SPORTS THIS WEEK, Yorkton This Week - There are times you hear people suggesting sports should not slide into the realm of politics, but when you think about it sport can be a powerful vehicle to bring attention to issues in our world which need public eyes.
One of those issues needing attention is climate change, and that correlates so naturally to hockey where frozen ponds and rivers have always been at the heart of the sport for so many.
So, it should not have been a surprise – although I admit I was surprised – to stumble upon the film The Last Game thanks to some random web surfing one eve.
A stop at www.lastgamefilm.org and I saw the film explained as “legendary ice hockey players spearhead the initiative to call attention to the issue of climate change. The movement is being documented as a film The Last Game, a series of ice hockey games that will take place in over 30 countries that are threatened by climate change.”
The documentary takes viewers around the world with hockey as a connecting thread to bring attention to climate change.
Stops on the odyssey include locales one expects hockey to exist; the Rideau canal in Canada to Scotland, Japan and Finland, but also finding the game in Singapore, Kenya, India and Argentina and other countries sharing an interest in the game we so love in Canada, and all facing impacts of climate change.
Jon Alpert is the man behind this extraordinary film. He explained while he has made dozens of films through the years, The Last Game stands out as something just a bit more special among them.
“This is a passion project for me,” he said, adding hockey has always been something special in his life. “. . . I never wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to be a hockey player.”
As a player Alpert said he was one of those who went to the local pond to skate. It was where he learned to play the game. Today the pond that once froze by Thanksgiving and stayed frozen until March, sees ice for only a few weeks.
That pond is not unique around the world, said Alpert.
Through the filming Alpert said he repeatedly saw people “really hit by climate change.”
Alpert tells the story of how in Finland, a country well north on a globe has had to move the Save Pond Hockey Tournament from natural ice which has become too dangerous. The event took place on an artificial rink because of rising temperatures.
He added, the entire country is being affected. In Lapland, the lichen that is the primary food of the reindeer is molding because of warm autumns. What remains becomes inaccessible under a layer of ice caused by a freeze-thaw cycle. The reindeer are starving, with some 50 per cent lost.
“The whole ecosystem is changing,” he said.
In Kenya, home of the Kenyan Ice Lions, a hockey team which plays on a small artificial ice surface in a hotel, just across the road Alpert said an unprecedented rural drought threatens the livestock of the Massai cattle farmers with large numbers of cattle dying, forcing the nomadic farmers into city slums.
And the stories kept flowing in the Yorkton This Week interview.
“Singapore is going under water,” said Alpert, the result of glacier melt raising water levels.
In India melting glaciers are again an issue as they have been a source of water for livestock in the Himalayan Mountains as they melt. The region’s livelihood depends on a slow melt, but that has changed, explained Alpert. Now unprecedented flash floods in early spring roar down the valleys drowning farmers and villagers in their fury. Then not a drop of water for the rest of the year-desiccating the crops and cattle.
Then Alpert turns to a situation closer to home for Canadians. It is the final scene in the movie, he notes. Storied hockey player Ken Dryden who recently died is on the shores of the Rideau Canal a place Alpert said is “on the bucket list” of people around the world to skate. But Dryden looks out over the canal with no one skating the locale closed to such activities for the first time.
While admitting connecting people through hockey, from Dryden to Jari Kurri in Finland to the late Pope Francis to Lou Lamoriello made the film “fun” to create, Alpert said he can’t overstate the seriousness of climate change and the impact it is having.
That is what the film is really about, and Alper said he now just hopes to find the network that will take the film to a broader audience and ultimately hopefully lead to some positive change.
