Football season is nearly upon us once again. While I always look forward to this fall tradition, this year I am even more excited at what this all-American sport has in store. For could it be that this favorite form of mass diversion could signify something more than just having a beer with buddies while donning your favorite team’s jersey, throwing peanut shells on the ground, and following the exploits of individual players? Could it also be the new model for sustainability?
Sports have a way of communicating to the masses like nothing else I know of. I found being in South Africa for last year’s World Cup, for instance, to be an amazing experience that combined high energy, fun, and cultural pride. Nelson Mandela’s famous story of using the Rugby World Cup to unite South Africa is epic and memorialized in the movie “Invictus” –and everyone seems to have their own “Rudy” story (referring to the movie about the Notre Dame walk-on who got to play). So might the unlikely heroes of the sustainability movement now be… the Philadelphia Eagles?
Let me talk for a moment about the example being set by the Eagles — that is, beyond just the recycling of the Michael Vick story (sorry, couldn’t help myself). On opening day during the first week of September, the team’s home stadium, Lincoln Financial Field, will get 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources, which will save the team an estimated $60 million over the next two decades. The scoreboard is powered by solar, the fat left over from cooking will be turned into biodiesel, and some 80 wind turbines are in the process of being installed. But then, the Eagles have been on this ‘green track’ since 2003, so what we’re about to see is the culmination of an eight-year transition in creating a totally sustainable stadium.
The Eagles’ soaring environmental spirit (hey, what better name for a team involved in such an endeavor) is also starting to catch on with rival football franchises, as well as in other professional sports. In fact, recently eight different baseball, basketball and hockey leagues have come together to form the “Green Sports Alliance,” a nonprofit headquartered in Portland, Oregon to help in navigating the “greening of sports.” Wow, this positively gives me chills! There’s nothing I love more than when a leader in a cause like environmentalism emerges from as unlikely an arena as professional athletics. Especially when it involves trendsetters with the ability to reach out to millions of people who might otherwise have remained oblivious to such efforts, if not downright antagonistic to what they might once have regarded as a strictly “elitist” movement.