Depiction of two naked Ancient Greek athletes, running in a race, on a black and organe pot

The Quadra Project: The Climate Olympics

Whether or not we acknowledge it or not, we are all participants in the Climate Olympics. And we’re not doing so well because we’re not trying hard enough. We have the capabilities, but we lack the effort and the focus.

The original purpose of the Olympic games, founded in Greece some 2,800 years ago, was to pay homage to humanity, and thereby to celebrate and honour the remarkable capabilities and achievements of a being that the Greeks believed to be the embodiment of nature’s perfection. The motto brought forward from those idealistic days of self-congratulations was “Swifter. Higher. Stronger.”

Indeed, mankind—but not so much womankind—was thought to be just one step below the gods, and the celebration of ourselves had a spiritual connotation. The first Olympic event was held in Greece in 776 BCE, and then regularly until 394 CE when the Roman emperor, Theodosius, outlawed the games as a pagan celebration. They were not held again until 1896, a pause of 15 centuries. But the image and rationale of its revival was the same as for the Greeks—humanity continually overcoming its limitations. Struggle, bravery and heroism would make us ever more glorious, which was the prevailing attitude at the end of the 19th century when humanity was revelling in the material wonders of the Industrial Revolution. This was before the world had erupted into the tumultuous world wars that were to follow, and before our unfolding environmental problems had exploded into a cataclysmic threat.

Beneath the facade of humanity’s professed accomplishment—the contrived drama of winning and losing, the excited theatre of tragedy and victory—lies a hidden

insecurity, a shaky confidence, an inkling of profound fallibility, a lurking doubt that

perhaps all the speed and stature and strength in our narcissism is little more than empty bravado. Do we need more confidence? Do we want a more inflated opinion of ourselves? In the great scheme of things, do we deserve an enhanced sense of our own grandiosity? Surely, given the difficulties into which we are manoeuvring our planet’s biosphere, we need more humility, more modesty, a more proportioned sense of who we are and how we belong in a living ecosystem that is—to our present reckoning — unique in the universe. Celebrating at the altar of ourselves seems too self-congratulatory for the caring and compassion that we so urgently need to nurture.

Those who come to the defence of the Olympics contend that the games are an opportunity to distract ourselves from the problems of the world. Precisely. Our nobility, ingenuity, confidence and arrogance as a species is being inverted to give us a much more realistic impression of ourselves than is conveyed in the heroism of the Olympics. We can’t continue to fool ourselves. The follies that we have perpetrated are now closing in on us, and it’s time for an honest assessment of who we actually are. A little humility needs to mix with caution and bravery to salvage what remains of the planet that we occupy.

But history is revealing. When we see ourselves in the undistorted image of time, we are little different from the Greeks, the Romans, and all the subsequent cultures and civilizations that have come and gone. Our character has remained much the same. Wars continue, and we are doing to the planet much the same as the classical world did to the ecologies of the Mediterranean. Perhaps the best excuse we have is that our intentions have a way of being forgotten in the momentum of the moment.

At the United Nations’ COP28 conference in Dubai in November 30, 2023, the global community agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels”, a decision that we should have made five decades earlier. Given the timing, generosity could excuse the 99.8 million barrels of oil per day (mb/d) consumed in 2022, the 102.2 mb/d consumed in 2023, and perhaps the 102.9 mb/d expected to be consumed in 2024. But the International Energy Agency expects consumption to be 104.7 mb/d in 2025, and 105.7 mb/d by 2028. If it’s still going up, there’s no one to blame but ourselves.

Planned emissions caused by the Paris 2024 Olympics were budgeted at 1.75 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, with the optimistic expectation that the actual production of CO2 will be only 1.58 million tonnes. This, in the company of a climate emergency, is supposed to be a compliment to our resourcefulness and ingenuity. And it doesn’t include the carbon emissions of the 2 million who were expected to fly in from abroad.

The motto of the Olympics, given the reality of our current situation on Planet Earth, now rings with a tragic irony and a sobering sadness that after 2,800 years we still have an image of ourselves that does not correlate to who we really are. Are we more civilized that we once were? Yes, we actually are. We’re making slow progress. A past of incessant bloodshed and brutality attests to that. At least we now know what we are not supposed to do, and we are learning to restrain ourselves. That said, we live in a moment of great promise, if we are as clever as we think we are. We also live in a time of great danger. We are still trying to be “Swifter. Higher. Stronger.” in our inept and faltering way. As for competing in the Climate Olympics, our aspirations have a long way to go to reach the image that we have of ourselves.

Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra

Top image credit: The Lambros cup, attributed to the attributed to the Camel Painter in Boetia, ca. 540–520 BC, awarded to the winner of the 1896 Marathon race and now in the Museum of the History of the Ancient Olympic Games – Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen (Own Work) via Wikimedia CC BY 4.0)