The Environmentalist: Brent Blackwelder
How Green Is Golf?
In 1970, Brent Blackwelder started doing volunteer work for the U.S. branch of Friends of the Earth, which describes itself as the world's largest grassroots environmental network (foe.org). Now president of the organization, Blackwelder, 65, is one of America's most prominent environmental advocates and has testified before Congress on environmental issues more than 100 times. He has also been a golfer for more than half a century -- and used to be the proud owner of a 2-handicap. "Now it's more like 5 or 6," says the former golf team member of Duke University (the start of an academic journey in which Blackwelder earned a master's in mathematics from Yale and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Maryland). "I play nine holes probably twice a week in the summer, except when I'm on vacation. Then I'll play most of the time." We met at the Friends of the Earth headquarters in the nation's capital, not far from Dupont Circle. Blackwelder's sixth-floor office afforded a terrific view of the city. Snow was falling. After the interview, he headed to Capitol Hill to do what he does best: "an afternoon of hardball lobbying."
Golf Digest: Is golf a friend or a foe of the earth?
Brent Blackwelder: I've been asked whether, in my position, I should even play golf. My brother said to me, "Isn't environmentally sound golf an oxymoron?" And I said, "Well, it doesn't have to be." There have been some courses that have done some very good things, and there have been other courses that have caused some fairly serious environmental problems: contaminating water, ruining pristine streams, destroying habitats, producing landslides. There are some really bad examples. The nature of golf courses today is that too often you're playing the game on a chemical stew. The Golf & the Environment Initiative established very good principles to manage golf courses in as environmentally sound a manner as possible, covering things like where golf courses should and shouldn't be located, habitat creation, pesticides, water and energy use. Where we have not done a good job is in the outreach, in getting these principles used by the 16,000 golf courses in the United States. We haven't been able to instill an ethic of all golf courses looking at their daily management practices and trying to be compliant with good standards. I've been to a resort where they were spraying in high winds. You could actually smell it. That's violating all principles of good application. I've seen courses spraying when young children are present. Things like that should not happen. So overall, it's an uneven situation.
Let's talk about some of those principles. What land should be used for golf courses, and what shouldn't?
There are certain places where you don't want golf courses. I fought to keep a course off of the Crystal River in Northern Michigan, where we taught our kids to canoe, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. A prime, sensitive area with pristine water, very rare plants and so forth -- a golf course would be compromising the environmental integrity of that land. We were successful in keeping that one away. On the other hand, I grew up playing a course that was reseeded over farm fields and has very little chemical usage, Silver Lake Country Club in western New York state. I still play it when I'm there every summer. Any conversion of farmland to a golf course does not present very many problems. In fact, you might even be able to restore the land to some degree. Also, golf courses restoring quarries or mines or other degraded land. But if you're going into a forest and cutting down trees to put in a golf course, losing biological diversity, reducing the species that are present, and compromising the water quality, that's at the other end of the spectrum.
How about habitat creation -- what can golf courses do?
Part of the appeal of golf is, you're getting out with the elements, in nature. The more non-use portions of the golf course can be returned to native species, the better it is. You don't want a lot of ornamentals. If you don't have the right native shrubs, you won't get the insects, butterflies and different kinds of birds that you want. About 6,000 of the 9,000 bird species on earth are in decline. That's not good news. It's very serious. There are possibilities on every course to alter that. Take a look at how Augusta does the banks of its creeks. It's not natural to grow grass right down a bank and into a stream. I'd prefer to see native vegetation, aquatic plants, growing along those banks. It's much more attractive. One of the worst things you see at some courses is an artificially dug pond with stone work all around the edge of it like a gothic cathedral. Then you have golf balls bouncing off it, and it starts getting much too much like a miniature golf course rather than being out with the elements.
Energy use?
Golf is going to require some energy use, but there are energy-efficient ways of doing things. I've talked with Kenwood Golf and Country Club here in Bethesda [Md.] about using solar panels. We've potentially got so much solar and wind power. We've got these vast outdoor parking lots in this country, like at the Pentagon here in D.C., or Dulles Airport. If you put solar collectors over these outdoor parking lots -- up on pedestals so that they'd shield the cars from the heat that builds up during the day -- you'd be generating fantastic amounts of electricity. If you did all those outdoor parking lots, you'd generate more electricity than the U.S. uses. It's a no-brainer to do it. The problem is that fossil fuels are heavily subsidized, and what we pay for them does not reflect their true cost, or their external costs on society. That's not in accordance with the free-market system. When you externalize your cost onto the rest of society, that's cheating. But that's exactly how we've allowed it to proceed.
