Colonial echoes in sport and the environment – time to decolonise and degrow?
The convergence of sport, decoloniality, and the environment presents a labyrinth of intricate ideas, and as we delve into their interconnectedness, the complexity deepens. Joining us on this informative journey is Samuel Clevenger, an Assistant Professor at Towson University in the USA, who has been trying to unpack some of this intersection.
We start with the radical concept of decoloniality—an evolution beyond mere decolonisation. Through philosophical references and anecdotes, we raise instances where sport has been wielded to perpetuate a Western-centric worldview, shaping notions of identity, imagery, and competition. Then, in contrast, we examine examples where Western sports were recast more in the image of the indigenous people who were pressured to play them.
As we pivot to the environmental repercussions, a canvas of broader societal critiques unfurls. The discourse expands to encompass profound themes like climate justice, athlete and fan burnout, and the nuances of degrowth or post-growth.
Whether you're a sports enthusiast, an environmental advocate, or simply curious about the multifaceted connections between these realms, there are undoubtedly ideas in this episode of interest to you.
Episode Transcript
Ben 01:24
So, as I like to begin with everyone, now tell us a little bit about how you got into this space. What led you down to this particular subject matter of sport, colonialism, the environment, all the many other topics you touch on.
Sam 01:38
Specifically with colonialism. It was a particular article that I wrote I think forget what year it was in grad school when I was at the University of Maryland and it was a paper about. I was getting really interested and influenced by the school thought called decoloniality. It's kind of a group of scholars with Latin American origins that look into kind of epistemological colonialism that came along with the literal, the physical, material colonialism in the history of kind of Western invasion of indigenous peoples and I was really interested in the way that decoloniality could help explain how the idea of sport could be tied to issues of power and repression, like the ways in which ideas of sport could be like Eurocentric or could inform kind of a Western view of the world at the expense of other perspectives and other worldviews, particularly non-Western or indigenous worldviews.
I grew up as a white settler in the state of Ohio in the US and I grew up as a fan of Cleveland sports and one of the Cleveland sports teams was always the Cleveland Indians, the major league baseball team, and they famously had the chief Wahoo mascot and I just remember growing up like there was just always something kind of strange and difficult with the mascot, like even as a kid because you go to games and you'd see these grown men I mean like fathers and grown adults be sort of painting their faces red and be wearing sort of feathers and making kind of stereotypical sounds that they think Native Americans made when they went to battle or something, and it just seemed like it just always seemed wrong. So when I was in grad school later on and started to study in sport history, it just seemed like kind of a natural movement for me. It's like getting into the ways in which sports seem to be tied to these issues with the history of colonialism. So when I got into that, that first piece which is just about kind of basically like kind of Eurocentric knowledge and the history of sport, that was kind of my first entry into seeing the ties between the two. It's only been kind of more recently in my work that I've started to more closely look at the links between environmental change, colonialism and sport, the interconnections between all three of them.
Ben 04:21
Yes, and I don't think that's an uncommon route, I think to some of these acknowledgments, or at least becoming aware of these things, I think, even as a non-American, the first thing that often comes to my mind would be the Washington Redskins and all that that's gone on in terms of the name, but it goes around the world. I think more apparent would be like the Exeter Chiefs, which have changed their logo from more of like a Native American, but that's a British rugby team with a sort of Native American representation which seems very peculiar. But again there is that change happening and I think in my own country of South Africa it's been very tied where, post-apartheid, they basically had to change all of the sports teams' names because most of them were named regionally and the regions themselves were bicolonial design. I think let's start with this concept of like decoloniality. From what I understand and I think you probably need to clarify this for me it is a deeper set of thoughts than purely decolonization. Decolonialization refers to more, maybe what dependency theory, and decoloniality is more both a cultural and economic sort of equitization. Is that fair to say?
Sam 05:28
I think so I think it's getting to it. I'm definitely not an expert. I definitely wouldn't especially as being sort of a white settler from the United States, like to declare myself an expert in decoloniality. I mean, a lot of the writers, like Walter McNullo, for example, really emphasize sort of the decolonial thinkers that have existed for centuries, going back to the 1400s of the Common Era, and people that were responding to the forced colonization of peoples with the arrival of Europeans.
The thing I always emphasize, because there's so many connections between when you're talking about you know if you're talking about Edward Said and postcolonialism, or if you're talking about settler colonialism and then this idea of decoloniality, like for me, decoloniality has a lot to do with the knowledge, like the colonization of knowledge, and how epistemic repression is tied to economic and physical repression, how, when you're talking about the history of colonialism, it's not just that the people you're talking about genocide or you're talking about dispossession or enslavement, but at the same time the ideas of those peoples were also being repressed or trying to be extinguished by European peoples. You know the emphasis whenever you read decoloniality is always about you know strategies for changing the terms of the conversation, like it's about how you frame and understand knowledge and the ways that which those framings can often reinforce kind of the Western modern worldview and slide this whole kind of dark history of colonialism and then how that epistemological repression has direct ties to the capitalist world system and to sort of economic repression, like they're not separate things. They have sort of distinct elements to it but they're not separate. They're sort of overlapping and interlocked in important ways. You know, when I think of decoloniality with sport, for me decoloniality and sport is like this how the ideas that we take for granted when we think about sport, like dominant perception, perceptions of sport, often involve ideas that are linked to Western history and the Western worldview and we forget that. We often look like thinking about sport as being something that's supposed to be competitive or something where it's supposed to be a business and supposed to be profitable, or it involves individuals competing against individuals. You know, all of those ideas are not universal. There's nothing universal about them. They come from a particular kind of geopolitical origin.
