newsroom

TODAY Monday 28 July 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Golf

Sunday's paper ran an article about Bill Clinton's visit to Lake Tahoe (with photograph of him and Al Gore on a research boat). The Tahoe Summit will be covered soon on this site by Carson City resident Jim Christensen, so there's no need to linger on the subject except to note the interesting detail, revealed in the article, that the President hopes to get in a couple of rounds of golf after the environmental meeting.

That anybody who tears up his knee (at Greg Norman's house!) can feel unspooked about getting back to the golf course is all to his credit. There's a lot of torque in a good golf swing, so the Prez is showing some guts here. Perhaps he was inspired by Friday's obituaries of the incomparable Ben Hogan. Hogan stills holds the reputation as the greatest shotmaker ever. What was particularly inspiring about Ben Hogan was that he earned that reputation both before and after an automobile accident that shattered his legs. His US Open victory of 1950, three years after the accident, was won on a final day of 36 holes of excrutiating pain.

Golf legends tend to highlight strength of temperment, from Bobby Jones to Hogan to Tiger Woods. Success in golf demands character, from duffer to touring pro, and it's this psychological requirement that makes the game so addictive. That plus the fact that you get outdoors and relax with the pals. Golf commands unusual affection and involvement, at least from the 25 million Americans who play it.

So it's entirely reasonable that national environmental organizations are not making too big a stink about the fact that most golf courses are environmental nightmares. According to an article by Ann Japenga in USA Weekend, there are frequent instances of local enviros opposing new courses (she reports on the current brouhaha in Carmel, California, where they're trying to stop two new golf developments, one of them proposed by Clint Eastwood), but there's little in the way of national campaigning. The exception is the Sierra Club, which calls for golf courses to publish information about their turf-management practices.

Those practices are usually pretty terrible. Golf courses are artificial constructs in which natural (but usually not native) plants are arrayed in unnatural patterns and then maintained through the intensive use of synthetic chemicals. In the eastern part of the country, golf courses do their damage in three general ways: they destroy or fragmentize natural forest habitats; their heavy use of fertilizers adds nitrogen runoffs to nearby bodies of water; and their pesticides and herbicides threaten animal and human health. In the West, it's usually prairie or desert ecosystems which are degraded, and there's the added factor of water waste. One course in Palm Springs consumes about as much water as a city of 10,000 people. There's an eco-golf movement afoot, (no irrigated courses, no toxics), and the US Golf Association says it's looking into new strains of fairway grasses that need less water and fewer inputs, but those are just micro-trends compared with the growth of big, thirsty, chemically-intensive courses all over the country (nearly 16,000 to date).

So golf courses are bad, ecologically speaking, but they're bad in the same ways that farms and front lawns are bad, and for the same reasons: loss of biodiversity plus perturbations of water and air. Agriculture has to be tackled on its own terms of food and income production, and though it remains the Number One land-use problem in the world, there is at least an organized body of knowledge and a broad social movement in support of more sustainable alternatives. Lawns and golf courses are less important in global terms, but in some ways will be harder to remedy. Farmers are economic animals and respond more or less predictably to incentives to preserve soil and disincentives to discourage toxins. Homeowners and golfers, though, have made deep aesthetic attachments to their inappropriate landscapes, attachments that don't respond quite so directly to price signals. Personally, I'm always in favor of better price signals -- let's tax the hell out of herbicides and pesticides -- but we're talking culture here, and no one should be surprised if it takes a long time to transform the satisfactions afforded by lush yards and emerald fairways. Just ask the President.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Hibernicus is back. The gimlet-eyed Gael examines the recent fight about new Clean Air standards and declares it (tentatively) an enviro victory of significant proportions. Check out today's new Capitol Hill Spy.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

7/25: Climate Chess: Arkansan Opening
7/24: Top and Bottom
7/23: Smart Exxon
7/22: Climate Chess
7/21: Don't Know Much About Conservation
7/18: All Aboard
7/17: Downward and Outward Mobility
7/16: A Muggy Day on The Hill
7/15: Plug for Planet Ark
7/14: Follow Me

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.