Golf war syndrome
How playing 18 holes endangers the earth
March/April 1996
By Elaine Robbins, Utne Reader
Golf is wildly popular these days, and developers, anxious to cash in on the boom, are building new golf courses around the world faster than you can say "Jack Nicklaus." There are now 25,000 golf courses on the planet, 14,000 of them in the United States, and hundreds more are on the drawing board.
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Today's perfectly manicured rolling green courses require massive amounts of land, water, and chemicals. Most U.S. courses use 1,500 pounds of pesticides a year; that's seven times the amount used by farmers. Add to that a laundry list of fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and other chemicals. And when it rains, it pours: Runoff from golf courses has been found to have contaminated nearby groundwater, lagoons, lakes, and wetlands. The golf boom is causing pollution and social dislocation, but teed-off environmentalists and local-rights groups are starting to fight back.
Many of the resource-gobbling playlands are being built in Southeast Asia, where "the thirst of national governments for foreign exchange has made a deadly combination with the hunger of Japanese developers for [paradisiacal] sites," writes Leopoldo Rodriguez in (sub)TEX (Oct./Nov. 1995). For Japan's 12 million golf fanatics, a shortage of land and soaring golf club membership costs--brokers dealing in club memberships have driven the price tag as high as $250,000 a year--mean that it's often easier and cheaper to fly to Thailand or Malaysia than to play at home. In Toward Freedom (June/July 1995) Chee Yoke Ling and Muhd Farhan Ferrari report that Thailand alone has 160 courses, with many more in the offing. Developers have set their sights on Vietnam, Laos, and Burma as well.
Too often, these new golf-resort developments are forcing rural people off their land. When developers have trouble getting local people to sell, they sometimes buy up all the surrounding plots and deny them access to their land. Ninety acres is the minimum area needed to build the average course, and, as Ling and Ferrari point out, "since most new courses, especially in less developed countries, are developed as packages with luxury homes, chalets, condos, and other recreational amenities, a single project can cover up to 700 acres."