Ben 08:04
No, it does make a lot of sense and it's, I think, fascinating from a South African perspective, because it's exceptionally true that, both both from a knowledge and identification perspective and also from an economic perspective, south African sport is entirely in the colonial design. I mean, I acknowledge your point about it's maybe some ironic to hear this from likes of yourself or me where, yeah, we are both white people but from countries that basically only exist because of colonialism. But all of the sports in South Africa, like the big three, are football, slash soccer, predominantly rugby and cricket, which are kind of England's big three sports. But then if you actually look into the sports themselves, the very systems on the ground are pointing still towards England. Like, if you are a young South African soccer player, slash football player, you absolutely want to make it at your local club level, maybe make it at the big club level so that you will be picked up by a European club. And that is for both reasons of financial gain, of course, which are drastically imbalanced, and also from a perspective of identification. You know these children are raised. I'm not saying they're indoctrinated, I would not go that far. It is purely just a case of, yeah, marketing and good TV coverage to think that, you know, playing for Arsenal or playing for Liverpool are the best things that can happen, such that, yeah, their own ambitions within their own country seem to be quite diminished.
Sam 09:27
Oh yeah, absolutely, and it comes. You know, there's even kind of this sort of backward looking route too where they assume that kind of the value of the sport, like you know, for example, like history is a football, like association football, like most histories still assume that the origins are in England, so it has like a Western European origin. I mean, if you look at it from kind of a longer perspective of ball games like this, the very long history of various different societies using a ball and either kicking it around or throwing it around, then that history is a lot more complicated. I mean, people have been doing those type of ball games for centuries. I mean, you can go back at least to the Egyptian societies thousands of years ago. But we have these narratives that say that, okay, well, this modern version of the sport originated in Europe, in Britain, and from there it's spread around the world. So it retains that kind of kernel of kind of Western exceptionalism. That's kind of serves to reinforce the existing power structure where kind of the European institutions and sort of European governments or Western governance seem to still reign supreme within the organization. And that's the same thing, not the same thing. But there's similar dynamics, I think, in the United States as well. I mean a lot of my work. So I've done some work recently and I'm still doing some research on the history of basketball, and with basketball there's this sort of long established narrative that James Naysmith, who was a Canadian born kind of physical educator, comes to Springfield, massachusetts, and then in 1891 writes down the rules for basketball.
There's been ball games that involved an elevated hoop in a rectangular court for a really, really long time. There's a lot of Aztec and Mayan and other kind of early modern civilizations, going all the way back to the Olmecs, having very similar games. But in the narrative that exists and then the narrative that's reproduced by the NBA and by the basketball hall of fame, by universities like the University of Kansas, they reinforce this idea that no, it's this modern, individual Western man had this sort of immaculate conception of a game that had no sort of predecessor whatsoever, had no connection to any other people that existed in history. And then suddenly that narrative kind of reinforces this sort of exceptionalist view of the sport and it's part of how they sort of frame the sport, how they promote it, how it exists as kind of an economic entity. You see that in a lot of different sports to this day.
Ben 11:56
I think it's funny that that does sort of still manifest itself when, at least I would say, former British colonial countries such as New Zealand, australia, south Africa and I'd even go so far as to say the likes of Scotland, obviously pushing it back, you know, even perhaps pre-colonialism, in terms of that rivalry.
But there is this sort of mantra and I think the Scottish fans were singing it a few years ago during the Euros, the football tournament. It's like anyone but England, because they accept the narrative of like. Maybe these people invented the sport. Whether or not that's true, as you say, is highly debated, but if they are going to invent a sport and spread it around the world, then we better take that on board and beat them at it. And there's this, you know, some kind of tribalism and joy that people get out of it, and I would even say I get a lot out of that. You mentioned this kind of relationship with the how the sport spread, and obviously that was a part of colonialism and, specifically, globalization. Where do you see sport in the cause and effect? Do you see sport as just another thing that's being globalized like many other types of culture, or do you think sport has a bit more agency in terms of it is a tool to be used to influence people.
Sam 13:03
I mean most of my work involves kind of historical analysis, like if you asked me to describe myself, let's say, as a port historian. So when you look back in terms of the diffusion of modern organized forms of sport, they were often deployed by settler nations like in my work, the United States, for example as tools for cultural assimilation, ways of stripping indigenous or non-western peoples of their customs and assimilate them into Western society, western views, western attire, western ways of acting and working. You know you could look at the colonization of Hawaii and the sort of the appropriation and commodification of surfing, of surfing practices, into it's kind of like a business by the early 1900s. You can look at Puerto Rico, the boarding schools. You know American Indian boarding schools, the government, government run boarding schools, church run boarding schools. That happened in Canada as well where they sort of forcibly placed native children on these schools and then it was basically a curriculum of colonization and assimilation. You know, in those curriculum I mean sport it wasn't just there. They didn't include sport just because they thought the kids would like it and it'd be fun and playful. I mean it was part and parcel of their sort of assimilationists and kind of erasure objectives. You know, like the sport itself they thought at least, was a way to fully ingratiate the native children into the Western way of living. It didn't work.
