Should We Ban Golf Courses?

On Anti-Social Environmentalism

A fox and geese at Monarch Bay GC in San Leandro, photo by the author.

By Alex Smith

On a beautiful Sunday in June, a typical Professional Golf Association event was coming to an exciting (for golf) end on the 18th green of TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut. The top ranked player in the world, Scottie Scheffler, held a 1-stroke lead over Tom Kim, a young but already decorated rival. 

Before Scheffler and Kim could stroke their respective putts for birdie, chaos ensued. Protesters wearing t-shirts that read “No golf on a dead planet” crowded the green complex, released canisters of red powder, and put a stop to the fun. 

Police and security tackled, handcuffed, and escorted the protestors away from the green as the crowd cheered. Scheffler missed his putt from just off the green. An apparently unfazed Kim sank his birdie putt and forced a playoff, where he finally did lose to Scheffler after one hole. 

The protest was just another in a long line of environmentalist escapades aimed at bringing awareness to what groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil see as the existential threat of climate change. In the case of the Travelers Championship, Extinction Rebellion wanted to highlight “the worldwide danger of climate breakdown.” The “climate catastrophe,” it claimed, “threatens everything we love on this planet, including golf.” 

Golf is a particular bugbear for XR and similar groups. In the summer of 2023, an XR group damaged the greens on 10 golf courses in Spain to protest golf’s outsized water use while the country faced drought. In 2023, a group called Planet Over Profits stormed a fancy country club in the Hamptons. 

In some ways, environmental groups’ intense focus on golf is not all that surprising. New York Times journalist Cara Buckley, for example, has pointed to golf as a luxury activity that uses an outsized amount of land, water, and chemicals just to let high-wealth individuals recreate. Closing golf courses has been celebrated in Bloomberg, and advocated for in news outlets in Europe and Australia. For the left-leaning environmentalists, it does not help that the name “Trump” is plastered across golf clubs around the country.

In the United States, golf courses cover more land than the state of Delaware—about 2 million acres. They use about 2.08 billion gallons of water per day, or about 0.5% of total U.S. water consumption. In dry regions where golf is very popular, like Southern California and Arizona, golf courses stick out like a gangrenous thumb. 

At face value, then, the impacts of golf seem astounding: Deserts turned bright green for a game. Land use the size of a state. Gallons of water poured into that environmentalist pet peeve, lawns. 

But the environmentalist, and more particularly, the climate case against golf is surprisingly weak given the bluster the game provokes. And the common solutions that flow from those arguments—golf should be banned and courses should be rewilded and remade into public parks—are based on faulty logic. The climate movement has long held that to achieve purity and sanctity with nature, everyone must accord themselves with the aesthetic principles of environmentalism. 

That is simply not true.

Golf and Nature

I must confess, I am a golfer. I started playing when I was around 10 years old. My father, an avid golfer, would bring my older brother and me to Anthony Decile’s, a long-gone driving range in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland. There I learned the pleasure of striking a ball in the center of a club face. The first time I actually played golf, I par’d the first hole—something I don’t remember, but my dad likes to bring up. 

Every few Sundays, the three of us would play 9 holes at Highland Park Golf Course in Highland, Ohio, a Cleveland municipal course with low greens fees and a long history as a place where Black Clevelanders gathered and played. My father remembers being heckled as a teenager on the first tee box by none other than Jim Brown, inarguably the greatest running back to ever play for the Cleveland Browns. 

Everything was bucolic. Except for the fact that I absolutely hated golf. It was boring. It was hot and usually humid. I hated carrying the bag. I hated putting. And I resisted. One day, I completely stopped. But in January 2022, I decided to try it again. 

Since then, I have been in love. The feeling of a pure strike is unmatched. The difficulty of the game keeps bringing me back—something my girlfriend has referred to as an obsessive impulse for improvement. And the competition of a round with friends makes me buzz. 

