[ Lost in the Landscape ]

teed off

In wild­ness is the preser­va­tion of the world.
–Thoreau

In a desert, golf is the utter ruin of the known uni­verse.
–Me

This is the week of the U.S. Open golf tour­na­ment here in San Diego. Some­thing like 42,500 spec­ta­tor tick­ets per day have been sold for three days of prac­tice rounds and four of com­pe­ti­tion. It’s being described as hav­ing a string of Super Bowls hit­ting town, seven days in a row.

To mit­i­gate the poten­tials for traf­fic headaches they’re run­ning shut­tles for the spec­ta­tors from Qual­comm Sta­dium, where they last played the city’s last real Super Bowl, up to the Tor­rey Pines golf facil­ity, located on the brink of a cliff four hun­dred feet above the broad sands of Black’s Beach, one of the most spec­tac­u­lar clothing-optional beaches remain­ing any­where. And yes, in addi­tion to being a spec­tac­u­lar loca­tion for a nude beach it’s also a stun­ning place to plant a golf course.

The Tor­rey Pines golf course [ source ]

In addi­tion to the shut­tles, they’re ask­ing employ­ers sur­round­ing the golf course to limit how many employ­ees show up at work this week. Beyond that, some of the office build­ings that bor­der the golf course effec­tively have been ordered shut down. Rumor is that they don’t want non-paying work­ing stiffs to get a free look at Tiger or Phil or Adam, and that there are secu­rity concerns.

To add to the chaos, add to every­thing that this is finals week at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, located just across the street from the golf course. Oops.

All that rubs me the wrong way. While it might be appro­pri­ate to main­tain golf courses in cool, wet places like Scot­land, it seems some­where between bizarre and socially irre­spon­si­ble to ded­i­cate thou­sands of acres to the game of golf in the desert that is South­ern California.

Water is at the fore­front of many a Californian’s think­ing. Many of us plant our gar­dens with drought-tolerant plants to max­i­mize our water usage, and we try to limit the size of our lawns.

The San Diego County desert town of Bor­rego Springs grew to some size as an agri­cul­tural area, then began to attract peo­ple who grew the town even fur­ther. With those peo­ple came golf courses and the kind of water use that goes with them. The num­bers aren’t exact, but of the total water intake of the town, some­thing like ten per­cent goes to house­holds (includ­ing land­scap­ing), while twenty per­cent goes to golf courses. The rest goes to the farm­ers who are com­plain­ing that their aquifer is being drained dry. The pro­por­tion of water use between res­i­dences and golf courses is sim­i­lar in other desert areas like Palm Springs. So, in a desert, huge num­bers of golf courses don’t make much sense.

In addi­tion to the water issues, golf courses are prof­li­gate users of pes­ti­cides and her­bi­cides. After all, who wants to play golf on a course with brown spots? The Beyond Pes­ti­cides site posted a piece estab­lish­ing links between golf course chem­i­cal use and var­i­ous can­cers, and Golf Digest of all pub­li­ca­tions ran an arti­cle, “How Green is Golf,” in its recent May 2008 issue look­ing at the issue.

Their con­clu­sion? “New courses in the desert will become rarer,” and “The residue of syn­thetic chem­i­cals are found in high con­cen­tra­tions as far away as the Arc­tic,” and this quote from a par­tic­i­pant at a sym­po­sium at Peb­ble Beach: “From what I know about Augusta National, it’s really a tele­vi­sion stu­dio and not a golf course.”

There are signs of encour­age­ment. The week­end San Diego Union-Tribune had an arti­cle on how master-planned golf com­mu­ni­ties are on the wane here in town. Much of the rea­son­ing is eco­nomic. There were days when you could build a course here for a mil­lion dol­lars a hole, but ris­ing land val­ues have made that impos­si­ble. Seems that the major­ity of the peo­ple who bought into a golf com­mu­nity val­ued the per­ceived open space, but only a minor­ity of them ever played the game. It’s proven to be cheaper to set down some hik­ing trails and pre­serve the nat­ural open space. In addi­tion, with what is known now about the health haz­ards of liv­ing on a golf course, who’d want to pay extra for the privilege?

So this week I get to endure the U.S. Open along with much of San Diego. While I’m doing that, I keep flash­ing to this pic­ture in my mind of a dri­ving range that I saw on the out­skirts of Bor­rego Springs, prob­a­bly the most socially respon­si­ble golf facil­ity that I’ve seen any­where. (Next time I’m out there I’ll try to snap a photo of it.) What tells you it’s a dri­ving range isn’t the sickly fake-green color of its grass. In fact, nobody waters it, and the range is the color of the sur­round­ing desert.

Instead, what tips its hand as a dri­ving range are the golf balls scat­tered over the facil­ity: thou­sands of the lit­tle white things, glis­ten­ing in the vibrat­ing mirage-inducing mid­day atmos­phere like bright desert rocks arrayed over the pale brown sands. Now that’s my vision of paradise!

June 10 2008 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: golf • golf courses • herbicides • pesticides • U.S. Open | No Comments »

vegetable plutonium

In my more active anti-nuke activist days one of the more com­pelling argu­ments against nuclear power was that some of its byprod­ucts were so long-lived that they would remain lethal for longer than human civ­i­liza­tion has existed. Plutonium-239, for exam­ple, has a half-life of some­thing like 24,000 years, and even a tiny par­ti­cle of it could prove dan­ger­ous to a person.

I was think­ing about that dur­ing my weed­ing exer­cise this week­end, deal­ing with a neglected cor­ner of the gar­den where the neighbor’s Eng­lish ivy had crossed over and under the fence and set up a stand that had spread 20 feet or more into my yard. In the course of its inva­sion, it had con­tributed to a low brick retain­ing wall being pushed over.

The wall the ivy helped push over

I hate to use stuff like Roundup in the yard, but I tried it on the ivy a cou­ple weeks ago. Some of the weeds around it shriv­eled to brown ghosts of them­selves, but at best the ivy showed a lit­tle burn­ing around the edges of the leaves. I’d tried Roundup­ping the ivy before, with sim­i­lar min­i­mal results. Ivy really seems like the thing that wouldn’t die. Some online sites have guide­lines on how to get rid of the stuff, but none of them seem to guar­an­tee easy con­trol. (A cou­ple of the sites I looked at: South­east Exotic Pest Plant Coun­cil Inva­sive Plant Man­ual and the Plant Con­ser­va­tion Alliance’s “Least wanted” pages.)

I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to the alter­na­tive of dig­ging it out by hand, but dig­ging it out by hand was the chore that ate my week­end. And it’s a chore that’ll be occu­py­ing at least a cou­ple more. The job is extra-awful in that even a lit­tle piece of ivy run­ner left in the ground could grow roots and set up a whole new colony. You have to be sure to dig down the foot or so that the run­ners can travel at, and you need to be sure that you’ve rid the patch of all the alien ivy life forms before you move on to the next spade­full. It’s like veg­etable plu­to­nium in that any lit­tle bit left in the ground could prove dan­ger­ous for future gen­er­a­tions. Nasty, evil stuff.

Here you can see the pro­por­tion of dirt to ivy roots…

If my mantra of my teen years was “No nukes!” the mantra of my cur­rent gar­den­ing life has to be “No Ivy!” Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for his quote that went some­thing like, “Doctor’s can always bury their mis­takes. Archi­tects can only plant ivy.” Well, friends, doing that would be the great­est mis­take of all.

March 03 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • quotes | Tags: herbicides • ivy • plutonium • weeding • weeds | 2 Comments »