Any sites doing a carbon-footprint counter for the Games?  Like, a counter on the tonnes of CO2 emitted so far by all the gravel and ore extraction, raw materials processong, construction, transport, etc  - not forgetting the car and plane travel by the Olympic officials etc before the Games were even (mis)awarded (lucky Paris).  Or maybe a forest-hectares counter of the area of trees that this CO2 represents (don't forget to include the actual acreage of trees in the lower Lea Valley uprooted to build the venue).  Then we could have a £££s counter on the financial cost of the whole jamboree; for this I suggest a counter using NHS hospitals as a suitably large financial unit.

Dr Hillary Shaw
Food and Supply Chain Management Department
Harper Adams University College
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8NB
www.fooddeserts.org
Those who neglect the gain of knowledge in order to maximise the gain of beauty will ultimately gain neither


-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Cloke <[log in to unmask]>
To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Fri, 25 May 2012 16:22
Subject: Olympomania

For those of you really coming to terms with your olympicity I can’t recommend the Games Monitor site highly enough - http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/
 
This has a staggering array of different documents and resources and sells itself on its ‘About’ section alone:
 
“We want to highlight the local, London and international implications of the Olympic industry. We seek to deconstruct the 'fantastic' hype of Olympic boosterism and the eager complicity of the 'urban elites' in politics, business, the media, sport, academia and local institutional 'community stakeholders'.
 
Our network operates with an open, dynamic principle, and functions as a discussion forum, research body, press and political lobby. Our website and online group provide hubs for publication, information exchange and solidarity networking. We are also a contact point for local, minority, and specialist interviewees for press and broadcast media.
 
'Among the tasks of a politics of morality [is] to work incessantly toward unveiling hidden differences between official theory and actual progress, between the limelight and the backrooms of political life.'
 
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
 
"It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works."
 
Marshall Berman
From: All That is Solid Melts into Air, the experience of modernity. 1982”
 
Jon