{"id":3638,"date":"2020-01-02T01:21:01","date_gmt":"2020-01-02T00:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=3638"},"modified":"2020-01-02T14:11:43","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T13:11:43","slug":"when-cricket-and-climate-collide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/when-cricket-and-climate-collide\/","title":{"rendered":"When cricket and climate collide"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Australia’s cricketers hope bushfire smoke will not impact on the Test with New Zealand at the SCG.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another decade dawns and sport is as entwined with Australian culture as ever.\u00a0 It is doubtful that Prime Minister Scott Morrison would have promoted any other form of culture when prescribing \u201ca great summer of cricket\u201d as\u00a0a psychological antidote<\/a>\u00a0to fighting bushfires.<\/p>\n

Morrison\u2019s glib tweet about \u201cour firefighters and fire-impacted communities\u201d being given \u201csomething to cheer about\u201d might have raised hackles, but it highlighted sport\u2019s go-to, rhetorical role in symbolising the nation and its collective spirit.<\/p>\n

No matter that, despite Cricket Australia\u2019s claims,\u00a0participation in the sport is actually declining<\/a>.\u00a0 Nor that the national men\u2019s game is still recovering from the\u00a0international shame<\/a>\u00a0of the Sandpapergate scandal bemoaned by Morrison\u2019s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull.<\/p>\n

But Australian cricket\u2019s most pressing problem is environmental.\u00a0 It is a game played in the open air for long periods, and this cricket season is being overshadowed, sometimes literally, by a long, dangerous fire season.<\/p>\n

The Prime Ministerial\u00a0celebration of cricket<\/a>\u00a0was unwise given that it also draws attention to widespread condemnation of the Liberal National government\u2019s response to climate change.<\/p>\n

As images of a Sydney Thunder-Adelaide Strikers Big Bash Twenty20 game in Canberra being abandoned because of bushfire smoke\u00a0circulated around the world<\/a>, Australia was being criticised domestically and internationally for the inadequacy of its\u00a0climate change<\/a>\u00a0policies.<\/p>\n

Collisions of cricket and climate keep growing in number and scale.\u00a0 During the first test match in the men\u2019s series against New Zealand in Perth,\u00a0a nearby scrub fire<\/a>\u00a0was seen by spectators and cameras alike.\u00a0 The increasingly vexed issue of\u00a0player heat stress<\/a>\u00a0was evident.<\/p>\n

There are news reports of cricketers in\u00a0respiratory distress<\/a>, and questions about the ethics of demanding that they play for up to six hours a day in hazardous air conditions. \u00a0New\u00a0smoke stops play<\/a>\u00a0policies will be in operation mirroring those devised for rain interruptions – which would be perversely welcome in present circumstances.<\/p>\n

There is also an increased chance of cricket games in regional areas being threatened by fire, as an\u00a0award-winning picture<\/a>from the Hunter Valley from 2002 dramatically demonstrated.\u00a0 New\u00a0Monash University research<\/a>\u00a0commissioned by The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) suggests that it may be necessary to reschedule major sport events during the Australian summer, including the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne and the New Year Test in Sydney.<\/p>\n

Given these urgent environmental matters in the midst of a terrible drought, it is ironic to recall that, in late 2018, one of 11 Australian Research Council Discovery grant applications recommended by expert peers, but secretively struck down by then Education Minister Simon Birmingham, was entitled\u00a0Greening Media Sport: The Communication of Environmental Issues and Sustainability in Professional Sport<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When asked, belatedly, to explain the decision to veto this and other research projects, the Minister stated that it was a matter of\u00a0\u201cbeing entirely the wrong priorities\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After re-submission with some minor tweaking and a title less likely to attract the censor\u2019s eye, Sport as a Communications Platform for Environmental Issues, this research project was successful in the 2020 ARC grant round.<\/p>\n

Presumably, the succeeding Education Minister, Dan Tehan, agrees with the researchers that sport and media\u2019s environmental impact, both actually negative and potentially positive, is indeed a priority matter.<\/p>\n

The 17 signatories to the 2018\u00a0United Nations\u2019 Sports for Climate Action Framework<\/a>\u00a0unequivocally think so.\u00a0 Among them are the International Olympic Committee (IOC), F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), National Basketball Association (NBA), World Surf League, and the Rugby League World Cup 2021.<\/p>\n

In the interest of full disclosure, I provided advice on the ARC project when it was in development, but I was not an applicant.\u00a0 Raising it here is not an exercise in score settling, but to emphasise how cricket\u2019s environmental problems in Australia and\u00a0around the world<\/a>\u00a0can help reinforce the vital importance of these issues for other sports and the societies that sustain them.<\/p>\n

Many sports lovers do not to think too deeply about the actual environmental costs of their favourite pastime.\u00a0 These range from media energy use to travel-related carbon emissions to unrecyclable waste.\u00a0\u00a0Greenwashing<\/a>\u00a0sport by the corporate public relations apparatus of many major sports organisations generates misleading environmental alibis.<\/p>\n

Sport makes much of its outdoor, healthy image and for many people, including me, a great deal of enjoyment has been derived from the sensory pleasure of playing and the sociable fun of watching it in the stadium (violence and bigotry excepted) and on screen (airheaded commentary excepted).<\/p>\n

It is increasingly difficult, though, to look away when sport is demonstrably implicated in anthropogenic climate change.\u00a0 But sport can also help to counteract it, both by example and by strategic use of its intimate connection to the media in communicating new ways of addressing profound environmental issues.<\/p>\n

Such a publicly proactive approach to planetary health by cricket and other sports would certainly provide something to cheer for, both on and off the pitch.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Previously published by On Line Opinion<\/a>\u00a0December 31, 2019, and\u00a0licensed under a\u00a0Creative Commons License<\/a>\u00a0(some rights reserved).<\/em><\/p>\n

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Another decade dawns and sport is as entwined with Australian culture as ever.\u00a0 It is doubtful that Prime Minister Scott Morrison would have promoted any other form of culture when prescribing \u201ca great summer of cricket\u201d as\u00a0a psychological antidote\u00a0to fighting bushfires. Morrison\u2019s glib tweet about \u201cour firefighters and fire-impacted communities\u201d being given \u201csomething to cheer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":3642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[136,135,134,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-3638","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-okategoriserade","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-bushfires","10":"tag-climate-change","11":"tag-cricket"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/cricket-smoke-small.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-WG","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}