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When Nick Faldo and Greg Norman struggled over the final holes of golf’s
Open Championship at Royal St George’s on Sandwich Bay in Kent in July,
they, their fellow competitors, along with caddies, TV crews and thousands
of spectators, were tramping across ‘the finest sand dune system in southeast
England’ with a ‘nationally important’ collection of orchids. That description
comes from English Nature, the government’s main adviser on conservation.
But far from condemning the sport’s use of this designated site of special
scientific interest, English Nature extolled the course’s value and published
a ‘hole-by-hole guide to the wildlife and conservation of Royal St George’s’.

The 220 hectares of the ancient course, which opened in 1887 and by
all accounts survived the latest onslaught intact, contains the largest
British populations of two protected species. The clove-scented broomrape
and the lizard orchid, which has more than 90 per cent of its British population
here, are found in greatest profusion beside the 7th and 8th holes. There
are eight other types of orchid along the course, living between the lady’s
bedstraw that flowers in the rough by the first fairway, and the kestrels,
short-eared owls and slowworms who have their homes near the 18th.

Royal St George’s, says Pete Raine, director of the Kent Trust for Nature
Conservation, is ‘a marvellous course where the relationship between golf
and wildlife comes to full fruition’. Without golf, many of the Sandwich
Bay dunes would have succumbed to agricultural ‘improvements’ and lost their
wildlife value.

But golf doesn’t usually get such a good press from environmentalists.
In Britain the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) fights
dozens of planning inquiries each year into proposed new courses, to halt
what it sees as creeping suburbanisation of the countryside. And earlier
this year, campaigners from round the world met in Malaysia to call for
a global moratorium on the construction of golf courses. They accused golf
of destroying rainforests, invading farmland, poisoning rivers and depleting
water supplies. What, then, is going wrong?

In 14th-century Scotland, where golf was invented, the game was almost
invariably played on coastal sand dunes. The fairways were paths across
them, the bunkers were ‘blowouts’ created by storms, and the greens were
the patches of natural lush grass known as dune slacks, kept short by grazing
sheep and rabbits. The first holes, it is said, were rabbit holes, and the
first clubs were shepherds’ crooks. ‘Nature was their architect,’ writes
Guy Campbell in his definitive History of Golf in Britain.

Nature still survives in profusion at some of the oldest British courses,
which were created amid natural landscape and make little use of modern
chemicals. There are 98 sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) designated
by English Nature and Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) on golf courses. Together
these SSSIs cover some 3000 hectares.

Royal Birkdale, on the Lancashire coast near Southport, boasts natterjack
toads and sand lizards. Wentworth in Surrey provides a refuge for the silver-studded
blue butterfly. Gleneagles in Tayside, Scotland, has bog moss, native cran-berries
and carpets of wild flowers such as mountain pansy and wild thyme. Earlier
this month at Gleneagles, SNH launched the Scottish Golf Course Wildlife
Initiative, which aims to bring together ‘for the first time in Scotland,
the golf and conservation sectors, to examine and implement methods of
wildlife conservation on golf courses’.

Golf courses are a ‘priceless resource’ for certain endangered types
of habitat in England, says Raine. Limestone and chalk grasslands make up
almost a fifth of golf course SSSIs in Britain. ‘If this grassland is kept
as short rough, you are almost perfectly replicating the conditions of an
old grazed pasture, a habitat rich in flowers, insects and butterflies.’

But such courses are the exception. The windy dunes of Sandwich are
a world away from the modern American-style courses that are taking over
around the world. These courses are in thrall to what golfers call the ‘Augusta
dream’, after the famous American course in Georgia. They have wide fertiliser-gorged
fairways, narrow close-cropped roughs and constantly irrigated pesticide-sodden
greens. To recreate the dream, American Bermuda grass, with its rapacious
demands for water and chemicals, has become the essential ingredient for
most top-flight courses.

According to British course architect Tom MacKenzie, speaking at a conference
on golf organised by the British Association of Nature Conservation earlier
this year, the style evolved on swamplands in Florida. There, the construction
of courses involved major civil engineering to create flood-free fairways
and bunkers without alligators. Such courses do not blend into the landscape,
they transform it. Since then, massive civil engineering has become par
for the course, obliterating most features of the landscape in order to
provide the wide-open fairways demanded by the new generation of American-influenced
players.

