 cannot be assessed by means of the vigorous examinations which the other three cases have been subjected to. Despite this issue, this book is not restricted to coverage of existing EM capacities in previous host nations and cities but also offers projections about the environmental legacy of the 2012 Games. Given this projection, it has been necessary to take into account the impact of the financial crisis that the UK (along with the rest of the world) has faced since 2008.

Given the complexity of recent economic history, the reader probably wonders whether the global financial crisis warrants the re-examination of the EM capacities of the other three Olympic host nations and cities. Indeed, the case of Greece, the host of Athens 2004, makes plain the need for such re-examination. In my earlier study of the Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 Games (Karamichas, 2012a), I concluded that the nature of political parties in government was the single most influential determinant of the post-Olympics EM capacity of the host nation. This argument was substantiated by using examples of specific changes made by labour- and socialist-led governments in both countries. In particular, an electoral victory by the Greek socialist party (PASOK) in 2009 was heralded as the first serious sign that the country was moving toward fully embracing the EM dynamic. Since that time, however, the economic slump has caused that country to experience an unprecedented rate of change in both its social and economic fabric. This has had an immense impact on the EM projections that were made back in 2009. Chapter 7 provides a detailed examination of the Greek case in connection to these developments.

Meanwhile, as a prelude to how these cases and the global economic crisis have been brought together within this book, I want to bring in two descriptors of the Greek crisis that have acted as trigger points for facilitating the discussion of the EM capacities of Olympic host nations and cities. The first descriptor – that the Greek crisis is a ‘blessing in disguise’ – was taken from a series of articles in Time Magazine (Tsiantar, 2010; Crumley, 2010). The second descriptor – that there is a ‘canary in the coalmine’ – was fished from an article in the Guardian (Wachman, 2010).

The first descriptor suggests that the woes that are being experienced and the sacrifices that are being made by the Greek people in attempting to bring their country out of its seriously disadvantageous position may also be in some ways beneficial. In what way and for whose benefit can this crisis be beneficial? This is the question that confronts us. Elsewhere (Karamichas, 2012a, p. 170), I claim that ‘the perpetuation of severe structural deficiencies (e.g. the continuation of nepotism and clientelism in Greece) has severely undermined the necessary public legitimacy of the state apparatus to develop its EM capacity’. If the crisis leads to the addressing of these issues by the Greek nation, that development would be beneficial for both the Greek public in general and for business interests in particular. The expectation is that such changes would facilitate both the economic and ecological modernization (EM) of the country.

Although the second descriptor – the idea of the ‘canary in the coalmine’ – does not overlook the peculiarities of the Greek context, it moves beyond them to link the Greek crisis to a general spread of economic crises in other national contexts. The underlying idea here is that the impact of austerity measures in Greece may be replicated elsewhere in the world. This would create adverse effects on the provisions of public services and would lead to a rise in civil contestation. These facts are pertinent to this study in two ways. First, they make a case for examining the impact of the crisis on the EM legacies of hosting. Second, the positive projections that were made about Greece after the election of Papandreou’s PASOK in 2009 and were subsequently tarnished with acceleration of the crisis are mirrored in the UK case, for which positive projections have also been made (see Karamichas, 2012b).

To summarize, the onset of the economic crisis and the specific global and national impacts that accompanied it have added an intervening variable in the overall design of this study. Despite this situation, its overall perspective has remained much the same. In essence, this book is a comparative, cross-national study that makes extensive use of the perspectives offered by environmental sociology. In that way, it showcases the scientific and analytical vigour of this sub-discipline of sociology. As we are reminded by Preuss (2004, p. 2), ‘[i]n order to make a successful comparison of host countries, it is necessary to homogenize the calculation methods employed to determine the final balance’. As such, the contribution that reflexive modernization (hereafter, RM or reflexivity) has made to the discipline of environmental sociology (as that contribution has been expressed through the lens of EM) has been employed in identifying the study’s key indicators (Chapter 5), which were then subsequently used in both Chapters 7 and 8 in order to strengthen this cross-national investigation.

