Earlier this week, in The Guardian Sustainable Business blog, I compared the modern Olympic games to a plague of locusts:
Over the past few weeks, reading through the atrocities committed in the name of this global competition brought to mind an apt metaphor for the Olympics. To me, they seem almost like a biblical plague of locusts. They swarm periodically – currently every other year – consuming everything in their path. But the difference is that a locust plague doesn’t permanently devastate the landscape.It’s true that locusts eat crops and trees, but the insects are themselves edible, and the excrement they leave behind enriches the soil for years to come (like a forest fire). The Olympics don’t compare. In most places the Olympics swarm, they consume parkland, homes and communities, and replace them with concrete scars in the form of stadiums and hotels that rarely find much use after the horde of tourists depart. There has to be a better and more sustainable way to design the Olympics.
And while that may be a strong comparison, when we look at the ecocide caused in the name of celebration in Sochi–from the 6,000 acres of National Park built on to the damage that the Mzymta River – the spawning grounds of 20% of Russia’s Black Sea salmon – took, I don’t think it really is.
So I suggested a new way to organize the games, from reducing their frequency to shrinking their overall participation (both in athletes and spectators). Plus I offered a new set of games that’ll help prepare us for the turbulent times ahead.
I would propose replacing many of the current games at the Olympics with ones that are relevant for our ecologically constrained future. Is flipping several times in the air after launching from a ski jump the skill that humanity should hone and celebrate as the climate starts to superheat? And will this event even be possible as global warming makes the availability of snow at the games more and more uncertain?
Should we instead substitute a new game of who can plant 25 trees the fastest? Or how many solar panels a contestant can affix to a roof in 10 minutes? Or who can weld a bicycle out of a box of spare parts the quickest? Or run to a well, fill a bucket with 20 gallons of water and run back without spilling – a challenge many of the world’s people today could deeply relate with? Or even who can navigate an inflatable boat down a turbulent river picking up trapped passengers along the way, an increasingly relevant skill given the growing number floods, hurricanes and other climate change disasters?
While I doubt the Olympic Committee will implement any of these ideas, I found them fun to consider. If you have other suggestions for new events, please do add them in the comments.