I mean, like some of the best histories out there are these histories from the perspective of indigenous peoples and sort of detailing the ways that indigenous peoples did not engage with the sport in the way that you know the school leaders or the other organizers of sport wanted them to engage with it. They use sport for their own purposes. They use sport as a way to sort of a kind of counter hegemonic strategy, a way of maintaining their native identities in the face or in that context of colonization. I'm thinking in particular of the historian Wade Davies has his book Native Hoops, which is about kind of the history of American Indian basketball, and American Indian peoples encounter basketball through the boarding school experience by the turn of the 20th century. So it's distinctly a context of colonialism. But the way that they engaged with basketball, the meaning that they ascribed to basketball, how they used it, was entirely connected to the way they preserved and maintained a sense of native community and native identity. It wasn't, it was not as if they just simply accepted the sort of intentions of the school leaders.
Ben 15:52
Yeah, absolutely, and I think to that point it raises some very interesting parallels with even just the colonial history of South Africa. Obviously the first Europeans to get there were Dutch and then followed, once they found a certain degree of resources where the British came as well. And in the evolution of the country and I'm speaking in quite broad strokes here, but even the broad evolution of the country it sort of became associated that cricket was a little bit the English game and rugby was a little bit the Dutch game, even though rugby is also an English invention. That's kind of how it played out. So in this very sort of British boarding school style education which a lot of the white people in the country had, those two sports were pushed, obviously particularly across men.
And then during the apartheid era it was kind of considered almost not frowned upon, but not part of the ethos of the country to play games like soccer, slash football. But that was very interesting because then it became an act of protest to some degree within the oppressed indigenous people under apartheid to play soccer, because that was not what the dominant powers were doing. And actually on that act of rebellion there was even some causation there because the the ANC, the African National Congress, which was an underground movement during most of apartheid, realized that the local soccer communities attracted a crowd. So it was often used as like a non excuse, but like, built on top, was this way of communicating and gathering momentum and coordinating acts of rebellion, which I think is super interesting. And then, yeah, since the end of apartheid, rugby and cricket are slightly diminishing in the national consciousness and soccer and we do call it soccer in South Africa, by the way is growing.
Sam 17:31
You know, it's interesting too, like, I do think, like when you look at these various sort of contexts where sport was sort of well, european forms of sport, sort of enter a context of colonialism, I think often the intention was to make the people who are living in the colony more productive.
So, like you're saying, was sort of kind of the economics of South Africa to kind of be a compliment to what they're trying to extract economically within, within the, the place that they're trying to colonize. That was certainly the case, I think, with the, with the United States. You know, there is often, when you're talking about either extracting for gold or the various other natural resources, like sport. The function of sport was to sort of instill this, this idea that you need to constantly be improving your productivity or maintain your productivity, and playing sport was a way of maintaining that. So it has, in that sense, like in these various different contexts of colonialism, sport has this weird connection where it's being, it's often being cast as if it's not connected. It's kind of like the it's outside the economic context of colonialism, but I think it's actually a lot more integral.
Ben 18:45
And I think obviously during apartheid South Africa were famously sanctioned by, eventually by most of at least American supported allies around the world. The Soviets were taking a different approach, but you know that played into the Cold War. But one of the main sanctions was it did become sport. And there was this very controversial rugby tour in the 70s where New Zealand, which was going through its own sort of reckoning or or shall we say, awakening to their own racial history, sent a touring site just to Africa, despite some other countries saying no. But they brought certain Maori players with them, but then they pretended like they weren't, like the South African government, because they realized that they needed someone to play to keep this sport functional. The South African government basically like, pretended that the even in the official documentation you'd read it pretended these four Maori descended players were not Maori so that they were legally allowed to play. Because if we, if they had acknowledged they were Maori, it would have been illegal for them to play rugby at the International 11 South Africa, which is very frustrating, I find.
I also think that even more recently there's been a little bit of this and to the American listeners, they might struggle to follow this, but in the ashes, which is the cricket series between Australia and England that's going on at the moment. There was a game a couple of weeks ago where both teams bowled a lot of short balls, where the ball is like right at the batsman's head and it's a little bit dangerous, but the idea is that it kind of throws them off their game. And these bowlers were bowling a lot of these balls. And then one of the West Indian players whose long since retired so he's from Jamaica and cricket obviously became a very big thing in the Caribbean said that there was some hypocrisy there because when the West Indian players had done the same thing against England about 40 years ago, they were banned from doing so because they were so good at it. So there was this weird contradiction where these very physically strong players came up with a new tactic on the field and the English said no, no, no, you can't do that.