The traditional British links is now widely seen as a quaint anachronism.
Foreign golfers such as the American Jack Nicklaus hate it when the British
Open comes to Royal St George’s, reported The Golfer in July. It is ‘a test
of imagination and flair’ that they abhor, stated the journal. But having
dominated the postwar game, America’s golfers are now among the leading
designers of courses round the world. Nicklaus has designed courses in
England, Ireland, France, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

For conservationists, the Augusta dream is a nightmare. The combination
of chemicals and the ruthless obliteration of areas of rough in which balls
might get lost, makes the modern course inimical to wildlife. Modern courses
stand accused of four main environmental charges: that they take farm and
forest land; that they destroy natural landscapes, causing erosion and disrupting
drainage patterns; that they consume scarce water supplies, particularly
in the tropics and in arid countries; and that the excessive application
of fertilisers and pesticides pollutes water supplies and kills wildlife.

Vietnam has handed over a protected rainforest, the Thu Duc forest near
Saigon, to a Taiwanese golf entrepreneur as part of a drive to attract tourists.
Several courses have been built in Thai forests and national parks. In Malaysia,
a golf resort on Redang Island, which was until recently uninhabited, is
damaging coral reefs and mangrove forests, according to Chee Yok Ling, head
of Malaysian Friends of the Earth.

In the tropics, golf courses use more water, pesticide and fertiliser
than the farms that they often replace. A typical course in Thailand consumes
more than a billion litres of water a year – enough to supply a large village
and irrigate its crops. There have been numerous claims in southern Thailand
that golf courses are draining reservoirs and pumping underground water
reserves dry, leaving farmers’ irrigation channels empty. Elsewhere water
is a matter of life and death. Raine says: ‘Last year I was in Zimbabwe,
where I saw golf courses being watered on the outskirts of Harare, while
at the same time people were literally dying of thirst in Bulawayo.’

Irrigation of golf courses is also a serious issue around the Mediterranean.
On the Iberian peninsula, where the exploits of Spain’s Seve Ballesteros
brought the game great popularity during the 1980s, serious water shortages
have not withered the expansion of golf courses along the Costa del Sol
and Algarve coastlines, nor in the Balearic Islands, nor along the Coto
Doana, where golf is helping to dry up one of Europe’s most important wetland
wildlife areas. Similarly on Malta, where the water supply system is struggling
to meet demand and almost half the water comes from expensive desalination
plants, the government is considering applications for seven golf courses
as part of a campaign to boost its tourist industry.

In the US, golf courses drain scarce water supplies in ‘sunbelt’ states
such as Arizona, where Americans go to retire. The desert city of Phoenix,
where annual rainfall is less than 20 centimetres, has sprinklers in almost
continuous operation at 70 public courses. Yet anticipated shortages are
forcing the federal government to build a $4 billion aqueduct to bring water
to the city from the Colorado River.

When it’s not water, it’s chemicals. According to a recent Japanese
study, courses there use roughly 1.5 tonnes of agricultural chemicals per
year, or eight times the quantity used on neighbouring rice paddies – all
in the name of the Augusta dream. In the US, the Journal of Pesticides Reform
(Vol 11, No 3/1993) estimated that 750 kilograms of pesticides were sprayed
onto a typical course in a year, 11 kilograms onto each hectare. In 1990,
the Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of the organophosphate
diazinon on golf courses after the discovery of birds poisoned by the chemical.

Some studies have found that up to a third of the pesticide sprayed
onto courses vaporises, to become a hazard for users, particularly caddies
who work on the courses full time. A survey based on information from Japanese
doctors, published two years ago by a health insurance company, found that
of more than 500 patients with suspected poisoning from agricultural chemicals,
125 were associated with golf courses, 97 as employees. Symptoms included
skin rashes, respiratory illnesses such as asthma, allergic rhinitis, and
various disorders of the eye, ear and throat. In the US, at least one golfer
has died after exposure to the pesticide chlorothalonil on a course.

Slash and burn

Even in the British Isles, where the equable climate and less virulent
weeds should allow courses to prosper naturally, a combination of the Augusta
dream and plain bad course management is a constant threat to wildlife and
the surrounding countryside. At Brading on the Isle of Wight ‘they bulldozed
part of a brackish grazing marsh for a course, before the company went
bankrupt,’ says Clive Chatters, conservation director of the Hampshire and
Isle of Wight Naturalists’ Trust.

In Ireland, new courses are obliterating pristine sand dunes around
Lough Gill in County Kerry and at Brittas Bay in County Wicklow. At the
latter course, opened in June this year, developers remodelled the landscape
by ‘flattening slopes, scraping away natural vegetation and spraying peat
excavated from a nearby marsh onto the dune surface’, says the National
Trust for Ireland. At the Lough Gill course, ‘mowing and fertiliser application
in the dunes has reduced plant diversity by almost a half, leading to the
loss of species such as pyramidal orchids and the rare lady’s tresses’.

