FEATURE - Olympics-Village Happy With Environmental Cost of Games
Date: 14-Nov-05
Country: ITALY
Author: Sophie Hardach
In the words of one environmental activist, Pragelato has been "buried under an avalanche of cement" during construction of the two ski jumping hills for next February's Winter Games.
The villagers, however, do not seem to mind.
In a hamlet where the only sound on a Friday night is the ringing of cowbells, any change is welcome.
"It's very boring, to tell you the truth," said 17-year-old Erica Sproccati, waiting for one of the few buses connecting Pragelato to the nearest city, Turin.
"We're few residents and few tourists. I think it's good we have the ski jumps, it will bring some people," she added.
Environmentalists in Turin, host of the 2006 Games, say the event will harm wildlife and forests and pollute the air and water.
Up in the northern Italian mountains, the view is different.
Hotel owners are happy because they are fully booked for the the Games, which run from Feb. 10-26, and are also hosting dozens of builders working on the various construction sites.
HOMEMADE JAM
Shopkeepers expect Olympic visitors to buy plenty of their farmhouse cheeses, homemade jam and sausages, and to come back for more after the Games.
"As for the trees that have been chopped down -- there are still trees to the right, there are trees to the left," said Maria Viggiani, closing up her bread and cheese shop for the day as darkness crept up the valley.
Green activists see Pragelato's two ski jumping hills as a symbol of Olympic folly -- a venue built from scratch, in all likelihood left to crumble once the event is over, like so many stadiums and speed tracks around the world.
Wanda Bonardo of environmental group Legambiente in Turin rattled off a list of projects that enraged her:
The 1,400-metre bobsleigh track, which required hundreds of trees to be cut down; Olympic villages built on pristine mountainsides; the torrents of water that will be used to produce artificial snow; and, of course, the ski jumping hills.
Ski resorts in general are unpopular with environmentalists. Every spring, the snowy slopes turn into barren strips of earth and gravel. Global warming is now forcing skiers to move higher up the mountains in search of snow, damaging untouched habitats.
"Some of these sports are only practised by very few people," Bonardo said. "The bobsleigh track is monstrously damaging. One option would be to eliminate such sports from the Olympic Games."
Bonardo and other activists such as Fabio Porcari at the World Wildlife Fund in Turin asked the Games organisers TOROC to make removable venues instead.
TOROC refused, arguing that pack-away facilities would fail Olympic safety and technology standards.
POWER SAVINGS
Still, the organising committee recognises that there is a problem.
"The environmental damage is there. What you can do is intervene to limit the damage," said Roberto Saini, environmental director at TOROC.
Turin has pledged to stage "green" Olympics, for example by offsetting additional energy consumption during the Games against power savings in schools and government offices.
It is also trying to compensate for the trees it has chopped down for venues by planting the same number on other hillsides and will transport tonnes of the additional sewage produced by athletes and spectators to urban treatment centres to take the pressure off small mountain facilities.
Organisers said this week that the Games would be the most environmentally friendly Olympics ever and would have no net impact on climate change.
"This is the first time that an Olympic event will be able to offset all the carbon emissions produced during the event," Ugo Pretato, TOROC's head of environmental programmes, said in a statement.
Environmentalists appreciate the effort but they want something more radical -- either abolishing the Winter Olympics or recycling previous sites instead of opening up new mountainside sites every f