Professional sports promote their green credentials and yet remain complicit in our global environmental crisis
Sports are responsible for significant carbon footprints through stadium construction and energy use, player and spectator travel, and media coverage. The impact of sports on climate change is further compounded by sponsorship deals with the gas and petroleum industries—imbuing those extractive corporations with a positive image by embedding them within the everyday pleasure of sport. Toby Miller argues that such activities amount to "greenwashing".
Scrutinizing motor racing, association football, and the Olympics, Miller weighs up their environmental policies, their rhetoric of conservation and sustainability, and their green credentials. The book concludes with the role of green citizenship and organic fan activism in promoting pro-environmental sports.
This is a must-read for students and researchers in media, communications, sociology, cultural studies, and environmental studies.
List of Figures, Acknowledgements, 1. Introducing Greenwashing 2. Introducing Sport 3. Formula One 4. Football 5. The Games 6. Citizenship Resistance and Regulation Works Cited, Index
Biography
Toby Miller is Research Professor, University of California, Riverside; Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of Cultural Policy Studies, Murdoch University; Profesor Invitado, Escuela de Comunicación Social, Universidad del Norte; Professor of Journalism, Media, and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University/Prifysgol Caerdydd; and Director of the Institute for Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University London.
In this compact, power-packed book, Miller judiciously maps out the machinations of greenwashing, showing how football, Formula 1, and the Olympics stomp sizable carbon footprints while forging sponsorship pacts with environmentally dubious partners, all the while claiming the green mantle.
Jules Boykoff, Politics & Government, Pacific University, Oregon,
This book should be the primer on sport and the environment for policy makers and activists alike.
Jay Coakley, Sociology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
In an unmissable analysis and polemic, Greenwashing Sport, the polymathic Toby Miller guides us towards some possibilities of forms of citizen-based resistance to the hypocrisies and planet-threatening excesses of capital.
Alan Tomlinson, Leisure Studies, University of Brighton