Antagonism between the golf and environment communities has also grown
in Britain because of the increasing use of irrigation for American-style
courses. During 1990 and 1991, a rush of proposals from farmers to build
golf courses on farmland being rested under the European Community’s set-aside
programme coincided with a drought that left dozens of rivers in southeast
England empty. When the proposals included applications to extract large
amounts of water to irrigate greens and fairways, environmentalists reacted
with anger.

The now abolished Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) in its 1990 study,
On course conservation: Managing golf’s natural heritage, says that the
pursuit of the ‘dark-green course manicured to a state of perfection’ means
British courses, like their foreign counterparts, have leapt onto ‘a treadmill
of regular fertilising, watering and pesticide dosing which has led to
some becoming mere shadows of their former selves’. This is often bad for
golf as well as wildlife. Too much fertiliser and water on greens, for instance,
has allowed coarse meadow grasses to oust finer grasses such as bents and
fescues. Green they may be, but the turf ‘grows lush and supple and becomes
susceptible to disease and damage’, it says.

Recent research by the Sports Turf Research Institute has discovered
massive overdosing of British greens with phosphate fertilisers. The soil
of greens should have not more than 20 parts per million of phosphates,
it says. In reality, according to the NCC, ‘less than 1 per cent of Britain’s
courses meet this level’, with 95 per cent exceeding 60 ppm and some exceeding
1000 ppm. ‘The soil of some courses could be legally sold as phosphatic
fertiliser,’ it notes.

Another threat is the size of most courses. Not how big they are, but
how small. The English Golf Union recommends 50 to 60 hectares, a quarter
the area of the Royal St George’s. But, says Raine, constricting the size
of a course means there is no room for good rough in which wildlife can
thrive. Below 60 hectares, ‘you don’t have room for more than ecological
cosmetics . . . It is my belief that to accommodate significant wildlife
value you need about 90 hectares.’ Conservationists argue that farmers should
use their land less intensively and allow more room for wildlife, and Raine
believes that they should take the same attitude to golf courses.

Here is a conservationists’ dilemma. Should they encourage course developers
to embrace wildlife, and make courses larger to give nature room to breathe?
Should they encourage golf courses onto valuable habitats as a deliberate
conservation strategy? Or should they see all courses as a hostile presence,
to be constrained in former quarries and bleak urban fringes?

Most new British courses are built on farmland which, according to
a study by the University of York, ‘in itself has little if any landscape
significance or ‘protective designations’. Nonetheless, the CPRE rejects
the idea that golf courses are a greener alternative to monoculture farming.
‘We don’t want farmland abandoned to other uses; we want it used less intensively
and with greater concern for wildlife,’ says Neil Sinden, the CPRE’s planning
officer.

Earth moving, drainage works and the destruction of hedges and trees
all cause damage to wildlife, as will extra traffic in the countryside and
the buildings – from clubhouses to chalets and hotels – that increasingly
accompany planning applications for courses. ‘Golf is becoming a Trojan
Horse for evading otherwise strict controls over sporadic development in
the countryside,’ says Sinden. It is because of these concerns that the
government’s Countryside Commission said last year that new courses should
not generally be allowed in national parks, areas of outstanding natural
beauty and similar places, and should ideally be sited in urban fringes
and on derelict land.

But not all changes on the British golf scene work against nature conservation.
Some are being made fit for nature once more. The old course at St Andrews
in Scotland claims to spend just £350 a year on fertilisers and to
water it only rarely. Instead, the course’s managers minimise inputs and,
as a result, says the NCC report, have ‘a fine bent/fescue turf’. At Therfield
Heath in Hertfordshire, a management plan approved by English Nature has
revived the rough and re-created flower meadows in the chalk grassland.
English Nature believes that more courses could be designed like this from
the start, and it backs the construction of new courses to take the pressure
off existing ones. ‘A golf course with a variety of habitats will be a positive
gain for conservation if it replaces a crop monoculture,’ says Ian Dair,
English Nature’s golf course specialist. ‘For the natterjack toad, bedstraw
broomrape and the lizard orchid, the continued good management of their
golf course sites marks the difference between survival or extinction.’

