Opinion: Never mind mass extinction, what about baseball?
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Now that’s bringing it home: The cover of this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated features a picture of Florida Marlins pitcher Dontrelle Willis standing up to this thighs in water while on the mound in Dolphin Stadium. No, he wasn’t drowning in tears from Florida faithful after a disappointing 2006 season from one of baseball’s most successful new franchises; the magazine was apparently aiming to depict the stadium’s soggy future under a worst-case global warming scenario. An article inside points out all the impacts climate change will have on the sports world (lots of baseball games called on account of Category 5 hurricane, for example).
Many will point out the absurdity of Sports Illustrated (literally) wading into a complex environmental policy topic that’s pretty far afield from its usual menu of jocks and, well, swimwear fashion. But you can’t say the magazine’s editors aren’t conscious of this; toward the end of the cover article, there’s a section that serves to justify the entire piece--and a quote that seems directly aimed at SI readers:
It’s only a short jump from a NASCAR driver with a raised consciousness to a NASCAR fan with the same. ‘In the environmental movement there’s way too much preaching to the choir,’ says Ken Rakoz of Centralia, Wash., who built the first biodiesel-powered dragster. ‘There are people sitting on the fence, and Joe Sixpack doesn’t really know about [biodiesel] until we do something like racing.’
Right on, my green redneck brothers.