But the major difference between golf for me as a child and golf for me today is less a new relationship with the game and more a new relationship with the outdoors, with something that could be referred to as “nature.” 

For the majority of my life I classified myself as “indoorsy.” I thought camping was self-torture, and a walk through the woods seemed like a great way to get poison ivy and a few mosquito bites. When I moved to the Bay Area in 2019, I was stunned by the “outdoorsy” culture. Everyone I met was either on their way to a hike or on their way back from one. I didn’t get it, and in some ways, still don’t. But when I began to golf again, something in me changed. I began to crave the sunshine, to enjoy a long walk outside, and to find solace in solo time in  manicured, human-built nature. This was eye-opening. 

I call golf courses “nature” with some sarcasm—but not too much. Nature is, after all, a human concept full of puffed-up meaning. What makes a golf course different from a California state campground with fire pits, water spigots, and showers? A nice place for people to enjoy the outdoors complete with a beautifully constructed stairway down to the beach? Or even a national park carved full of hiking trails, roads lined with tourists, and even massive lodges? It’s all a matter of degrees.

Golfing changed my approach and understanding of all of these things. I revel in the sublime experience of a twilight round at the Metropolitan Golf Links in Oakland looking out over the San Francisco Bay. I snap pictures of the beautiful cranes, seabirds, and even eagles that populate the East Bay’s public golf courses. 

It has also made me appreciative of the rest of the outdoors. I like to hike more than I ever did before. I even went camping, and would do it again. The folks who presume that golf is an irredeemable environmental nightmare likely do not need some weird ball and stick game to make them appreciate the world outside. But I’d hazard a guess that I am not alone in being changed for the better by golfing. 

But Should Golf Be Banned?

Not for environmental purposes. Golf’s environmental impacts are doubtlessly greater than many other sports, but pale in comparison to the vast majority of human activity. 

The 2 million acres of U.S. land used for golf courses is significantly smaller than the 108 million acres of national park and wilderness preserves, and infinitesimal compared to the 215 million acres of public (i.e., excluding private) land used to graze cattle. The Delaware-sized chunk of land used for golf courses might be oversized, but with few (albeit clear) exceptions, the land that is currently used for golf in semi-rural, suburban, and non-residential areas, like that around airports, likely have few other potential uses. Or at least few uses that are particularly better than golf.  

When it comes to emissions, meanwhile, golf courses are relatively benign. A report published by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews—one of the leading governing bodies in the golf world—and performed by Norwegian ecologist Michael Bekken, found that the carbon balance on four golf courses in the United States was negative for the first 30 years of operations, thanks to carbon sequestration in the soil and biomass, but became positive and increased as years went on. The majority, approximately 63%, of the emissions related to maintenance at the U.S. courses, came from electricity and fuel used to power maintenance equipment and irrigation. Reducing the use of fossil fuels for maintenance, and using clean power—either from the grid or solar panels—can thus drastically reduce the emissions of golf. 

Water, though, remains a pressing issue for golf courses. In places where water is plentiful and rainfall provides at least some of the hydration for turfgrass, golf courses should not raise red flags. But in places where water is scarce and little rain can nourish the thirsty fairways and greens, the water requirements of golf can be outlandish. In Palm Desert, a popular golf destination in California's Coachella valley, golf courses use about 57 million gallons of water a day, equivalent to the average use of more than 400,000 Californians. Similar issues arise in Arizona, where a growing retirement community’s thirst for tee times means that more golf courses are being built despite drought.

In California, for example, golf course water use falls under the category of “urban use,” which accounts for about 10% of total water use. Agriculture makes up about 40% of California’s total water use on average, and the remaining 50% goes to rivers, streams, and other functions in the environment. Improving water efficiency for golf could open up more freshwater to other activities and reduce the overall pressure on drought-prone regions. To that end, many golf courses use non-potable, recycled, or reclaimed water, effectively mitigating their heavy water dependency.

