Different people fall in different places on the green spectrum.
You might visit one house where it would be totally normal to turn your car off so as not to idle and waste gas, or to spend some serious time sorting recyclables. Other times you'll find yourself at some kind of event where buses are idling all day, and there is only one kind of garbage for everything to be taken to the landfill together.
There are some food spreads where things have been bought locally, and seasonally, with an eye on fuel consumption. Other times you'll see a whole buffet where everything has clearly been trucked in from Chile or China or wherever it was cheapest of most convenient.
In some places, people bring their own coffee cup into the store to get a refill. In others, you get a different, new plastic cup every time you need a cop of joe.
In every one of these examples, the NBA has been, in my experience, just about as un-green as any organization I have exposure to.
I care deeply about the environment, but this reality does not bother me all that much. I suspect that a lot of companies do a lot of flag-waving on this topic, but aren't any better. In a way, the NBA's honest old-school approach at least makes clear they haven't gotten to this yet.
And I understand that a lot of the NBA's consumption has to do with the hard facts of the business. When you're flying large numbers of rich people around the country to perform in enormous climate-controlled arenas before tens of thousands of other rich people, you're going to use fossil fuels like they're going out of style.
But even beyond the hard realities, even in the style, message, and corporate posture of the NBA ... to me it has always been well behind the curve. (Behold the many discarded plastic plates in the media room!)
Over the last decade, practically every major organization has had some kind of internal and/or external green movement. I'm not saying it didn't happen at the NBA, but if it did I am certainly not aware of it.
David Stern's stated concerns about global warming notwithstanding, can you ever remember seeing any mention of the environment in anything the NBA has ever done publicly? This is the last refuge of the Escalade! The NBA has always been all about encouraging people to drive more miles to more stadiums in more opulence while buying more TVs, wearing more sneakers, and drinking more pre-packaged beverages ...
It wasn't anti-environment, so much as pre-environmental worries. Remember back when you would buy a car and not even consider it might have some effect on the polar ice cap? The NBA can ...
All of which is pretty meaningless, except for a throwaway line in an article about realignment. One unnamed GM said something that surprised me: the NBA is, he says, now trying to "go green."
The bad news is that I'm not sure most of the people in power at the moment have passion on this topic (other than a character here or there). But the good news is, there are probably a lot of easy changes to be made, because it's certainly a new approach.
