5d ago

I hate golf

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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.
- I was an irrigation tech at a 27 hole golf course a while back. We had the reclaim system you're talking about and a retention lake that we would pull from. During the winter (Florida) it was pretty close to a stable system. There wasn't much loss to evaporation and our lake didn't need to be refilled. During the summer and especially in droughts, more than half our water was city water supplementing our lake. We would pump about 1 million gallons of water per night normally. In the summer and drought seasons it could be closer to 2 million per night and half of that was city water. We were a smaller course too, some of the PGA 36 hole courses could easily double those numbers. Golf courses are a blight on the land and a giant waste of all kinds of resources.
  
  27 hole is not small. The majority of courses out there are 9 or 18. And the recycled water I was talking about came from outside the course. Usually part of the waste water system in the area. That's probably less common in Florida though. I am amzed you could be stable in the winter. I didn't know reclimation could be that effective.
  
  My mistake, I hadn't considered the recycled water would be supplied by the city like that. Where I was it was mostly retention ponds like I mentioned. As for being stable in winter, that really depended on rain. If we got a decent rain a few times a month it would mostly even out, but even then we still needed topping off from time to time.
  
  Yeah, even though they can treat sewage enough to make it safe to drink, most people don't want to anyway. So they often send it to golf courses, water features, sometimes very large companies will use it if they have a lot of grass on thier campuses. It's just a matter of piping it most of the time because they can't just release the sewage untreated, so it's there for the taking. But piping isn't cheap if it is an urban area.
- Lots of golf courses also use or are part of the waste water system in the area.
- There’s no point trying to be rational, whoever made this meme clearly has no idea about actual golf. Most golfers aren’t rich, most golf courses are pretty cheap. It’s just a way for people to drink and have fun with buddies.
  
  Probably true. The courses I have played on were far from high end. And of the ones I know of around me, there is like 8 budget places for each "nicer" one. And I think there is only 2 super high end ones on my side of portland.
- 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.
  
  Where do you live? My experiences are in NY and Oregon. We have a few places like you describe. But the vast majority are mom and pop courses where they carve out a little space for a hole and leave the rest untouched. The on closest to me is surrounded by houses, so some of the trees they have are really old. Would have been cleared for housing if not for the course. So it is almost like an oasis for wildlife. Though obviously it is on the high end side for sure, it still preserves some natural space that acts as a way point for larger stuff moving through the area from the undeveloped land not too far by. Thier ecosystem isn't impressive, but still plenty of small stuff for the ducks that stop by continuously.
  
  Germany.
  
  Interesting. I could totally see what you are saying being true throughout Europe. It might just be that golfers won't accept the kind of courses we have here. Might consider them uncouth or something.
  In the US we often get this impression of Europe as old world traditionalists. Early education and media do that. I assume it isn't actually true of the majority of Europeans. But maybe golfers skew that way in Germany?

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