SPONSORED: This article is part of a series that seeks to elevate and define a progressive vision of “the good life,” developed by the Roosevelt Institute in collaboration with The American Prospect. You can read the whole series here.
The crack of a baseball bat. The splash of a child’s cannonball off the diving board. The laughter at a picnic in a park. These are the sounds of reprieve; the moments where we catch up with friends or spend time with our families. Leisure is a critical—but often missing—piece of the political agenda for many progressives, particularly for climate advocates.
With the polycrisis at hand, it might be hard to understand why climate advocates should focus on low-carbon leisure. Many people are struggling to meet basic needs in the United States, living paycheck to paycheck. Black and brown families inhale pollution from massive highways or toxic landfills. The climate crisis has destroyed whole communities with wildfires, floods, and hurricanes.
But that doesn’t make the leisure agenda less important. Investing political hours—and public dollars—in low-carbon leisure helps cultivate interconnected communities, rebuild the political imagination, and grow a new political base—not to mention helping people survive the climate crisis.
Shams, Bhargava, and Hanbury describe that the neoliberal project has left people lonely, stressed, and in despair. To counteract this, progressives need to weave policy, culture, and lifestyle together. Constructing spaces of leisure can help foster community and create a new vision of “the good life.” Climate advocates should especially heed this call. The climate crisis has contributed significantly to the U.S. mental health crisis, creating anxiety from the chronic fear of ecological collapse and trauma from experiencing wildfires or hurricanes. Climate activists need a mental break and can be instrumental in constructing spaces that enable their well-being to improve, while lowering emissions in the process.
The climate agenda of past decades often fit squarely within the neoliberal mindset, pushing piecemeal solutions such as carbon markets and personal sacrifice onto consumers while shifting blame away from the corporations that are overwhelmingly responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place.
The Green New Deal changed the tide of mainstream climate politics away from austerity and toward a vision of a more abundant future. It proposed transformative government investments at the scale of the crisis to rapidly decarbonize, create good jobs, and address historic economic and racial inequities. This laid the groundwork for the investment-forward Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a big step toward decarbonization. But the question remains, what infrastructure do we need to transform our culture while also decarbonizing our communities? The answer, in part: Public pools. Shorter workweeks. Accessible parks. Local sports.
The climate agenda of past decades often fit squarely within the neoliberal mindset, pushing piecemeal solutions such as carbon markets and personal sacrifice.
Public pools are a perfect example of the kind of low-carbon leisure we need. But we have always been at risk of losing them as a public good: Municipalities in the mid-1900s attempted to segregate pool use, and white flight ultimately meant that public pool infrastructure was left to languish, as richer, whiter communities built their own private pools and swim clubs. This, paired with the neoliberal hollowing of the state, has left nonwhite communities in particular without anywhere to cool off or connect as the twin crises of a warming climate and a loneliness epidemic continue to wash over us.
Today, in places like Washington, D.C., the Parks and Recreation Department has had to extend their pool hours during heat emergencies to help residents cool off. But with far too few pools and ever-slashed budgets, cities are treading water to keep pools open.
As climate journalist Kate Aronoff writes, while President Biden’s IRA invested in jobs and infrastructure, “few people get up in the morning excited about the U.S. share of manufacturing employment.” Aronoff advocates for pools as a different type of infrastructure investment—one that helps foster community and connection, and one that’s considerably sexier than solar panel component manufacturing. The New Deal built 750 pools in five years, along with other infrastructure that built social fabric, like playgrounds and cabins in public parks. A fight for free, accessible public pools—but also air-conditioned libraries, free museums, and community centers—can provide important heat relief and create places of fun connection for community members.
More free time can also be a climate strategy. Sociologist and economist Juliet Schor has written extensively about how Americans are working increasingly longer hours and filling their time off with expensive activities. In her description of plenitude, she argues that lowering working hours will give people more time to engage in a whole range of affordable activities—playing sports, gardening, hiking on public lands, or (importantly) organizing their community. There is also ample research that shows that a shorter workweek could limit carbon emissions, while also allowing people to live more fulfilled and balanced lives.
History shows that these types of leisure-forward campaigns are popular. Sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen recounts the story of the Popular Front in 1936 France, a group of social movements that advocated and won a 40-hour workweek, two weeks of paid vacation, and a 40 percent discount on train fares for the French working class. Hundreds of thousands of families took the trains and saw the ocean for the first time. We could do the same. New Yorkers with shorter workweeks could take the train to the Appalachian Trail stop, walking off the platform directly into the mountains without ever needing a car. Connecting with nature and being outside has a proven positive impact on people’s well-being, but has been made particularly inaccessible to minority and especially Black families in the U.S., who are not just physically but structurally cut out, without enough time, money, or transportation to get to the outdoors.
Even sports could be part of the climate strategy. In his 2005 book What’s My Name, Fool?, sportswriter Dave Zirin explains that “the very passion we invest in sports can transform it from a kind of mindless escape into a site of resistance.” Right now, major sports leagues are usually managed by rich owners’ whims and “race to the bottom” economics. Notably, major league games are usually carbon-intensive productions that don’t give much back to the local economy. Sports are already such an integral part of American culture that provide people a sense of belonging. Making sports more accessible and joyful could be an integral strategy to building solidarity with the working class and providing an on-ramp to radicalization. Imagine: democratized, decarbonized, re-localized sports. Free or low-cost tickets to games and accessible public transit to the stadium. Teams and arenas owned by the fans.
This is not a total fantasy. Germany has a “50 + 1” ownership system that requires the majority of a club to be owned by fans. This grounds the team locally and ensures that the fan base can attend games. In the U.S., the Green Bay Packers football team is publicly owned. Divisions could also be regionally reorganized to help relocalize travel, paired with railway investments that could help minimize flights. (This would include reorganizing college athletics, where Rutgers and the University of Southern California are both in the Big Ten, and Stanford and Cal play in the Atlantic Coast Conference.)
Early U.S. stadiums were developed as multipurpose public-works projects. Winning back sports from economic extractors would re-ground local leisure in community need and create paragons of decarbonized infrastructure for public use.
Low-carbon leisure will not only make the climate crisis livable, but will also build a base of people feeling the benefits of investments in their daily lives. These examples are illustrative of a much larger suite of interventions that current climate realities demand—denser communities, resilient infrastructure, and green buildings. Decarbonizing is not just a question of surviving climate change. It’s a question of creating policy to change our culture, and vice versa—the feedback loop we need to build a world we can all enjoy.
