|
|
This is only a preview of the paper
Click here to register and get the full text.
Existing members click here to login
|
|
|
Evaluate the environmental and socio-economic impacts of two contrasting large sporting events on their local area Often the light of modern day politics casts ill-shaped shadows of individuals and groups who might commonly fall under the environmentalist rubric. Related Resources • Solar Powered Sydney • Sydney Environment • Olympics Index Common sense suggests that you won't find many people opposed to the notion of clean air and water as the building blocks for all healthy life. Yet, far too often the harsh glow of a political spotlight transforms what might be reasonable policy disagreements among concerned individuals into media manufactured battles pitting environmentalists against industry, as if environmentalists had no concern for industry, and industrialists had no concern for the environment. Just as it is probably fair to assume that most people happily wear some shade of green to match their particular environmental vision, it also comes across as reasonable to assume that those same people happily wear some type of sporting apparel to fit their athletic vision. In fact, environment and sports have always walked hand in hand, because broken down into their constituent parts, most sporting events amount to little more than men (women also) finding amusing ways to combine their athletic prowess and desire for competition in a natural setting. Like many species in the animal world, man finds pleasure in running on the land and swimming in the water. The modern Olympics Movement represents one of man's most celebrated attempts to use sports as the basis for promoting the concepts of peace and brotherhood on a global scale. Until recently, the environment aspect of the Olympics remained obscured. While a few recently completed Olympic games incorporated bits and pieces of environmental thinking into their program planning and execution, the Sydney 2000 Olympics stand apart as the first attempt to totally integrate environmental thinking into an Olympics. The Sydney Organization Committee, placed environmental issues front and center of their Olympics vision from the start. The bidding stage including a five part proposal, formally entitled the Environmental Guidelines, which advertised itself as a green guide for planning an Olympics based on the concept of sustainable development. Specifically the Guidelines promised to incorporate the ideas of 1. Energy conservation 2. Water conservation 3. Waste avoidance and minimisation 4. Pollution management 5. Protection of the natural and cultural environment into all aspects of the Olympics site planning, construction, and implementation prior to and during the games. In the days leading up to the official opening of the Sydney 2000 Olympic games, the most obvious question would be to ask how close the Sydney organizers came to achieving their goals. The reviews are mixed. Greenpeace, the group most responsible for moving the Olympics past its eco-inertia phase, awarded the planners an overall C grade. On the positive side, Greenpeace cited work on energy conservation, especially solar power projects in the Athlete's Village and sundry Olympic venues as the best of show. According to Greenpeace, pollution management represents one of the least successful goals, especially concerning toxic waste clean up in the immediate area. The main green wins include public transport access, solar power applications, good building material selection, recycling of construction waste, progressive tendering policies, energy and water conservation and wetland restoration. The main green losses include the failure of most sponsors to go green, poor quality Olympic merchandising, environmentally destructive refrigerant selection, loss of biodiversity in some projects, failure to clean up contaminated Homebush Bay sediments in time for the Games and the lack of transparency and effective public consultation by OCA (Olympic Coordination Authority) and SOCOG (Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games). In June 2000 the NSW government approved the OCA's proposal for a Criterium Cycling Circuit in Louisa Reserve at the Crest of Bankstown in western Sydney. The circuit was said to be a warm-up track for Olympic cyclists at the Velodrome with post-Games use for competition and community recreation. GGW2000 has always opposed this project because of its removal of rare bushland including the vulnerable plant species Acacia pubescens (Downy Wattle) and the threatened ecological community of Cooks River Clay Plain Scrub Forest (CRCPSF), both listed on the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995 (TSC Act). We recommended use of the existing Criterium Track and road cycling venue at nearby Lansdowne which already hosts full-scale competition events and would require no bush clearing; or to forgo the proposed cricket oval and realign the track through that area to avoid bushland removal. By intersecting an important natural ecosystem, fragmenting remnant CRCPSF, removing TSC Act-listed vegetation and introducing non-locally indigenous plant species (all of which compromise bushland integrity) the approved track fails to comply with sections of the Environmental Guidelines for the Summer Olympic Games, the Department of Urban Affairs & Planning's Environmental Planning for ESD (1996) and the TSC Act. OCA claims that as Acacia pubescens is 'relatively common' in Louisa Reserve the track would not significantly impact upon it, or the CRCPSF; and that a larger plant population at Chullora lessened the significance of the one in Louisa Reserve. It is ludicrous to suggest 'numerous specimens' of a vulnerable species in one location as being 'common', and to ignore the problem of incremental removals of scattered remnants which cumulatively add to the loss of a lot, if not the whole. CRCPSF is unknown in conservation reserves and does not occur elsewhere, in Australia or the world. OCA's failure to acknowledge all of its bushland removals in its environmental assessment conceals an actual decrease. It also claims it will recreate the site's natural vegetation community, but it is impossible to completely replicate full biological complexity. The landscape plan shows a limited range of about 35 plant species, but the community has about 220 species. Although it promises landscape treatments to discourage damaging pedestrian access through bushland, OCA has conceded that ongoing circuit use could degrade habitat. As all bushland on The Crest is weed infested and degraded due to poor (if any) active protection from Bankstown Council, it is of great concern that ongoing management of Louisa Reserve is so dependent on the Council. Bankstown Council damaged another endangered ecological community at The Crest in 1999. OCA has recently conceded that the Criterium Track is not necessary for an Olympic warm-up track. It is suspected that the project is more related to propping up the adjacent Velodrome, to help stop it from becoming a post-Games white elephant. http://www.nccnsw.org.au http://greennature.com This is the html version of the file http://www.blues.uab.es/olympic.studies/web/pdf/od013_eng.pdf. G o o g l e automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web. To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:J3cj4ET4R1YJ:www.blues.uab.es/olympic.studies/web/pdf/od013_eng.pdf+Sydney+olympics+%2Bsocio-economic+issues&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.
Approximate Word count = 4414
Approximate Pages = 17.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
|
|
|
|
|
|