But then 30 years later they do exactly the same thing and no one complains about it. But I apologize for that little to anyone who don't know about rugby or cricket. So let's bring in the environmental angle here. Let's start with the obviously the colonial side. There's no doubt that the concept of even development, or even economic growth, has like severe environmental consequences, and the biggest emitting countries are the likes of the United States and Europe. How does colonialism play into that?
So this problem of economic growth, like this emphasis on economic growth, you made, or even just like spreading this certain idea of how we live our life and spreading that to all four corners of the world and thereby increasing emissions in all four corners of the world.
Sam 21:16
Yeah, you know, you know I've been, I've been reading a lot of work by this philosopher is a Swiss, german philosopher named Young Jo Han who talks a lot about the psycho politics of neoliberal capitalism, which is a very kind of Eurocentric worldview to. What he means by psycho politics is, you know, we often talk about capitalism, sort of pursuit of capital, this endless pursuit of capital, for through the commodification of the material resources of Earth, be that people or be at sort of the actual resources that are extracted from the earth. But then he also talks about kind of the way capitalism also colonizes the human psyche. So we start to look at ourselves and exploit ourselves as if we are commodities. So we people start to relentlessly pursue, pursue achievement and kind of the optimization of the self, as if we need to sort of constantly improve ourselves, as if we are kind of mechanical robots where we can just constantly kind of tinker with ourselves and find ways to make ourselves more efficient or more productive. And not only is that sort of tied into this all discussion of kind of epistemic repression with with colonialism. It's a very sort of Eurocentric worldview, this idea of like endlessly pursuing your productivity. It has a very sort of Western geopolitical origin, but then also I mean that that's kind of corollary to this problem of growth. You know, when you talk about growth and climate change, it's not, it's not just the growth in terms of economic activity and sort of sort of adverse impacts of that economic activity on the earth, but then also us burning ourselves out. There's a kind of. I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know, following Han, there's a dual crisis with climate change. There's the crisis of how we're kind of destroying the earth and the burning of fossil fuels and sort of the degradation of the biosphere, and then how we're burning ourselves out in the process. It's kind of a dual death drive, the way Han describes it, bringing it back to Freud there.
And that, I think, is where sport really has a central role, like sport, is the popularity of sport as a cultural spectacle. The importance is not just that it's popular, but the way that it reproduces cultural ideas, and one of the such foundational cultural ideas that dominate forms of sport professional and elite levels of sport in the United States, going all down to collegiate levels of sport and how they're promoted in mass media and how much big business they are, but they constantly are promoting this idea of achievement, individual achievement, as one of the most important values that you can believe in. They are constantly reinforcing this very Western-centered psychopolitical worldview. That is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in any way.
I'm coming at all of this from, in many ways, a perspective of degrowth, like what I'm saying here is, what is necessary in terms of dealing with the environmental emergency is very much. It'll involve kind of reduction of growth, strategic reduction of growth, and that's going to involve not just sort of reduction of economic or business growth, but then also a rethinking of how people live and how we look at ourselves and how we understand ourselves and different conceptions of happiness and well-being and mental health and how we treat each other. And that's going to involve, I think, looking at sport differently, because sport constantly is reinforcing a very unsustainable worldview. Not only is the sport industry constantly growing, with immense environmental consequences you can just look at scholars like Jules Boykoff and the studies of the Olympic Games.
I mean that mega event is dramatically not sustainable. It can't keep going the way it is in terms of operations but then also if we keep thinking of sport as something where the most important thing is individual achievement, individuals constantly achieving it and every year trying to achieve more and more and more and trying to improve our productivity. That's not sustainable either. I mean, that's not a sustainable way of thinking about ourselves in an era of climate change. So yeah, sport is central to it.
Ben 25:40
Yeah, I think there's so many good themes raised there I think the Olympics one and I had I had Jules Boykoff on this podcast a couple of months ago and, yeah, so amazing that one can spend your entire career basically highlighting the problem of this and still nothing sort of ringing true. But I do think the cows are coming home a little bit with that. I just saw this morning that finally, lvmh signed on to sponsor the next Olympics in Paris and it was a bit of a relief for the Olympics because they were struggling to find sponsors. The reason being and even though this is supposed to be the most sustainable Olympics ever, the reason being is that their expectations were out of line for how much money that wanted to come in. You know what I mean. Like every time you host an event, you're expecting a bigger sponsor than last time and subsequently, five, 10 years beforehand, you start putting in the excess that will that you can spend that money on, and then that money doesn't come.
You put yourself in a very tricky position and I think, even at the grassroots level, the area that I struggle with the most, both from an emotional perspective but from an ethical perspective or projects like Sport for Development, which is that there is no environmental understanding. Or even if it is, it's just usually a charity where Europeans fly over and teach some African kids some soccer and say look how good teamwork is, and then they leave and of course you know you can get into like the monitoring and evaluation of it. But there's an ethical question here. I guess they're trying to focus on the development, but I just often see there one travel emissions and two the, as you say, hegemony of it all.
