#Maybe I'm just pissy that there are no green spaces where I live to the tune of me having to create my own in my backyard

[ioletia]

Today at the Traveler Championship golf nonsense game, some people stormed the field to protest something. People are attributing it to Just Stop Oil, a British based environmental group, but as of right now no one is certain- and, honestly, I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about the nonsense that are golf courses...

I could and should write out a whole treatise on why exactly golf courses and their existence within the world are both ethically and morally "bad," but no one's going to read that twenty page document. So, bullet points.

Golf courses, and the associated country clubs, were (and still are) notoriously bigoted- specifically towards Jewish and BIPOC people. If you aren't a WASP, good luck finding a foothold in the sport/community.

Golf courses, and the associated country clubs, actively exclude anyone not of a certain wealth. This has a number of knock on effects, such as keeping average people out of "green" spaces, actively gentrifying nearby areas, and just generally creating a very insular community. And, as we all know, insular communities tend to become quite bigoted- see the first bullet.

Golf courses are monocultures. A monoculture refers to a large swath of area predominately populated by one species to the exclusion of others. Golf courses use one or two species of grass to populate their entire course. This pushes out local native species of plants that many native species of wildlife need to survive.

To continue, golf courses aren't allowed to seed. Grasses need to go through a period of growth before they push up seed heads, but, because golf requires very consistent turf, that is prevented by constant cutting and over seeding. This essentially creates a vast wasteland that pushes out local wildlife and starves any that might try to stay within it. Golf courses might look "natural" and "green," but are literally as far from those concepts as you could possible be.

In addition, maintaining a thick lush turf requires constant fertilizing, watering, and biocides/pesticides, which are rarely ever contained to only the golf course. These chemicals can run off to local water ways causing all sorts of environmental damage to wildlife species that were already pushed out of their habitats.

Golf courses take up so much space! Which, in and of itself isn't an issue, but when you combine this with the environmental impact they can have as well as the exclusionary culture they operate under, it becomes a huge issue. Instead of having a green space for everyone, including the local wildlife, there's a WASP club that actively poisons the area around it.

So, yeah, fuck golf. We should be protesting it all the time. It's bad.