Magazines: golfdigest.com

How Green Is Golf?

We talked to seven leading thinkers at the intersection of golf and the environment

Interviews By John Barton

Portraits By Kagan McLeod

May 2008

THE GOLF-COURSE ARCHITECT

Mike Hurdzan

Mike Hurdzan, 64, is one of the world's pre-eminent golf-course architects with an extraordinary and varied portfolio of golf courses to his name (see hurdzanfry.com), such as Widow's Walk, where he took an abandoned sand and gravel quarry and garbage landfill south of Boston and, working with environmentalists, transformed it into a thriving, environmentally friendly public golf course.

Read Interview >>

THE ACTIVIST

Jay Feldman

Jay Feldman, 54, is a co-founder and the director of Beyond Pesticides (beyondpesticides.org), a nonprofit membership organization started in 1981 that "works with allies in protecting public health and the environment to lead the transition to a world free of toxic pesticides." Feldman has been involved in the Golf & the Environment Initiative from the beginning, attending that first meeting at Pebble Beach and every summit since then.

Read Interview >>

THE GOLF-COURSE SUPERINTENDENT

Jeff Carlson

Before joining the Vineyard, Carlson worked with Mike Hurdzan in building and managing Widow's Walk (see "The golf-course architect" above). Jeff Carlson was a recipient of a 2003 GCSAA/Golf Digest Environmental Leaders in Golf Award and is the 2008 winner of the President's Award for Environmental Stewardship from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.

Read Interview >>

THE REGULATOR

Robert Wood

Robert Wood is the deputy director of the Wetlands Division, the EPA's representative in the Golf & the Environment Initiative, and an 18-handicap golfer. We met in his office in the vast EPA building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Read Interview >>

THE ADVOCATE

Ronald G. Dodson

Ronald G. Dodson has been president of Audubon International (auduboninternational.org) since he founded it in 1987. The organization has nothing to do with birds, nor the prestigious National Audubon Society, which Dodson worked for in the 1980s as a regional vice president. A former scratch golfer who earned a golf scholarship to Oakland City University in Indiana, Dodson now plays to a 10-handicap.

Read Interview >>

THE GRASS EXPERT

James T. Snow

The Green Section is the least-loved resident of the U.S. Golf Association's headquarters at Golf House in Far Hills, N.J. "Everyone's much more interested in equipment, or the rules, or the U.S. Open," says the department's national director, James T. Snow, 56. "But what's more important than the surface that we play the game on?" The Green Section, founded in 1920, is designed to make sure that surface is as good as possible

Read Interview >>

THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

Brent Blackwelder

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.

Read Interview >>