Sam 27:14
Exactly, I struggle. I struggle with that question because, like you know, when you look at sport, it does have the kernel of ideas that I think are beneficial, like the idea of cooperation, for example, with all sport. Like you, like, different teams have to cooperate, they have to agree to the rules in order to have the sport actually happen. And things like teamwork, like the idea of teamwork in and of itself isn't a bad thing, it can be a good thing. It's how those, it's either how those ideas sometimes get kind of subsumed with a kind of an over emphasis on the competitiveness of it and the achievement oriented element of it, and how those, you know, how we kind of forget that those are all kernels to it. I think it's just the way that I agree with you.
Like, I get a little dismayed sometimes at how particularly dominant forms of sport get overemphasized. You know, like in, like in the United States, they're just, it's just those like three or four major popular sports and you don't hear very much of the other forms of sport that are going on. And some of those forms of sport have more interesting ties to a sense of community within local areas or complicated histories that involve various different subaltern or sort of marginalized groups Like that's the really interesting stories with sport that need to be emphasized, and sometimes we just focus so much on these dominant sports. There needs to be kind of more work to really emphasize the other kind of sports at the periphery or at the boundaries that offer different opportunities.
Ben 28:43
I think there is a challenge with that. Where there's a natural centralization to any anything of interest, you know it becomes a little bit of a winner. Take all the sport that has the most resources, that has the most influence, the most interest across the world will naturally attract the most attention and more resources to be reinvested in the same thing. So FIFA aren't going to go around using their excessive wealth and the small projects they do run in Africa and I mean small, not in the scale of the projects, but in the scale of the actual projects they could do, given how wealthy they are. They're not going to not going to sponsor some like other sports. They're like no, because they know that by getting more and more people around the world into soccer, slash football, that'll suit FIFA in the long run. You know it's that's only going to help their, their situation. And of course you can't ever criticize project by project. You can't go to the course the project manager in, like Uganda, and say you're doing the wrong thing because they're not. They are helping people. They are taking resources from overseas and bringing them into the country. They are doing some good things. But it's also quite difficult when, as we've just discussed, they're not doing things, maybe exactly the best for the long term, for the community, whether you know, be a short term project and the outcomes are potentially negative as in it centralizes powers and worlds.
I guess this leads to another big topic around you know, reparations. What do you make of that topic? Because there's a growing number of people in the global south and I hate using the term global south because it seems a bit nonsensical to me, but I acknowledge the difference between the wealthy north and the less wealthy south what do you think of the concept between reparations from the north to the south? Because I can see why it's demanded and it makes a lot of sense to me, but the execution seems almost impossible. Like who do you give it to? And also that anyone in the north, particularly the working class people of the global north, would ever accept that because it would also diminish their own material wealth.
Sam 30:33
I don't, I don't I am not well versed in that discussion but, to be honest with you, but when I'm thinking about listening to what you're saying, like not only does kind of the complexity just kind of come right at you, but also like what you were talking about, this issue within a context of kind of an environmental emergency which requires, in effect, kind of a very drastic reduction of economic growth. If I'm thinking of it in terms of the context of sport, with reparations, in some sense it involves a strategic growth for certain groups, right?
So like not only you're talking about reparations in a context of centralized authority, which which makes it sort of super duper complicated, like you were saying earlier, like central organizations trying to control an actual sort of sport or sort of what happens within an industry, but then you're also talking about this issue of who benefit from certain types of economic growth and who shouldn't, which, to be honest, I think is, I think that's going to be a necessary thing.
I'm thinking about, if there's any sort of implementation of kind of a degrowth or post growth strategy in global society, it's going to necessarily involve certain aspects of the world, specifically in the global north, because those are the more affluent and those are the countries in the global north.
They're the ones that are polluting the most, right like they're the ones that they, or the corporations and sort of consumer societies in the global north, they're the ones that are causing the most sort of carbon emissions and pollution that's driving climate change. So the degrowth is going to happen the most, the reduction is going to happen the most there, and there's probably going to be areas of the global south and economies of the global south where they're going to need to continue to continue to grow some economies or continue to engage in economic growth in order to achieve sort of a greater equity with northern societies. So I think I think in that context, reparations is going to would be kind of a necessary, a necessary part of that right in order to achieve equity. But how it's implemented, I mean, that's a really that's a really difficult question. I don't think I have a good answer to that.
Ben 32:46
I'll tell you if the two of us did have a good answer for it. I promise you this. This wouldn't just be on a podcast.
I think. I think even the field of degrowth is struggling a little bit with itself and obviously this is why the names come up a lot, because the degrowth bit is only a phase, you know. It is only to try and bring us down to a sort of sustainable level. And then you have the term post growth, where it's more flatlining. And of course technology will have a role and I know the people who, I guess, define themselves eco and modernist would say technology will save us, even though evidence, I think, strikes the contrary. But there will be some technological improvements. You know we are improving our renewable energy outlook, all this kind of stuff.
