Years ago I overheard (eavesdropped upon) a telephone conversation between a public parks official and a golf course owner.
Parks Official: No sir, you cannot
Parks Official: No. They are a protected species
Parks Official: You CANNOT shoot them
Parks Official: Or poison them, no. Or trap them
Parks Official: If you like, we can-- no, I'm it. I'm the ranking official here. There's nobody above me. My boss? You mean... the governor's office? Sure, I guess. Okay bye
After he hung up, he gave me this thousand-yard stare before answering my unvoiced question.
"There's a flock of flamingos at the 9th green disrupting golfers. He wanted permission to go out there with a shotgun and take care of matters, but sensed there might be... legal ramifications. So he called us."
I laughed. "Does that happen often?"
"Oh, we get calls like that a couple times a month."
Country clubs should be burned to the ground and their golf courses turned into community gardens i am 10000% serious
Was golf created for the sole purpose of hoarding ridiculously large amounts of land just to brag about how little they use it?
Yes, literally.
I do agree that golf courses are frequented by a majority of not so great people and that they're a monopoly of valuable land, but I'd like to vouch for community based golf courses. My great-grandfather (down to earth guy) would go whenever he could afford to with his band of fellow elderly folks under the coined name "The Misfits;" it's really great exercise for people that aren't super mobile!! Helped him clear his head mentally too :D
I know you thought this meant something but there’s nothing your pop pop could achieve for his health at a golf course that he couldn’t have done at a community park / food forest.
Please think just a little more abstractly.
Golf supplies people with the opportunity to:
1. Walk
2. Rotate their spine and shoulders
While being directly tied to the suburbanization of US stolen land, whiteness, the creation of the middle class and the import of the concept of lawns which is DIRECTLY a result of the desire to imitate royalty- which is what you’d have to be to show off a costly expanse of well maintained monocultured land that was not used for food or grazing.
Every golf course is at least three crimes against humanity, without exaggeration.
Also don’t use familial exceptionism in actual discourse. It does not matter how down to earth your great great grandfather is. At all. Tesla and Elon Musk are heinous and dangerous entities but my partners parents (super nice people) both own Teslas. Irrelevant. Tesla as a company still blows ass and commits violence against the planet.
Cheers.
I hadn't thought of it in such large terms and I highly appreciate your point. But could the same not be said for any urban development that collects large swaths of land ?
Is it not equally wasteful to use any acreage of forest or field for something of urban purpose like a football field or baseball field, water park, or for something of leisure in general?
Is the yearly remodel of a golf course an exorbitant enough use of resources to justify the removal of their existence entirely? The golf course I'm referring to hasn't changed since it was first built not because of funds but because no one where it's located cares that it hasn't changed. It's also already blocked into the heart of the (rundown) capital city and it really is a BIG part of the community and the collective effort to maintain a genuine know about what's going on especially with crime and people in need. Are community focused golf courses not the better of the two (versus a gated community/country club course)? Where do we draw the line between forgoing something because it's an "imitation of royalty" and a waste of resources, or keeping something around for the sake of the small enjoyments people find in it (within restrictions to maximize resources)?
I GENUINELY don't mean this to be combative. I really am just curious. And I absolutely agree that golf courses are a waste of land and resources (and also a gate kept activity of the wealthy); I used to live in a gated community that would turn their golf course over every year and it was really freaking obvious that they were not only disrupting the surrounding wildlife, but the sheer amounts of dirt and water being displaced by heavy machinery made me dig my heels into climate research for the first time.
I totally understand if this is way too much of a question load. I'll delete this in due time. I KNOW I'm still looking at the argument from a small scale but I don't have much exposure to this argument and am honestly so curious about it and really want to get serious about what's going on in the world and my community and have no idea where to start
I want to really take this response at face level but there‘s a difference in what we know that’s making it hard.
No, ‘any’ urban development’ that collects large swathes of land can’t be the same bc golf is distinctive. Aside from the connections I already mentioned, golf is specifically a big lawn. Just a big ol lawn.
It’s not a shopping center. There is n o housing, It provides no food or service.
It is a lawn- not just hogging space but the widespread presence of non-native high maintenance grass that hogs water.
Fuck golf. No one needs golf in any way that can’t be met by literally any other community space and or exercise. Putt putt courses exist and are WAY smaller if people ~need~ to push a small ball around with a stick so badly.
But golf courses by necessity of the span of the sport are massive. Like I said- they provide no food, they are hostile to wildlife, they provide no resources but hog lots of water.
In a time when and where people are facing food scarcity, all of this is stolen land anyway, the planet is burning up and losing ground water at an alarming rate: No. The world we must create has 0 uses for a golf course.
This is the critical lack of imagination that plagues us, that I talk about so often. There is nothing so special or useful about golf that makes it worth clinging to- it only left Scotland for the US some 150 odd years ago MAX. It’s not intrinsic to life here, it’s not that interesting, it’s a huge waste of resources, and when it comes to enjoyment, at the LEAST every golf course would be better off as a PARK where people could walk and play, animals could live without harassment, and if we are really talking smart here, it would be at least in part a community garden/food forest.
There is NOTHING you can say that justifies a golf course over that, and again if putting a ball is so precious...we still have putt putt courses and golf ranges which are way smaller. But neither of those carry the prestige (read: bullshit snobbery) of sprawling green golf courses which is really what golf is all about, since that’s what lawns are all about: prestige & excess as symbols of success.
Now my own eco-defensive fervor aside, honestly no your response isn’t too much of a question load- it reads as your own cognitive dissonance. You admit in multiple ways how wasteful golf courses are and have seen that with your own eyes yet the familiarity of them in your life and culture forces you to defend them emotionally or inquisitively when your own logic and experience gives evidence to the other direction.
It’s okay you don’t have to defend golf courses. You’re not a bad person for knowing ppl who like them, for living by one, for playing golf, none of it. That’s why familiarity isn’t a relevant argument for or against.
Golf courses suck. Urban dev also tends to suck. So yes, in fact there are other offenders we can bring into this argument esp by way of lawns, bc the suburbs are golf’s sibling. Many urban spaces need to be reimagined and rehashed and one of the main ways that need to happen is greening their spaces and using them for food and biodiversity.
