By Alexander Wolff

	Photo Illustration by SI Imaging

"In the environmental movement there's way too much preaching to the choir," says Ken Rakoz of Centralia, Wash., who built the first biodiesel-powered dragster. "There are people sitting on the fence, and Joe Sixpack doesn't really know about [biodiesel] until we do something like racing." Whereupon we'll be that much closer to a future in which we define a winner as not merely the team that holds a lead, but one whose arena holds a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

From his home in Ripton, Vt., McKibben, who sounded an early warning about climate change in his 1989 book The End of Nature, surveys this disfigurement of the world as we've known it with as much melancholy as indignation. "If I were a deeply moral person, I should be kept awake at night by the thought of hundreds of millions of Bangladeshis fleeing rising waters and dengue and famine," says McKibben, who's helping to organize a nationwide call to action on climate change for April 14 that will include iconic outdoor and sporting sites Mount Hood and the Key West coral reefs. "But at some level I feel this most acutely in the winter, when I realize I've had fewer and fewer chances to put on my skis."

And therein may lie the great value of sports. What happens in an arena so familiar and beloved may sound an alarm we will hear and heed. At a time when so much in our lives is linear and digital, from the economy to technology, sports still run in graceful cycles, marking time in rhythm with the seasons.

"It's the last of the semipagan calendars we keep," McKibben says, "and a lot of it is going to disappear. All that Bart Giamatti stuff" -- the pastoral invocations of the former commissioner of baseball -- "has a different valence if we're not going to Florida for spring training, but to St. Paul. We're still so used to the idea that we can deal with the forces of nature that we think nothing of naming our teams Hurricanes and Cyclones. In 10 years, that will be like calling a team the Plagues."

Ten years. That's two-and-a-half Olympiads -- enough time for our teams and athletes to take the lead, galvanize attention and influence behavior. When they do, per usual, may we cheer and may we follow. But as we watch, let us remember that this game is different. We don't have the luxury of looking on from the sidelines. We must become players too.