And in that realm there seems to be some kind of contradiction where obviously a lot of the materials required for solar and other types of renewables come from Central Africa and those materials currently are not being used on the whole to build solar panels in the Democratic Republic of Congo and that's where they're being built on the whole. They're being built in Europe and I understand those. They're still being paid, but are they being paid a fair value? Because obviously the Congo is quite a difficult area right now and there's not a lot of institutional structure, so it's probably very easy to extract materials at below market rates. How's that resource being used?
So I even think that in our efforts to like decarbonize, we're still kind of leaving certain areas behind. So I agree with your point African doesn't necessarily need to decry. Certain parts of almost the entire global South don't need to decry. In fact, they need pretty rigorous development to save a lot of people from a lot of horrendous things. But at the same time, the institutions that have or sorry, the countries that have the biggest emissions definitely do, but they're the ones in charge. So how, why would they ever choose to decry?
Sam 34:34
Right, exactly, and the thing that comes to mind for me is this question of desire Like you know, when you're looking at either these major sporting organizations that are located in the global north or, you know, these affluent societies, the people and the corporations have to want to limit their sort of engagement with growth or limit their consumerism or limit their impact on the earth, even as they're looking at other societies, particularly in the global south, still engaging in growth Because they are, because they are less affluent or they haven't benefited the most from the capitalist world system, how it's operated to this, to this point, you know, and that that idea of getting people I live in the United States, the United States as a late capitalist society People don't have a very good conception of limits.
They don't like limits. They don't like the idea of limiting themselves and the idea of trying to get them to not only accept the notion of limits but actually want it, to see the benefits of it, to see the pleasures that can come from limiting oneself. I mean, that is, I don't even know how that's possible. How do you even approach something like that? And you know, these questions of sport in an era of climate change is a question of reparations and necessarily involves people in the global north coming to accept and desire limitations to how they consume and how they engage in certain things like sport, that that question of desiring that is really important. And we're not, you know, I don't. I don't think we're anywhere close to even having a very good discussion of how we can sort of achieve something like that get people to desire stuff like limits.
Ben 36:15
Yes, and I think, if anything, the current is going in the opposite direction. And I'll use a line that one of my former guests, a guy called Matt Zarb-Cousin, who's a sort of anti gambling campaigner he uses this very nice term, which is unstimulated demand, which I love where people do want things. That's undisputed like if you're just sitting there in a field, you will go around and leverage the resources around you to improve your situation. That is how human beings have survived, it's how we've how we've propagated, it's how we've prospered. That's not for dispute, but wanting things.
There's no want of something you've never seen, and I'm not talking about some kind of like repressive police state where everything is blocked and you can't. You know there's no freedom of expression. But at the same time, just living your life in a global North country, you cannot go 10 seconds without seeing an advert or a this or that, and it's often fairly high carbon actions, because those are the most profitable industries that can pour money into advertising and I am very worried that that kind of stuff is pouring into the rest of the country just because of the ability of the internet now and smartphones as much, as, like everyone, having internet is a good thing for purposes of education and communication. It does create desires that weren't there before, and it's trying to get the genie back in the bottle right. You can't go to these people and say, oh, for you to desire a European or American lifestyle is wrong, because it's not necessarily wrong.
But at the same time, those lifestyles are so carbon intensive and, as you say, there's there's growing evidence that they lead to lower outcomes in things like well being, which I think to the pure. I don't know the freedmen supporters of this world. The term well being is completely alien to them because they can't put a number on it necessarily. I know a lot of scholars are trying and I think of the work of Tim Jackson at the University of Surrey, who's trying to create this narrative around sustainable prosperity but well being essential to that that, although in the short term it seems completely contradictory, buying less stuff can lead to a happier outcome. But how the hell do you tell everyone around the world that that's the case when, for the last 50 years and still to this day, everything they've seen on a television or an advert is said buy more stuff will make you happy?
Sam 38:32
And I think, bring this back to sport. I don't think sport often dominant forms of sport, I don't think promote a very healthy understanding of life and how to live, like in many ways it's sort of over most sports over emphasize unhealthy compulsive pursuits right, I'm trying to, I think, like the sort of over emphasis on competition and achievement is one example of that. It's really interesting, like in recent years. I'm trying to think, like the Olympian Simone Biles is one example that's coming to mind or Naomi Asaka, where you have these sort of prominent athletes who very openly decide to stop playing sports or they're talking about their mental health in a very sort of public setting, which is a really, really interesting phenomenon. I mean, you know, you go back a few decades. It'd be, it'd be something that would not be accepted the way that is accepted now, and I think that's in many ways a byproduct of how much there's this sort of kind of hyper competitive emphasis that you find in a lot of sports.
We have these like the NBA, for example. They want to expand the number of games that the players played in the football league that already added one more game. If they could, they'd add more games to it in order to make more money off of the broadcasting and then the putting on of the various regular season games, like they always want to do more and more and more to the detriment of the players themselves. You know, the players have limits. It's like all human beings have limits. So I think the way that more athletes are talking about sort of burnout and the mental health struggles as athletes themselves is in many ways a manifestation of just how kind of sustainable a lot of a lot of sports are in the sporting values are that exist.
