The very first golf courses in the U.S. had ½-inch-tall turfgrass that was allowed to go brown in the summer, so it was relatively sustainable. But then Augusta National opened in 1932 – with 32,000 feet of underground sprinkler pipes – and brown grass was henceforth deemed unacceptable. In the 1950s Ike’s passion for golf brought millions to the sport, even among the working classes, with golf ranking third in popularity with factory workers after baseball and bowling. And with the broadcast of the Masters tournament in living color on television in the ‘60s, standards for the greenness of golf courses were pumped up a notch or two and course managers across the country were pressured to duplicate the Augusta look. (Actually, Augusta wasn’t just artificially green but artificially everything. Blue dye was poured into its lakes and until recently, pre-recorded bird sounds were added to the television broadcasts – until savvy birders noticed songs of birds that don’t really exist there. Oops.)

But the turf at Augusta was destined to become even more tortured after Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player complained that the fairway grass wasn’t fast enough, and again it was made shorter. By the ‘60s most courses had lowered their turf height to 1/4 inch and today some have even moved to 1/8th inch.

Still, Augusta’s the extreme case, with its underground pipes pumping hot or cold air to moderate soil temperatures, and its closed-for-renovations status for half of every year, pre-tournament. No matter that other American golf courses can’t afford to go to those extremes, their members demand the look. Dubbed the “Augusta Syndrome,” the quest for the artificial yet perfect greensward has likewise captured the culture of suburbia, spawning millions of competitive Torojockeys.

The Cost of Shorter Mowing

But here’s what the scalping of turfgrass does: interfere with photosynthesis, encourage shallow roots, and make the grass more vulnerable to disease, temperature extremes and wear and tear from golfers. Short-short grass needs much more water to stay alive, which in turn encourages more fungi, which means that more fungicides are used, in addition to the thousands of pounds of fertilizer and herbicides already dumped on the course. In other words, groundskeepers are forced to create the absolute worst conditions for turfgrass, yet still make it look perfect. No easy feat, with one Chicago course reporting that it uses 5,000 pounds of fungicide and 31 million gallons of water each summer in the war against brown grass. A biologist with N.Y.’s Department of Environmental Conservation gives this sober assessment: “If you scraped a golf green and tested it, you’d have to cart it away to a hazardous waste facility.” Yet greens superintendents are told to keep it green or they’ll lose their job, and some actually have.

And in one of those unintended consequences that Nature is famous for, the acres of super-green and super-short grass, on top of millions of new acres of residential lawns in the U.S., have brought about an explosion in the population of Canadian geese. While only 100 years ago they were near extinction, now they’re the number one animal menace in the golf world. There was even a notorious incident in the ‘70s at Bethesda’s Congressional Country Club when a golfer beat one to death because it honked and ruined his shot. He was actually charged under Migratory Bird Treaty Act with killing a bird out of season, ordered to pay a $500 fine, and was suspended by the club – briefly. Nowadays the Congressional employs the services of a border collie (trained at the Goose-Away Academy in North Carolina!) to chase the copiously defecating birds off the course. A real solution would be to let grass grow taller or switch to another groundcover, but until there’s a cure for the Augusta Syndrome, that ain’t gonna happen.

Signs of Change?

At the end of 2004 there were over 15,000 courses in the U.S., even in such inhospitable places as Alaska. The states with the most golf courses are Florida, where wetlands are drying up because of dwindling groundwater supplies, and the semi-desert of California, where 40 percent of the water is pumped in from elsewhere. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, it’s only recently, with the downturn in the real estate market, that buyers are less willing to spend the extra $30,000 to have a golf course in their new development, and the building of new golf courses has taken a downturn.

Another sign of change, an actual hint of environmental awareness in the golf world, was the awarding of Golf Digest’s 2003 “Environmental Leader in Golf Award” to Jeff Carlson, the man who takes care of the Vineyard Golf Course and does it organically. But there’s an interesting story there. The local authorities on Martha’s Vineyard only approved the creation of this new course over vocal opposition – including folk songs written in protest, which songs were sung by kids in the local schools – after concluding that it was preferable to seeing the acreage turned into a 148-lot subdivision. And approval of the course was loaded with conditions – that it be maintained 100 percent organically, and that 125 local residents be allowed to join for only $400 a year, in contrast to the usual initiation fee of $350,000 and yearly fee of $12,000. At those prices, it’s no surprise that the members are rich and powerful (including the Clintons and many other famous names). According to press accounts, it was the wives (and, one would hope, female members) who supported the all-organic requirement, figuring they were paying more for organic at Whole Foods, so why settle for a toxic golf course?

So yes, the Vineyard club has been all-organic since it opened in 2002 and they, too, use border collies to chase off geese, but still, huge amounts of fertilizer are dumped on it – and organic overfertilization is just as harmful to our waters as the synthetic kind. And far too much water is used to keep the course green. So if “all-organic” is the golf industry’s answer to environmental pressures, I hope they soon realize that’s just a starting point.

My primary source for this article was Ted Steinberg, professor at Case Western University, in his book American Green and in a telephone interview; also Golf Digest, and Internet searches.