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| Green was the theme as Brazil sent a message to the world. (AP Photo: Markus Schreiber) |
A rallying cry to save the planet from environmental
destruction has launched the Olympic Games as Rio de Janeiro put on a
glittering opening carnival.
The overwhelming theme of the evening was protection of the environment."It is not enough to stop harming the planet, it is time to start healing it," programme notes from the ceremony's organisers read.
"This will be our Olympic message: Earthlings, let's replant, let's save the planet!"An early opening sequence depicted the birth of life, culminating in the sprouting of a green entanglement of leaves from the stadium floor depicting the Amazon rainforest.
Indigenous Brazilians then performed native dances before creating huge "Ocas" or native huts in the centre of the stage.
Yet the party mood was halted in its tracks by a sombre sequence titled 'After the Party' which used NASA scientific maps to warn of environmental crisis facing the planet, detailing rising sea levels to melting polar ice caps.
It culminated with Oscar-winning British actress Judi Dench and Brazilian thespian Fernanda Montenegro reading Carlos Drummond de Andrade's classic poem A Flor e a Nausea (The Flower and the Nausea).
The gloomy theme was lifted with a hopeful message, showing a boy captivated by the emergence of a seedling in a concrete jungle.
The theme continued as the parade of more than 10,000 athletes from 207 teams across the globe got under way.
Each athlete was presented with a seed and a cartridge of soil to enable them to plant a native tree of Brazil, which will ultimately form an 'Athletes Forest' made up of 207 different species -- one for each delegation.
With the completion of the athletes parade, mirrored towers were cleverly opened to create five green Olympic rings of lush vegetation, symbolising what the forest will one day look like.
The innovative reforestation scheme comes, however, after the failure of one of the most talked about attempts to create an environmental legacy for Rio -- cleaning up the city's polluted Guanabara Bay.
Garbage, dead animals and human effluent continue to pollute the waters of the bay, into which the raw sewage of half the city is pumped daily.
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