And there may be hope even in the land of the Augusta dream. A year
ago, the US Department of the Interior signed a deal with the country’s
main golfing organisations ‘to create environmentally friendly golf courses’
on federal land. Though environmentalists fear that the initiative could
be cover for an orgy of course construction in national parks and on native
reserves, the conservation-oriented National Audubon Society reports that
these new courses will use fewer pesticides, recycle sewage for irrigation
and preserve rough where possible. The society admits, however, that the
developers ‘will still have to bring in the bulldozers to carve the courses’.
Before bulldozing starts, perhaps the course designers should take a trip
across the Atlantic to have a look at Royal St George’s, and see what really
green greens are like.

* * *

Colonised by golf

The two most avid golf-playing nations are the US and the Japan, with
respectively 25 million and 12 million of the world’s estimated 50 million
golfers. There are around 25 000 courses in the world, covering territory
approaching the area of Belgium. Through the 1980s, the US opened more than
one new course a day – it now has around 13 600, or one for every 18 000
inhabitants.

Britain has 2 million players, and its two thousand courses account
for more than half the European total. Already, Britain has more golf courses
for its size than any other nation bar Singapore and a few remote islands.
Golf courses already occupy at least 1000 square kilometres of Britain
– almost three times the size of the Isle of Wight – and there are plans
to increase the total area by one-third. According to Pete Raine, director
of the Kent Trust for Nature Conservation, one-sixtieth of Kent is taken
up by golf courses.

In comparison with its area, Britain has twice as many courses as Japan
and six times as many as the US. Even so, Britain adds more at a rate of
roughly one a week – just about enough to meet the target set by the Royal
and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews in 1989 for 700 new courses during the
1990s.

By contrast, Japan’s 12 million golfers are vying to use just 1700 courses,
leading to very high club membership fees and long waiting lists to join.
There is a thriving trade in club memberships, which are bought and sold
like stocks and shares.

To solve the crisis, Japanese course developers and golfers alike have
headed abroad. The Japanese, who also own courses in the US and Europe,
are the driving force behind the spread of golf across Southeast Asia. It
can be cheaper to fly to Thailand to play a few rounds in one of the dozens
of courses sprouting on former farmland along the Bang Na-Trat highway out
of Bangkok than to play at home. Thailand now builds one new course every
ten days, thanks to an invasion of Japanese golfers and financiers, who
expect to increase the number from 80 in 1991 to 600 by 2000. The giant
Thai golf resort at Kaeng Krachan covers 5600 hectares and includes three
courses as well as hotels, other sports facilities and an airport.

In golf-mad Australia, Japanese money has helped give Queensland one
course for every 13 000 people. Other Asian ‘tiger’ economies are following
the Japanese lead. By the end of the decade, Singapore plans to have 5 per
cent of its land area taken up by golf courses. Its entrepreneurs are also
financing courses in neighbouring Malaysia and Indonesia. China is draining
paddies in Guangdong province to accommodate golfers from neighbouring
Hong Kong and Macau with courses designed by Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman
and Gary Player. The Taiwanese are building courses in Vietnam. The US-administered
island of Guam in the western Pacific, which has a resident population of
120 000, has plans for seven courses.

The British tradition of business deals sealed on golf courses is being
imitated from Bangkok to Bali, Seoul to Sumatra. And golf itself is becoming
big business. Investors in property and tourism are making a killing as
golf courses increasingly feature hotels, chalet villages and even private
airports, to attract golf tourists who never need to leave the site.

Tim Shepstone, golf specialist with London business consultancy Touche
Ross, estimates that northern Europeans take around 200 000 golfing holidays
in Spain each year, keeping 30 courses busy on an 80-kilometre stretch of
the Costa del Sol. You can go golfing ‘on safari’ in Zimbabwe, or hire a
female caddie in Thailand who doubles as a prostitute. But, while tourists
in general show growing interest in wildlife and its protection, golfers
appear to be the exception. ‘As far as I know there is no discernible market
sector emerging of green golfers,’ says Shepstone.

Instead, golf courses are emerging as one of the most environmentally
rapacious and socially divisive forms of tourist and property development.
In western Java, farmers have fought a series of well-publicised battles
with course developers and police to prevent the takeover of their land
for golf resorts. There have been similar disputes in Thailand and Malaysia,
where five courses line the road from Kuala Lumpur to the airport. Even
pilots protest about the safety hazards of lights from night golfing.

Japanese environmentalists launched the first anti-golf movement two
years ago and claim success in halting construction of dozens of courses.
The Global Anti-Golf Movement formed in Malaysia last April declared 29
April World No-Golf Day. According to Susan Wheat, the movement’s British
coordinator, its influence will be felt worldwide.