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Here golf courses grow like weeds
By DIANE ROBERTS
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 14, 2003
Just before the land boom of the 1920s, the ruling image of Florida was the swamp, Cracker-infested and gator-replete, a backwater often under water. Then Florida convinced the property-buying and vacation-taking public that it was all colored-postcard beach, icing-sugar sand and peacock-blue water. Now Florida sells itself as one big golf course, green as the Garden of Eden and smooth as a supermodel's thigh, designed by a pro out of Augusta and, best of all, right next to your house.
In 1998, the National Golf Foundation, based in Jupiter, exhorted its members to "open a new golf course every day." While things didn't quite get that silly, more than a dozen new golf courses have opened in the Tampa Bay area since 2001. The Villages, a retirement megalopolis in Sumter, Lake and Marion counties which resembles a village about as much as Wewahitchka resembles Manhattan, boasts 181 holes. The unsightly sprawl around Naples has the second-highest density of holes-per-person in the country, beaten only by Myrtle Beach, S.C. Drive up Highway 19 toward the Withlacoochee, and you'll see endlessly replicating "golf communities" named for whatever trees got cut down or wildlife scared off to build them. At last count (two years ago) Florida had 1,261 golf courses. That's more than any other state; more than any other whole country.
You'd think that golf was growing faster than the federal deficit. You'd be wrong. Over the past few years, golf clubs, including more than a dozen in Florida, have gone bankrupt - there aren't enough players to go around. Maybe people are deciding that golf really is, as Mark Twain said, "a good walk spoiled." But whatever the reason, golf the game is in a slump while golf the property development proliferates. If you're wondering why you should care whether the pastel classes have a glut of grassy spaces on which to smack around a small white ball, it's simple: Golf courses are an assault on Florida's increasingly fragile ecosystems. Golf courses wreck habitat, suck up vast amounts of water, and spit out poisons.
Golf courses are pretty. People like to live near them (except maybe the lady who got whacked in the head with a golf ball when she recklessly went outside her house in the Villages). But that pretty golf course needs a lot of fertilizers to make it look like springtime in County Clare. And herbicides. Wherever that golf course was built, something other than emigres from Michigan used to live there. A golf course built on scrub, say in the sand hills of West Florida - ancient dunes from a time when the sea level was higher - looks like an oasis, but only because the course designer has destroyed the habitat of critters accustomed to living there and ripped out the highly adapted native vegetation, replacing it with non-native plants, which need much fertilizing and irrigating. It may look real good, but it feels real bad.
The business end of weed-killer and bug-killer chemicals finds its way into creeks, wetlands and ground water. One of the most common golf course herbicides, monosodium methyl arsenate, or MSMA, contains arsenic. Not only is arsenic a carcinogen, it hangs around forever. That arsenic will still be with us when the sea comes back to cover Florida once more. Then there's the water. Golf courses use between 500,000 and 1,000,000 gallons of water per day. Twenty acres-worth of golf course soak up more water than 20 acres-worth of residential community.
Golf course developers occasionally realize they have a public relations problem. Some try to minimize the rape-and-pillage aspect of their wannabe St. Andrews by retaining most of the runoff, using organic fertilizers, cutting down on the amount of maintained turf. The 36-holer at Mediterra, a "master-planned community" of ersatz Renaissance palazzi north of Naples, won an Environmental Leaders in Golf Award for, as Golf Digest magazine breathlessly reported, "preserving wetlands, re-establishing forested areas, and [sponsoring] nature and bird-watching tours for nonmembers and schoolchildren." Most golf course barons just try to put lipstick on the pig.
There's an outfit called "Audubon International" which claims to "certify" golf courses as ecologically sound. Invoking Audubon often helps developers get approval for their projects. Only this Audubon isn't the venerable bird-hugging group, but a name-appropriating upstart. It gets a big chunk of its funding from the U.S. Golf Association and charges developers fees in exchange for its blessing. The AI-certified Legacy Club at Alaqua Lakes in Seminole County earnestly claims "many indigenous plant species were left in place" and that sightings of black bear, Florida panther and bobcat are "not uncommon around the golf course." So it's okay with Legacy Club's well-heeled clientele that they've got the Wild Kingdom hanging out at the 8th hole? If you believe that, I've got some swamp land to sell you.
"Environmentally friendly" golf courses are about as common as feminists in a strip joint. But even if all golf courses tried to cut back on the chemicals, there'd still be noisome runoff. They'd still use vast amounts of water (though some golf course-makers have hit on the enterprising notion of reusing brown water - if the state will pay them to do it). And the number of golfers would still be going down. The golf course boom is about nothing but money for developers, charging 20- or 30-grand more for a house just because it's on a golf course, and at its heart, the old paradisal Florida dream of wilderness domesticated - and made profitable.
- Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.
Perspective
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Here golf courses grow like weeds
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