Based out of the College’s Salmon Arm campus, English professor Tim Walters was recently featured in The Blizzard magazine and podcast by the same name, Seattle-based Grist magazine as well as The Guardian online for his commentary on both football and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Known as “the Football Quarterly,” The Blizzard serves as hub of discussion for the football world. Walters written piece titled “The Green Future” takes a deep dive into the relationship between carbon emissions and football, an unlikely yet relevant duo. In the piece he writes, “there is a more pressing reason why the football authorities need to think more broadly about load management and curtail their expansionist tendencies: our planet can’t sustain it either.”
Walters writes on the environmental impact that the sport has on the world and encourages readers to consider the carbon footprint they make when they partake in football culture. He notes that the continued expansion of leagues and events such as the World Cup “undoubtedly increase football’s already vast carbon footprint.” This includes jet fuel, fast fashion sales of team merchandise, and many other impacts. Walter’s writing was picked up by The Guardian and published in early August, retitled “The football industry needs to wake up to the climate emergency.”
Read “Green Future” here, listen to Walters on the podcast here and read the article in The Guardian here.
In the Grist piece, “Fake News is Killing Us. How Can We Stop It?,” Walters is interviewed after he removed dozens of “signs claiming that COVID-19 is a hoax.” Since May, Walters has spent up to three or four hours a day walking around town taking down the signs, which led to his appearing on CBC radio. The piece goes on to talk about misinformation throughout the pandemic and how it has become a “communications crisis” in addition to a public health emergency in ways that overlap with climate crisis denialism. Read the article here.