Abstract
With few exceptions, sport historians have neglected to examine the relationship between sport and the environment. In this paper, I argue the “digital turn” offers an opportunity for sport historians to consider the environmental cost stemming from the proliferation of digital media technologies, including the masking of its materiality. I discuss the implications of Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s ecocentric critique of the production, consumption, and disposal of digital media technologies, and delineate what an environmental history of sport and sport media might take into account. I conclude with a consideration of the environmental risks that accompany digital humanities and digital history approaches for research, publishing, and pedagogy, and propose that the incorporation of environmental justice aims in digital sport history projects would help situate the field in a productive tension that simultaneously reproduces and resists environmental devastation.