Ben 40:16
Yes, and I also think your point around more and more games is to the detriment of the sport itself, and I would use my own lived experience is that you know I am a massive Liverpool FC fan and I never used to miss a game. But if, particularly if the team does well in any given way, you're playing up to 80, 85 games a year, plus maybe some internationals, like in the summer break, you know where, like your country's playing, I just can't watch that much of one game. I just I cannot do it. Like diminishing returns, the whole thing, you get everything. And it's interesting you mentioned the actual players perspective on this because of course I think they you get a little bit of an arms race, you get a little bit of game theory where some, some players would say, hey, why don't we have a more balanced lifestyle? Why don't we have a sport for half the year and the other half the year we're going to be? I don't know, maybe academics would not be amazing, but of course, if one of the athletes spent the whole year training, they would absolutely trance the like you know, they'd wipe the floor with everyone else and then I mean, this is how they basically describing the professionalization era of sport. So then, because performance but gets attention and wealth, everyone's going to try and perform at the highest level and you know it's in the clubs interest to play more games and the players interest to play more games in the short term, of course, long term they get exactly burnout, things like that, and I also think there's a lot of intersectional problems here.
When it comes to things like women's sport, you know they were talking this year about how difficult it was to raise the same level of commercial sponsorships for the women's soccer World Cup, and part of that was the time zone, because it's an Australian, new Zealand but I also think part of that was the expectation, like it was never going to be as big as the men's World Cup, particularly overnight, and also it probably shouldn't because that's such an unsustainable event. You know, if the FIFA are trying to get the women's World Cup to be big, not because they care about women, because they want to make the same amount of money twice as opposed to do it once, and that's what suffers in that, you know, not women, definitely not women. Power to them like they should be able to earn a much more fairer salary, but the environment does completely struggle because for every flight that needs to be taken, there's your problem. But even the commercial side if you have to sell more products to make a World Cup commercially viable, those products have to be made and sold. So, yeah, we're really tying ourselves into knots here, that's. Yeah, we really are.
Now, as I try and do a lot of these episodes, I'm going to try and put a happy one. When I ask you to try and put a happy twist on this and I'm kind of annoyed, I would got into the advertising topic because that's actually the topic of the next episode. So look forward to that. But how do you, maybe even at a community level, go about changing this? And I think your perspective from being American, I think is very interesting because obviously, as you've described in this episode, the consumption there is quite excessive and that's probably one of the first places to be brought down. Even at the sporting level, you know, like the, the fireworks and the grandeur or something like the NFL is unparalleled. Where, where does this conversation start in the American sporting ecosystem?
Sam 43:06
to maybe dial things down a bit, the thing that's been common to mind for me lately is, I think, the problem of burnout of people, either feeling burned out either through their consumption of sport being a spectator and just the sheer amount that they're often asked to watch, the amount of advertising and promotion of the sporting events, or being participants or athletes themselves, and feeling sort of exhausted or overwhelmed by the sport is a kind of interesting catalyst for kind of reconceptualizing how we engage with sport. I mean, there's two things I always think about Like number one, the vast majority of people are not professionals, do not engage in sport as professionals. It's either as spectators or basically as amateurs like they play the sports with friends or in leagues linked to their community. That's how the vast majority of us do it, and they may be competitive, they may want to win, but it's not this sort of professional sport where they're making a salary in order to engage in the sport, and that engagement in sport in and of itself is not the problem. It's not the problem that's driving climate change, us playing people playing sport at a YWCA, for example. That's not the problem. And then, number two, this conception of sport that seems dominant, this idea of sport being sort of hyper competitive and needing to be a business and these huge spectacles that are deeply, deeply unsustainable. That's a very recent understanding of sport.
The vast majority of human history people have engaged in forms of play and more or less what we can think of in sport in ways that were more sustainable, that were very local, that weren't overly sort of rationally organized, that had sort of ties to communities, a sense of communal identity. And those ideas don't, they didn't get extinguished with modern sports. They just sort of kind of in some ways kind of lose their power. They become kind of residual ideas within the sporting culture, but they still exist. The way people have a sense of community identity and through sport is a residual of those earlier forms of sport that existed before industrial capitalism. So we have the tools, the kind of cultural and ideological tools, to engage in sport in different ways.
We don't have to engage in sport in the ways that we do now. We don't have to want to desire elite professional sport. It's just this difficult and arduous task of kind of recalibrating our desire, our sporting desires. How do you do that? I mean, that's where I get to this. I see a lot of potential in this discussion of burnout Because I think the usefulness of this discussion of burnout is it really brings to the forefront what are we getting out of these sporting products, like, do these dominant forms of sport actually are actually benefiting us as people? And if they're not, then what do we do about it and what should we do about it? I mean, that's kind of the question I keep going to back and forth. And I think that's a question that a lot of people can connect to. When you talk about it in terms of mental health, well-being, a burnout, I think that's a discussion that a lot of people can connect with.
Ben 46:32
Yes, I wonder if, and please tell me if you know any research that conceptualizes as such. But I wonder if there's maybe even from the psychologist or the sociologist perspective, if we view things like love or attention or identity or interest as a renewable resource given an appropriate time. What I mean by that is I can be interested in something as long as I do it every couple of days at most. If I try and do it every day, it runs out. I mean it slowly regenerates over a period of hours or days, and I think there's evidence from the historical record that that is the case.
