Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, April 12, 2009
Citiwire.net

OK, what’s the connection–the climate change afflicting our globe and the man some call baseball’s greatest player of all time?

With a new baseball season opening, it’s also good season to ask that question.

For a powerful hitter, climate change is the natural world’s equivalent. Most of us have heard how rising sea levels and surges generated by more intense storms will cause flooding of roads, railways, transit systems, and airport runways in coastal areas. Increased rainfall will create severe flooding on transportation routes in Midwestern farmlands and towns. Heat waves can potentially increase wildfires in the Southwest that could destroy transportation infrastructure. Drier conditions in watersheds around the Great Lakes might reduce shipping capacity, strand barges on our great rivers, and diminish freight movement along the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Ohio/Missouri/Mississippi Riverways.

Even in the games we play and the sports we watch, it seems that climate change will have an effect. It has become so hot in Texas that the two-a-day high school football practices in August have been turned into one-at-night, and so steamy in Florida that the Miami Dolphins have built a climate-controlled practice bubble instead of sweating out their football players on an open field. It is projected that in 2025, the ski resort in Taos, New Mexico, will lose 23 days of business for lack of snow, a number that will increase to 48 by 2050. Major league baseball bats are customarily made from ash wood that grows from eastern Pennsylvania to the Adirondacks in New York, but the quality of the ash is being threatened by two things: a warmer climate, and the arrival of a tiny destructive beetle known as the emerald ash borer.

So this brings us to Willie Mays, the immortal (and–at 77–still living) legendary center fielder for the Giants. An incident in his storied career illustrates how climate change effects even baseball, because baseballs fly through the atmosphere slower when it’s cooler, faster when it’s warmer. In Game One of the 1954 World Series in New York, a Cleveland Indian, Vic Wertz, hit a 460-foot blast that would have been a home run in any other ball park. But the old Polo Grounds had a huge centerfield, and speedy Willie Mays made a magnificent play on the ball. He ran it down, caught it over his shoulder, and secured his fame forever as one of the greatest players of all time. On that day, the temperature was 76 degrees. But since that time, the earth is on average 1.17 percent warmer, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That being the case, a University of Illinois physicist, Alan Nathan, has calculated that if the temperature were 77 degrees, the ball would have traveled “two inches farther in the less-dense air,” and thus might have glanced off Willie Mays’s glove instead of being caught.

Sports are adapting to climate change, however. Sports Illustrated has noted: “At a time when so much in our lives is linear and digital, from the economy to technology, sports still run in graceful cycles, marking time in rhythm with the seasons.” The magazine points to several positive steps that are being taken to combine environmental conservation with recreation. The Natural Resources Defense Council is working with the NBA and MLB to help their teams get greener. The Formula One circuit is using hybrids and biofuels, and Indy cars are mixing ethanol into their fuel tanks. The men’s lacrosse team at Middlebury College raised money to purchase renewable energy credits through wind power, to offset their carbon footprint. Golf courses can replace synthetic fertilizers with organic products, plant trees that turn carbon into oxygen, make water hazards hospitable to aquatic habitats, and serve as testing grounds for carts powered by newly developed fuels such as hydrogen cells and biodiesel. And new baseball stadiums, like the ones in New York City and Washington, D.C., have been sited near public-transit lines to reduce vehicle miles traveled and the baneful blight of asphalt parking lots. New stadiums can use water filtration and recirculation systems, harness wind and solar power off the rooftops, and incorporate parks into the design.

So when we’re told we all need a new ethic of conservation, what’s different? You’ve heard the batting order already: green infrastructure, green buildings, energy efficiency, LEED standards and certification, protection of habitat and open space, compact development, greater use of transit. We know those and countless companion steps spell our future. Because one lesson we can learn from our passion for a sporting culture is that we must not only cheer and watch, we must be players as well. Right now that means a long-term fight to save our environment and our quality of life.

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