Greening the Team: Will Fans Follow Suit?

Associated Press Martin Tull, executive director of the Green Sports Alliance, spoke Monday about the group's goals.

With the current political climate in Washington tending toward the anti-environmental (especially among Republicans in the House of Representatives), some campaigners are seeking new venues for rallying public support.

Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the National Resource Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization, has decided that sports might be the most effective arena for taking the conservation message straight to the public. He has been working with professional teams on ways of greening their behavior and letting their fans know about it.

On Monday, a collection of sports teams and venue operators that had already been working with the council on reducing their energy and water usage with tools like low-pressure flush toilets and solar panels announced the creation of the nonprofit Green Sports Alliance to promote the cause. The alliance comes with the full-throated endorsement of the commissioners of Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, the Women™ National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer.

The idea for the alliance sprang from a collaboration that began in 2009 between Mr. Hershkowitz and the Microsoft billionaire Paul G. Allen, who owns the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers and is co-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC soccer team. The notion was to help those teams go green by measuring their waste and their water and power usage and adopting strategies to cut back.

Mr. Hershkowitz suggests that the American public is generally more passionate and involved in sports than in politics. The commitment by these six professional teams, from six different leagues, to enhance their environmental profile in a meaningful and public way marks a watershed in the history of professional sports, he said.