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Golf Brings Sprawl and Waste. by James Mason To support golf is to support wastefulness of our land and water, and the further march of urban sprawl, in the public eye of millions who are working and trying to live in poverty or not much better. No piece of land is yours mine and ours. We borrow it while we are alive to see it and live on it. We pay for the privilege, we sell it, and we pass on the privilege to our surviving family. But all of the families will be gone and dust on the land, and the land will out exist everyone, its surface polka dotted with eighteen hole, green, mile long, oblong clearings or not. Golf seems harmless. Enjoyed by many as a leisure sport, others obsessed. In recent years, on average, approx. 2,000 new golf courses annually have been built, in the continental United States, alone. They create jobs, oops, most are seasonal and not a living wage. They bring money to the community, oops, most are not owned by a local resident or corporation – it’s where the profit goes that counts ultimately, not the wages of a bus boy or a caddy. In Japan golf is taken fanatically and green time in short supply. However, except for mountainsides, they are totally out of land for new golf courses, forcing extremely expensive new courses to be built, further away from urban centers. We are not unlike them in our situation with this recreation. The land consuming nature of the sport makes it expensive and creates a cycle that others and I see as ultimately destructive to environment and economy and wasteful of natural resources. This high expense, and greater demand to golf, forces an outward urban sprawl of new golf courses, raising real estate values too high, wherever they are developed. Build them and they will come: a bigger road, a shopping center, price gouging merchants, two or three gated communities.
Thousands of acre-feet of water must be consumed by golf courses. Thousands of trees cut down to make way for space that takes up more real estate square feet than most stadiums. Wildlife chased off. Often, a new golf course is the tentacle that pulls urban sprawl outward. This at a time when people are charging money to others to rent to them small lots to park their trailers on to live. At a time when the wages of the working class poor are 25 years behind the cost of living. Homelessness is on the rise. Middle Class is almost extinct. Hello? Where will the poor and those striving to “make it,” live when gated communities and golf courses surround us like a world wide economic and environmental minefield? Solutions: Moratorium on new golf courses statewide, for an unspecified length of time. Let them dry out: it’s called “Astroturf”, lay it down. Golf at sea: golfers could ride around on speed boats swinging away toward anchored inner tubes, trying to get a par 87. There is lots of space at sea and the wildlife won’t mind and no sand traps to get caught in. Or let folks build houses right on the golf course, right in the middle of it, make the homes and traffic part of the course, a hard helmet zone of sorts. I could go on. Virtual Golf as a sport perhaps? |
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