Play It Green

Golf may be on the decline across the U.S., but it couldn’t be hotter (literally!) in Dubai. According to Mohammed Juma Buamaim, VP of Golf in Dubai, “Right now we have too many golfers, and not enough courses. “It’s become impossible to get a tee time on the weekend if you’re not a member at one of the clubs.” They’re catching up fast, having shut down the city’s sand-only course in favor of grass courses of which there are now seven. One of these is a 7,539-yard (two 18-hole) course set to open to the public next month at Dubai Sports City. Four more golf courses are set to open there next year, including the first designed by Tiger Woods, which will be attached to an exclusive 80-suite boutique hotel. It will be a par-72 course called Al Ruwaya or “Serenity” in Arabic. “What they are doing is frankly phenomenal,” Woods told the AP before winning his second Dubai Desert Classic title this month. At the moment, Dubai’s golfing is drawing mostly expats from the U.K., Ireland and Australia. They apparently don’t mind the fact that each course requires 1 million gallons of treated sewage a day in the water-starved United Arab Emirates. While treated sewage water is better than drinking water, it’s wasting a lot of energy to keep those courses green. Then again, it’s nowhere near the ecological footprint of Dubai’s endless upscale hotels and indoor ski parks.

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My first response to the news that golf is on the decline was a happy one. What sport is more wasteful of space and resources while serving only the smallest (richest) segment of the population? And there is a hope that some of this land that’s been groomed with equal parts pesticides and water will be returned to nature as a result of golf’s falling stature (though developments and McMansions seem more likely). But there’s another sad lesson here. The decline in golfing parallels a wider nature-phobia that’s swept the country since the onset of passive “activities” like online gaming and web surfing. Still, golf’s number is up due to a change in societal expectations on men—they’re expected to be home with the family, not out on a golf course all weekend, according to the New York Times article on the subject. Clearly young people aren’t getting into the sport, for which the hideous attire must be partially to blame, but all the baby boomers who were supposed to flock to the courses haven’t materialized either. Says the article: Developers built more than 3000 new golf courses in the U.S. between 1990 and 2003, bringing the number to 16,000. Now hundreds have closed in the last few years, primarily in Arizona, Florida, Michigan and South Carolina. Considering the combined acreages of these courses—each 18-hole course runs about 75 acres of maintained turf in a larger 150 acre plot, and 70 percent of that land is unused during play—and the shortage of resources, maybe it is time for golfers to get some new priorities.

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Shocking! The first college football stadium to go zero waste will be in sunny California, a state that tends to be a few leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the union when it comes to environmental initiatives. In this case, they’re flaunting their green cred at the University of California Davis’ year-old Aggie Stadium. And taking the stadium zero waste was no easy feat. They had to wrestle with such dilemmas as—could a concession stand thrive without traditional candy bars? Do biodegradable-wrapping candy bars even exist? (In California, though, the real question is what vegan, fair trade, organic variety of biodegradable-wrapped candy bar do you want?) Some 30 composting bins have been set up around the stadium. At the end of the games, staff collects the biodegradable bags filled with hot dog wrappers and unbleached napkins and brings them to a compactor at the campus dining room which then transports them to Jepson Prairie Organics which processes and sells the rich compost to golf courses, nurseries, farms and other big customers. So far, Aggie’s efforts have paid off. According to school officials, they’ve turned around more than 2,400 pounds of organic matter to local farms and diverted 1500 pounds of recyclable bottles.

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The most exciting competition on television last night was not the dreary Academy Awards with its canned humor and Broadway-inspired musical acts. It was earlier in the day at the Jeep King of the Mountain snowboard and skiing events in Squaw Valley, California, where one of winter sports’ eco-defenders, Lindsey Jacobellis, led another assault in the snowboardcross competition. Jacobellis led easily in the fast downhill race, prompting U.S snowboarding coach Peter Foley to say, “In this race she crushed it and no one really posed a threat to her. It’s awesome that she has that kind of consistency.” In fact, Jacobellis has never been defeated in a King of the Mountain snowboardcross competition—this was her fifth consecutive win.

  And Jacobellis brings green credentials to her high-profile boarding. For the past five years she’s been sponsored by Paul Mitchell hair products, who’ve been using the Olympic silver medalist as a spokesperson for their “Head for Change” campaign. She talks about making lifestyle changes like turning off lights and reusing bags at the grocery store. “It irritates me to see people with plastic and paper bags that get thrown away,” Jacobellis told me in an earlier interview. She and the snowboardcross team are heading to Tamarack, ID, for this weekend’s Visa SBX Championship Series at the Chevy U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix. Mid-March they head to Sun Valley, Idaho for another King of the Mountain event. For those lucky enough to attend, global activist and cross-pollinating, uplifting, bass-booming musician Michael Franti & Spearhead will be headlining a show there March 15.

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Young NASCAR champ Brian Vickers (his 2003 Busch Series win at age 20 made him the youngest NASCAR champ in a top-tier series) has been spouting some green messages lately. Not everyone believes that NASCAR’s minor improvements—like a recent conversion to unleaded gasoline—have anything close to environmental teeth. But Vickers talks tough, anyway.  “Congress, unfortunately, has made more progress on steroids in baseball and the Patriots, whether they’re taping NFL games, than they have on global climate change, the war, economic recession and a budget that’s out of control,” Vickers told the AP. “That’s what (ticks) me off. I’m passionate about making the world a better place, and global climate change is one of those things.”

Vickers drives a Toyota for the Red Bull Racing Team, but a Lexus hybrid off the track. He’s pushing NASCAR to do more recycling and to buy carbon offsets, even though NASCAR’s emissions, in the grand scheme of global emissions, are fairly inconsequential. But green moves by NASCAR are important. If the organization were to switch from gasoline to a biofuel, as GM has asked them to, it might lend more credibility to alternative fuels. Of course, diverting food crops to ethanol (and subsidizing our own rising grocery bills) is a poor solution for a long-term energy crisis.

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