To develop a golf course, for example, large amounts of clearing are required, often resulting in deforestation. According to the Seattle Journal of Environmental Law, it's relatively common for developers to destroy entire ecosystems in the process. Golf courses have long been considered enormous wastes of water. Audubon International estimated that the average North American course uses more than one million liters of water per day, which is equivalent to what 780 four-member families could use.
In areas most affected by golf and devastated by drought, such as California, this is becoming a big problem and some golf courses have already gone on a water diet. But the serious argument against golf is empirical and undeniable. The construction and maintenance of golf courses are detrimental to fragile ecosystems around the world. Its proliferation as the international hobby of the leisure class is multiplying the problem, and its approval by governments and societies personifies the wasteful and defamatory approach to development that is reproduced in miniature in millions of suburban gardens.
At the COP26 summit in the Scottish city of Glasgow, the GEO Foundation for Sustainable Golf, an environmentalist based in North Berwick, showed a virtual audience how golf is learning to be a champion among sports bodies for a greener planet. In a study of 10 golf courses in North Carolina, researchers were surprised to discover that golf courses provided a wonderful environment for stream salamanders, an amphibian that they say played an important ecological role in the area's food chain. Kruse said he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw a team of maintenance personnel on television earlier this year using gasoline-powered leaf blowers to dry the rough, adding that American courses probably have more sprinklers per golf course and irrigate more grass area compared to courses. from, for example, Australia or the British Isles.
Well-watered and well-maintained golf courses often offer milder conditions that produce better scores and nicer television images, but Els and Woods took the opportunity to praise another approach that will become the norm as courses seek sustainable practices. And Tourism Concern (a British organization that works with communities in destination countries to reduce social and environmental problems related to tourism) estimates that an average golf course in a tropical country like Thailand needs 1500 kg of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides per year and uses as much Water like 60,000 rural villagers. Environmentalists say developers destroy natural habitats to build courses, eliminating native species and contributing to soil erosion and sediment runoff to nearby bodies of water. In space-conscious England, a column by a housing advocate who claims that golf courses occupy twice as much land as homes occupied headlines around the world.
In fact, the proliferation of golf courses (there are currently approximately 16,000 in the United States, by far more than any other country in the world (with the United Kingdom in a distant second place at 2.74, according to Golf Digest magazine) personifies the wasteful approach that the United States has taken to develop your landscape. In Miami, authorities are raising public drains to a low of 3.4 feet, but more than 50% of the city's golf courses are below this minimum, setting off Straka alarms. Golf courses and the corresponding tourist and retirement communities demonstrate a preference for carefully crafted imitations of nature and small-town life to reality, and impose landscape and architectural standards that are better suited to the climate of the northeastern United States than to the solar belt, Where development is booming. Golf complexes are increasingly located in or near protected areas or areas where resources are limited, aggravating their impacts.
When golf grass is mowed at a low height, the grass becomes stressed and is more vulnerable to pests, requiring greater use of pesticides. And if the archetypical plutocratic golfer feels inclined to dismiss these concerns because they are only of interest to the inhabitants of tropical tourist countries in the developing world, it should be noted that the United States is suffering from water scarcity and depoliation of natural land to feed the Frenzy of playing golf as well. In fact, golf even comes with its own kind of vehicle: no other sport, except the other emerging American hobby of auto racing, can make the same claim, nor can other sports use nearly as much land per player. The new golf courses are designed to use less area per hole and preserve as many natural elements and native species as possible.
. .
