I don’t play except once every couple of years… and poorly. But it isn’t as wasteful on water as you think. They often use some form of recycled water, and once it is on the ground it doesn’t just go away. Much of it goes deeper into the ground, getting filtered naturally, and ends up back in an underground aquifer. The “loss” is just in evaporation. Which of course eventually comes back as rain. Some percentage of that ends up in the ocean. That part is more or less lost as drinkable water. But recycled water often wasn’t drinkable to start with.
It’s really the fertalizers that are the problem I believe.
Every golf course is a dead ecosystem pretending it’s alive.
Well, they sure aren’t helping the ecosystem, but I wouldn’t say dead. I live near a golf course, lot’s of wildlife visiting it in the odd hours. And that is just the bigger stuff I can see.
Big animals don’t have a lasting ecological impact when the soil is dead. A golf course has no viable shrub cover, no insects to speak of, no real living soil, nothing. It’s basically a dead presentation field for some larger animals that abandon it after social functions. The area itself is not much more suited for live than a parking lot. Which also has wildlife visiting.
What are you talking about? They don’t plow bulldoze the place. There are plenty of shrubs and such, just not on the fairway. The few times I have golfed myself, I have never failed to lose a ball in some brush. And I remember getting bitten by mosquitoes at at least one. They always have a retention pond, and that thing is a haven for insect life. The ducks and geese always stop at the nearby course and are clearly finding food.
A golf course is dead ecologically speaking. Mowed gras supports nearly zero biodiversity. Compare it to any natural meadow and you’ll easily see why golf courses are a joke. Having a few token species (mosquitos, ducks) that thrive everywhere is no indicator of ecological viability. Get a bat coder and find some bats, find smaller snakes, rodents and newts, then you got a living thing going. The soil deteriorates without natural cover, cultivated grass shrubs don’t retain a root system that supports a healthy soil. Instead nutrients and so on are washed out over time. Fauna dependent on nutrient enrichment by plants growing on the soil slowly dies until there is none left to incorporate eventual nutrient rich matter. Just because it might look „nice and alive“ doesn’t mean it is. It’s an ecological wasteland, optics don’t really play a role in that.
I think you are talking about the kind of golf courses you see in movies and TV. Those do exist. But they are a tiny minority. The shrubs and such I am talking about aren’t cultivated. Most courses are not that high end. My buddy plays a ton of golf, but at low end places because he is a teacher. The fairway and the green are the only place they modify the landscape. Every hole is surrounded by untouched natural space. Trees, overgrowth, and whatever was there. Costs too much to manage. Some don’t fertilizer or water anything but the greens, though only select climates can getaway with not watering in the summer. You are asssuming all golf courses are like the high end ones. They aren’t.
I work in forestry. We got several courses round here and they are all the way you described as high class. We don’t get any low end places like you describe here.