The ancient Olympics

A separate issue that has arisen in discussion about this work is the extent to which my treatment of these issues will deal with the ancient Olympics. Most people know that the origins of the Games can be traced back to ancient Greece. The fact that I am a Greek national may have played a role in the questions of my interlocutors. Still, I am slightly perplexed by this interest in the ancient Games. My study is inspired by what, in my opinion, are the most serious issues of our time – the environmental problematic in general and climate change in particular – and by my interest in the relationship between these issues and a quintessentially modern sporting event. My intention is to make use of sociological insights in both my methodology and analysis.

There is already a plethora of publications on the ancient Games by people who are dedicated to the study of ancient Greece. As such, my contribution to this topic would have been of small value. In addition, the relationship of the ancients to the natural environment, as well as the link between the Olympic Games and the concept of environmental protection, are rarely, if ever, at the top of the list of things to learn about the ancients. This is not to say that there are not many things to be said in relation to these issues. For this reason, I want to say a few words about the place of the environment in the social forms of the ancient world.

The ancient Greeks and the environment

Pollution and environmental contamination were not unknown to the ancient Greeks. For instance, in the ancient world coal-driven processes of heating polluted the atmosphere, and lead, mercury and other toxic chemicals from mines were understood to be a threat to public health, and this at a time during which there were no provisions for the storage and treatment of such waste products. At the same time, the ancient Greeks made provisions for the transfer of human waste to places of considerable distance from the walls of the city, as well as for its reuse in the fertilization of farming plots. Moreover, as early as 478 BC, we can find the first expressions of concern about the population and spatial growth of urban centres in ancient Greece (Gouta, 2009, p. 10).

For the ancient Greeks, this concern amounted to the potential reduction of public space. Following Hannah Arendt (1958), we can say that this process constitutes the pure essence of democratic socialization. Georgi (2010, p. 87) has summed up Arendt’s rationale:

In ancient Greece, the ‘public’ was defined as something which had the possibility of wider publicity, what could be seen and heard by everybody, and which also had, because of its communicative breadth, intense political tinge. While on the contrary, the ‘private’ in the ancient Greek world, meant deprivation from the objective societal links, in essence deprivation from real relationships for development of human existence. As such, the ‘private’ was characterised by an association with the negative.

Interestingly enough, in her attempt to exemplify these points, Georgi (2010) breaks down the concept of ‘public space’ into three different categories: squares, gardens and sacred thickets. Considering that sacred thickets can be understood as the predecessors of today’s public parks, Georgi makes a statement that is of considerable importance for any attempt to assess environmental factors within the mental framework that guided the originators of the Olympic Games. In ‘other civilizations, Roman times, Renaissance etc.,’ she writes, ‘green space was only composed by the gardens of Royal Palaces, which had some public character’ (ibid., p. 87). When we examine the actual public spaces that inspired Arendt to make her claim, we discover that the ancient Athenian agora (market) was initially a square-like structure that ‘operated as a symbol of free expression and distribution of ideas and goods’ (ibid., p. 88). Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that these ancient sacred thickets were protected by laws that prohibited the pasturage of animals, the removal of dry tree branches, and tree felling. In addition, the golden age of Pericles was marked by the construction of the first public gardens in Athens. These gardens ‘constituted notable meeting points between philosophers and their students who were taking a stroll whilst discussing in walking paths shaded by planes and acacias. In general, the organization of free public spaces in Greece was intimately connected to religious worship since every one of the Gods had a tree dedicated to him/her that was seen as sacred. In this context, the pine was dedicated to Pan, oak to Zeus, beech to Hercules, holm oak and poppy to Mars, mint to Pluto, and myrtle and rosebush to Aphrodite’ (ibid., pp. 91–2). According to Elliot and Thomas (2009, p. 1),

Greek religion recognised humanity’s oneness with nature. The ancient Greeks could not conceive of a sacred area without trees. [For instance,] on the rocky summit of the Acropolis when the Parthenon was built, holes were excavated in the solid rock and trees were planted, in rows, to flank the temple. [In addition, sacred] groves of trees were preserved and hunting was forbidden in these groves. While it is stretching the point to see these as national parks in anything like the modern sense, it is clear that the Greeks had a respect for nature.

The Romans changed this attitude through more pragmatic and utilitarian motivations that sanctioned the exploitation of nature. This Roman perspective has been bequeathed to us. In this perspective, we can detect the rationale that has underpinned industrialization. There is little doubt that the modern Olympics have been permeated almost exclusively with this mentality. This is an issue that is developed in the chapters that follow. In summary, however, there is little reason to doubt that the ancient Games were held in a way that was harmonious with the natural environment. After all, the scale of the event in ancient times, irrespective of its wide connection to the Hellenic World, was local and nothing like Games’ contemporary global scale.