Social Golf

Banning golf, or even severely limiting golf for its environmental impacts makes little sense. There could be cases where specific course designs in specific regions threaten local ecosystems, but overall, the environmental case against golf is weak. The social case against golf, though, is less so. Or rather, the social case against private golf is relatively strong.

About 75% of golf courses in the United States are open to the public, of which about a quarter are municipal courses—publicly owned by a city or municipality. The remaining 25% of courses, approximately 4,000, are closed to the public and require membership to a country club or similar institution. Such clubs require initiation fees—sometimes upwards of $200,000—to join and charge monthly dues to members. They often have long waiting lists and opaque membership rules.

Historically, country clubs have either outright restricted membership to certain races or religions, or have had quotas. They are the bastion of wealth, privilege, and exclusion, and typically occupy prime real estate that could be better used for housing in areas with high homelessness rates or for public parks.

Take Claremont Country Club in Oakland, California for example. Claremont sits on a relatively small lot for an 18 hole course, but it still takes up about 80 acres of real estate in a city with more than 5,000 unhoused people.

 Building mixed-use housing and urban development on what is now Claremont Country Club could create thousands of new homes. At the very least, making land that is currently only accessible to a small population of hyper-rich individuals into something usable by the public is a no-brainer. 

As a counterpoint, consider Metropolitan Golf Links, an Oakland municipal course and Corica Park Golf Complex, the city of Alameda’s sole municipal course. 

Both courses sit next to the Oakland International Airport, where housing development is either impossible or would be unwanted. Both cater to a diverse population of golfers from their respective cities and the surrounding area. Both courses are far more affordable than a country club (although, Corica Park is, in my opinion, still too expensive). 

Above all, these courses provide a legitimate third place—neither home nor work—for their East Bay communities. Regulars mix with newbies, old golfers mix with young golfers. They are places where friends meet and strangers make friends. 

The Environmental Trap

To even consider banning these municipal courses for supposedly “environmental” reasons demonstrates the anti-social politics at the core of much of traditional environmentalism. Ethical life, for many climate and environmental advocates, requires bowing down to the aesthetic principles at the core of their movements: worshiping “pristine” nature, eschewing synthetic life, and avoiding any and all “waste.” Righteousness, under these principles, means an ascetic appreciation of humanity’s weakness in the face of gaia. Human pleasure is waste; golf is waste. 

Golf course architects mold landscapes and reshape natural undulations and waterways to meet the human expectations of what a golf course looks like. Greenskeepers manipulate flora to create ideal turf for the game, with punishing bunkers, hazards, woods, and rough. But, they do so within the limits set by the particular landscape they work with. Golf courses are a prime example of the hybridized nature that surrounds humanity. Their synthetic qualities belie the “natural” realities of golf—like the rest of our world, golf courses are simply nature manipulated to human ends. Like farms, parks, and campgrounds, golf courses reflect the human-nature continuum.

The aesthetic impulse within environmentalism denies hybridity in favor of a simplistic understanding of nature as either untouched, or touched only by environmentalists. There is no wiggle room for activities that fall outside of their own notions of “green.” They accept as good only those things that appealed to their hippie forbearers. 

It does not help that what environmentalists see as ethically pure and morally righteous shares many of the same issues with private golf. The farmers markets, organic produce, electric vehicles, and outdoor adventures that environmentalists percieve as proper recreation, resemble the other side of the coin of Country Club elitism. 

Where, then, are the calls to ban and rewild organic farms—which use about 2.5 times more land than golf courses in the United States, and often have no environmental benefit, compared to conventional farms—that cater to elite consumers, who can afford to make aesthetic choices about the food they eat? What environmentalists consider as appropriate use for land depends on their own preoccupations and aesthetics: Yes to national parks, small organic farms, and urban gardens, no to golf courses. 

This form of anti-social environmentalism perhaps explains the inability of the movement to garner real and lasting support in the American political landscape, which often requires embracing contradictions, wiggle room, and golf handicaps.