And I always use the example of association football in England from the back end of the industrial revolution towards, I'd say, maybe the end of the 80s or the 90s. Before it went sort of global, was that there was at least three generations there where love of the local team did not diminish in the slightest, even intergenerational. Like people would go 60 years, 70 years of their life fully in love with their team and nothing would change. But in this modern world where you know, to quote the movie, you can have everything everywhere all at once. There is this either maybe it's a competition thing, as in you lose interest or you overplay your hand, as in. As I mentioned, there's too many games per year this kind of stuff, and that can we even use the term like fan burnout, and if we would just stop the gas on that particular thing, maybe it would reorganize itself. What do you think?
Sam 47:57
Yeah, yeah, I do think I think there's something important to that. Like well, you talked about like diminishing, diminishing returns earlier in our discussion and the notion of alienation. Like I think you know, we can talk about it in terms of kind of the Marxist sense, but I think a lot of people really feel that sense of alienation as fans. Like I'm just thinking I hope my family doesn't listen to this podcast Like I have family members or friends where I can just kind of tell, like when they're watching the Cleveland Browns and it's year after year after year where they're getting their hopes up for them to win a game or sort of get to the Super Bowl, even though they don't really know if the Browns somehow magically made it to the Super Bowl. It's not as if they would stop sort of wanting them to go to the Super Bowl. They wanted to do it again and again and again, but they can.
There's an exhaustion to that. Like there's exhaustion in terms of economics, in terms of their finances, the amount of money they're spending either by consuming sort of food and drink, or the money that they spend on merchandise that they really wish they didn't spend, but they feel like they have to, you know, in order to sort of be kind of a supportive fan, but then also like they'll watch the game. You watch an NFL football game on Sunday and you're not happy afterwards, like you've spent all this energy watching the game and then the game's over and you're like, why did I just do that? Like now I'm tired, I got to take a nap or I got to do something else, and it's not. It wasn't nearly as enjoyable as I thought it was.
I think people feel that I'm trying to think the late Mark Fisher had this term for it. It was like depressive anodonia or something like that where there's this sense that like we have to kind of compulsively look at our phones or engage in some sort of digital media or pop culture in order to get this kind of thrill and this thing that we were desiring, but we never quite get it. It never is as satisfying as we hoped it was and it's really kind of depressing that it's never that satisfying but it doesn't. We don't stop sort of pursuing it, we just pursue it over and over and over and we never attain that fulfillment. I just I'm just kind of convinced that people feel that. You know, they really do feel that that sense of alienation, and that's where, that's where the conversation, I think, can start.
Ben 50:21
Yes, and I think that's a pretty good note to end on, because that really does bring it down to the personal level. You know, I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast are sports fans and maybe they've experienced something similar. So, by the way, if anyone's listening and has experienced this, please let us know and we can. We can sit you down in a room and interrogate you. But yeah, I think maybe let's see run this at a personal level and see what happens. You know a little bit of taking your foot off the gas on certain things. As I say, they don't necessarily have to be your work or your livelihood or something like that, but it can be your recreation and enjoy the absence such that when it returns, it's perhaps more fulfilling. Because, I agree, this constant chasing of something that might not actually exist without the detriment to the environment and your own bank balance, doesn't seem, doesn't seem the right approach.
Sam 51:07
And the thing I was just thinking of, the Olympics. Like there, in terms of US history I know Boi Jules Boykoff had that more recent book on the no Olympian movement and in Los Angeles and then there's we was like 1976 in Denver, colorado, and the sort of saying no to hosting the Olympic games Like I think there's a pretty sort of building movement of people in the United States where they're looking at the idea of hosting the Olympic games and they see the negative consequences of it and they say no, like we don't want that, and I think that's really, really useful.
That's a really really useful case study in how people can kind of reorient their desires. Like there's this perception that of course anyone would want to host the Olympic games or go to the Olympic games and that's just not the case. You know, people are realizing that there are other things that they want or desire, either in their cities or where they live or how they engage in sport, and maybe the Olympics is not that. So I think there's a lot more examples of that type of engagement sport. That can give us a lot of clues on how to sort of move forward.
Ben 52:10
Yes, and I think the perfect example of that is unfolding right now. To really link those these three themes that have held this conversation together, around the Commonwealth games and how it's just been rejected by Victoria and Australia because they think it's going to be a financial disaster and there's no host for both the upcoming one and the one after. And it's raised all these questions of why? Why does the Commonwealth game exist? Like it's this sort of weird British empire sort of residue, as it were. As much as it is important to the athletes as a stepping stone, it is also sort of Olympics light, as it were. It's terrible for the environment because you're flying from New Zealand, australia, england, etc. And it doesn't really help the community where it's based. So why are we doing one of these things? But yeah, at the risk of this could go on forever and ever. I think we have to call it that. Sam, thank you so much for your time, thanks for all of this insight you're giving us, and keep up the good work and maybe in a few years come back around and we'll have some more solutions.