Substantial challenges have been posed to traditional understandings of the Games. These challenges include a range of publications that came out in time for the Athens 2004 (see, for instance, Katsikas and Nikolaidou, 2003; Perrottet, 2004; and Spivey, 2004). Those Games led Kalogeratou (2007) to recontextualize Baudrillard’s statements on the eve of the first Gulf War (Baudrillard, 1995) and ask, ‘did the 2004 Olympics take place?’ Kalogeratou did not dispute the fact that an event called ‘the Athens 2004 Olympics’ took place. She did, however, question the extent to which that event was an Olympic Games according to the ‘traditional cultural characteristics that define’ those Games, a claim made along the same lines that the French philosopher questioned the extent to which the remote-controlled missiles used in the military operation of the first Gulf War signified a ‘real war’ (Karamichas, 2012c). Kalogeratou writes:

We often ignore how much the contemporary staging of Olympic Games has been differentiated, from antiquity to nowadays but also from the first modern Olympics to their most recent edition. Many of those elements that nowadays constitute characteristics of authenticity are either fictitious or counterfeiting (such as the Marathon and the Torch relays), whilst many of their ancient characteristics would have caused outcry nowadays (for instance the participation in the sports only by men, Greek citizens who competed naked).

(Kalogeratou, 2007, p. 161)

In keeping with this interesting subject, I expand further upon the issue of continuity between the ancient and modern Games in Chapter 2.

I want to move forward now and elaborate upon the actual themes of this book. I will start by highlighting its overall concept, the Olympics and the environment, and go on to discuss how the disciplinary specialization of environmental sociology may be of interest.

Sociology, the Olympics and the environment

The study of sporting events is generally seen as something outside the sphere of sociological endeavour, (see, for instance, Roche, 2000, p. ix). The study of sporting events has not generally been taken seriously by the discipline. As Bourdieu (1990, p. 156) writes, ‘the sociology of sport: it is disdained by sociologists, and despised by sportspeople’. If one adds to this the environmental dimension of these events, this disdain becomes even more acute.

There are concerns, of course, about the capacity of the ‘sociological imagination’ to show its relevance to life outside of academia, and these concerns escalate if one takes into account articles advocating the need for a sub-discipline of environmental sociology. Furthermore, attempts to ascribe sociological connections to the environmental problematic still raise eyebrows in certain sociology departments. As many environmental sociologists can confirm, Durkheim’s ‘social facts injunction’ (Catton, 2002) is to a certain extent responsible for the exclusion of environmental concerns from the discipline. The truth is that even today – more than a decade after the publication of Raymond Murphy’s ‘Sociology as If Nature Did Not Matter’ (1995) – it is not exaggerating to say that, irrespective of some notable improvements, the discipline of sociology is still largely conditioned by a subscription to the ‘human exemptionalism paradigm’ (HEP).

Despite this exclusionary tendency and with both climate change having become unequivocally the most valent issue of our times and the London 2012 Olympics approaching, British sociologists have had to take an active role in producing a critical and constructive perspective about sport and the environment. This new perspective is evident in the most recent work of Anthony Giddens on climate change, The Politics of Climate Change (2009), as well as the addition that he made to the online version of his popular sociology textbook, Sociology, which includes a new chapter title ‘Sociology, Sport and the Olympics’ (Giddens, 2008). Given this situation, the amalgamation of sociology and components from the natural sciences may become a self-evident and necessary development. Similarly, sports studies may be infused with environmental concerns as more and more sporting events subscribe to environmental management systems and attempt to account for their carbon footprints.

Modernity and modernization

Sociology is unequivocally a product of mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Olympic Games: a Quintessentially Modern Project
• 3 The Environmental Issue: Opposing Modernity and Progress
• 4 Environmental Concern and Environmental Sociology: Parallel Developments
• 5 Reflexive Modernization: Connecting the Environment With Modernity and Modernization
• 6 The Greening of the Games
• 7 Olympic Games and Ecological Modernization: Sydney, Athens and Beijing
• 8 London 2012: Evaluating the Prospects
• 9 Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index