| Salt Lake City |
 |
 |
| GER |
12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
 |
| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
|
| NOR |
11 |
7 |
6 |
24 |
|
| CAN |
6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
|
| RUS |
6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
|
| AUT |
2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
|
| ITA |
4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
|
| FRA |
4 |
5 |
2 |
11 |
|
| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
|
| NED |
3 |
5 |
0 |
8 |
|
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Environment issues take back seat
By Jerry Spangler
Deseret News staff writer
There are 11,000 journalists in town all clamoring for a story no one else has. So how is it that the environmental agenda of the 2002 Winter Games has garnered hardly a whisper of attention?
In fact, getting any attention from anybody has been nearly impossible.
"It's kind of like religion. You have a great vision, but implementation is a very different story," said Dave Randle, an ordained minister, environmentalist and president of Wellness, Health and Lifestyle Education (WHALE).
The Olympic charter also places the environment — preserving and protecting it — on equal footing with sports and culture. If all things being equal, where is all the hoopla surrounding the environment? The warm-fuzzy NBC features on environmentalists who have defied all odds?
You won't find them, nor will you find much about the environment in a review of press releases issued by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee over the past five years.
Said one member of SLOC's environmental advisory committee: "The real heroine of this Greek tragedy is Diane Conrad Gleason," who is the head of SLOC's environmental program.
"She was caught between criticism from environmentalists on one side and SLOC managers on the other who cut her budget and wouldn't give her public relations support."
Gleason begs to differ, saying she has had nothing but support from her SLOC bosses, and that the budget for environment ended up being six times what it was when she started about five years ago. But its been hard to get the good environmental news out.
"Your breed is more interested in bad news than positive," she said of the news media.
Since 1994 — the year before Salt Lake won the bid to host the 2002 Games — the International Olympic Committee added environment as the "third pillar" of the Olympic movement, along with sport and culture.
In fact, the Salt Lake bid was the first to be evaluated under the IOC's new mandatory environmental criteria. Games organizers made the pitch they would leave Salt Lake City better and cleaner, that the Games would produce "zero waste and zero emissions."
Since that time, Salt Lake Organizing Committee has boasted these are "the greenest Games ever." Local environmentalists have challenged that claim, but few reporters are paying attention to them.
"If environment is indeed a third pillar of the Games, then the IOC has a lot it needs to do to make it that," said Wes Odell, from the group Save Our Canyons, who also served on SLOC's environmental advisory committee.
Randle agrees, saying the Olympic movement's commitment to the environment is certainly laudable, but it must also include a funding commitment to make environment a pillar on par with sports.
"A lot of people, maybe most, aren't even aware the IOC has developed a parallel (environmental) agenda with sport," Randle said. "They outlined what should be done, but they certainly haven't implemented it as they should."
The IOC, he added, has done a much better job than SLOC or the U.S. Olympic Committee of pushing its environmental agenda.
"At some point, the environment was reduced in priority," he said. "It started out with much loftier goals."
Ivan Weber, a former advisory committee member and now Utah chapter chairman of the Sierra Club, points out that SLOC's budget for environmental programs was only about $1 for every $1,000 spent by SLOC.
"Whether the budget was $1.5 million or $6 million or $8 million, it doesn't matter. The amount is a dot compared to the (overall) budget." And that, he said, is proof positive that SLOC gives little priority to its environmental program.
"This could have been an unparalleled opportunity to expose the world to environmental responsibility and outreach," Weber added. Instead, environmental programs "had no legitimacy or top-level support" within SLOC's management structure, and what programs were created "were done through sheer will" on Gleason's part.
"She did a very good job of doing something with nothing," he said.
Some members of SLOC's advisory committee have expressed frustration at SLOC for failing to make Olympic environmental issues a priority, either among themselves or among the media.
Reporters were commonly summoned to tree-planting ceremonies and ribbon cuttings, but they were not invited or informed about advisory committee meetings. When committee members issued reports critical of the programs, there was no public discussion and members were encouraged to keep dissent among themselves.
The "only-good-news" approach has persisted during the 2002 Games. SLOC has hosted environmental leaders from around the world, thrown some parties with environmentally friendly foods and announced winners of environmental awards. The media were not invited.
Reporters in town to cover the Games have largely ignored SLOC's environmental agenda.
SLOC did produce some slick, four-color publications, but then they tucked them out of sight in the Main Media Center in an unmanned kiosk next to the men's restroom.
Under SLOC's approach, the "environment was neglected and neglected deliberately to some extent," Weber said.
But is it realistic to expect the public, press and organizing committees to pay as much attention to the environmental pillar as to sports?
Gleason, who sits on the IOC's Sport and Environment Commission, said it was never the intent of the IOC that environment be equal to sports. In fact, the Olympics are all about sport, she said, and sport is simply a vehicle to draw attention to other issues like the environment.
"We are doing exactly what the IOC wants (with SLOC's environmental program), and they have said they are very satisfied with it," she said.
Weber said a closer reading of the IOC's environmental directives make it clear that environment and sport are on equal footing, and that future host cities will have to do much, much more for the environment than did Salt Lake.
"I have enough confidence in human nature and enough sense of global urgency to believe the IOC intends to use the Olympics for a vehicle for environmental understanding, responsibility and outreach. It just wasn't going to happen in Utah," he said.
Tom Price, current chairman of SLOC's environmental advisory committee, said critics have not afforded enough credit to some of the remarkable programs Gleason initiated, like satellite imaging and identifying urban hot spots for tree planting, "incredible, cutting-edge stuff." But he also did not disagree with critics who say SLOC could have done more to give its environmental programs a higher profile.
"Environment may be the neglected stepchild of the Olympic family, but at least it is part of the Olympic family and that is what's important," he said.
E-MAIL: spang@desnews.com
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February 20, 2002
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