The Organic Golf Course Movement

Photo: Julia Cumes for the New York Times

Well, I just don't know what to think about this. The New York Times had an article recently about America's most organic golf, located in Martha's Vineyard. Super-exclusive, and uber-expensive, the Vineyard Golf Club doesn't use any synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. It is content to let some weeds grow, and from the pictures it seems like the natural vegetation covers all of the out of bounds areas.

A side note: I really think the following paragraph shows how win-win-win something like this has the potential to be:

"Nothing at the Vineyard Golf Club, now in its ninth season, is left to chance. To prevent fungal disease, crews go out daily at dawn using a long, whip-like device that whisks condensation off the grass throughout the course’s 69 acres. And visitors have their shoes cleaned before they play to keep contrary grass seeds or diseases from infiltrating the fairways and greens. The club’s maintenance labor budget is higher than those of most clubs its size, but Carlson said his net costs were the same “because of the money we save on traditional pesticides, which are very expensive.”"

Better for the environment, better for employment, and in the long run, perhaps better for the budget.

On the one hand, this seems pretty dern cool - making golf courses, which are naturally huge wasters of resources and extreme polluters, more green. On the other hand - and this is the age-old question - does it matter how green you make something that is fundamentally flawed and environmentally unfriendly by its very nature? What do you all think? Does making a golf course (an inherently poor use of land) greener actually mean much in the grand scheme of things?