Transcript: Reclaiming Abandoned Golf Courses: A Sustainable Solution for Land Restoration
CLARICE: Good morning, everybody. And welcome to this week’s episode of Environmentally Speaking.
MARISA: Hi, everybody. I’m Marisa Desautel, an environmental attorney in Rhode Island, oh, and Massachusetts. Can’t forget about Massachusetts.
CLARICE: I like how you said that like it was a surprise like it’s a new thing.
MARISA: Like, oh, yeah. No. It’s always been that way. I just don’t say it. I don’t know why.
CLARICE: And I’m Clarice who lived in both states. I don’t know. I have no good segue this week.
MARISA: Well, we have a good topic —
CLARICE: Yes.
MARISA: — one that I stumbled across. And, you know, I feel inclined to share a personal anecdote.
CLARICE: Oh, start at the beginning.
MARISA: You already know this, so it’s not going to be a surprise to you, but I don’t sleep. I am up from 1:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. every single night regardless of sleeping pills and other supplements. I don’t sleep, so what I find myself doing is going on my phone. I know you’re not supposed to do that, but it actually kind of puts me back to sleep. And I use some of that time to look up environmental issues and my phone is now programmed to give me environmental issues. So I recently have been inundating Clarice with different topics and issues that I’m finding at all hours of the night and I think I’m actually sending them to you at all hours of the night, as well.
CLARICE: I like it if it helps.
MARISA: Okay.
CLARICE: I mean, one, selfishly, I don’t have to look for it.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: And, two, I wake up with a bunch of new topics to read.
MARISA: It’s a win-win.
CLARICE: Yeah. When you’re catching up on your sleep, I’m —
MARISA: When is that? When am I doing that?
CLARICE: Oh, you’re not.
MARISA: While I’m driving. While I’m driving the car.
CLARICE: Yeah. I like to give these a quick read on the treadmill, so I like this.
MARISA: Nice. Okay. Good. I’m glad we talked it through.
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: What are we talking about today?
CLARICE: We are talking about reclaiming abandoned, unloved, unpopular golf courses.
MARISA: Yes.
CLARICE: I love this. Have you ever golfed?
MARISA: Yes, I have.
CLARICE: Oh.
MARISA: How about you?
CLARICE: Does mini-golf count?
MARISA: No.
CLARICE: Then no.
MARISA: Okay.
CLARICE: I’ve always wanted to do — I think Topgolf is becoming really popular where you just stand on that platform and then, like in Happy Gilmore, send the balls to space.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: That’s what I want to do.
MARISA: We should do that.
CLARICE: Yeah. I have no interest in a golf course.
MARISA: No. I’ve played a few times. A lot of business gets done on the golf course.
CLARICE: Yes.
MARISA: It’s an entire day. People love it, so I’m not talking badly about it.
[0:03:00] CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: But it’s an entire day. You have to dedicate your whole workday to it. And I’m competitive and I like to consider myself an athlete. I’m awful at golf. Golf and tennis, I can’t do them and then I get mad and frustrated and so it’s not a pleasurable experience for me, but people love it. People love it.
CLARICE: Yeah. Who knows. All right. Maybe I’ll try it, but, I mean, there’s plenty of golf courses that people have either tried and disliked, never tried, but end of the story is these golf courses are unpopular, unpopulated and they’re getting reclaimed.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: So I love this article that you sent. The number of closures since 2006 have been outweighing openings —
MARISA: Really?
CLARICE: — which I thought was really interesting because —
MARISA: I wonder why. You’d think with COVID a lot of people were trying to get outside and do stuff. I would have thought the numbers increased. Okay. Continue.
CLARICE: I thought so, too, and also the consistent popularity. At least in the circles that — you know, my friends and I’m imagining your friends, the popularity hasn’t waned.
MARISA: No.
CLARICE: So, yeah. There’s organizations that are working on — and I keep saying reclaiming, especially out in California.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: The state director of Trust for Public Land, they’re looking to take back this land and kind of work backwards because if you think of a golf course it’s a man cured lawn. The grass is one to two to three types. You’ve got that, you know, smooth fair green. You’ve kind of got those rough patches and then you’ve got when you’ve gone way out of bounds. There’s not a ton of variety. There’s not a ton of diversity and it isn’t how nature works. So when they’re taking back these golf courses, they’re bringing back that biodiversity. They’re returning it to its natural state.
MARISA: Look at you knowing stuff. I’m so proud of you. You’re turning into a real pro-environmentalist. Like you have these facts and knowledge at your fingertips.
CLARICE: I was very excited about that one.
MARISA: Yeah. That’s pretty awesome. The thing about golf courses that I find interesting from a professional environmental perspective is they were once open space, vacant land, probably forested. And as a development the company that’s moving forward with the development will go in and clear-cut an entire forest to build a golf course on. And as we’ve talked about in other episodes, that’s not awesome. The thing about this article that made me laugh out loud is a reference to someone saying that reclaiming golf courses is a good way to combat climate change. That is so backwards to me.
[0:06:14] CLARICE: It felt like a tall order.
MARISA: Well, it’s like but you’re looking at this the wrong way. We have to slow development down. We don’t need to be — I mean, it’s great that golf courses are being reclaimed, but looking at this as a way to — there wouldn’t be such climate change if you stopped clear-cutting forests for development or for anything else.
CLARICE: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s a huge ask. We wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for this super homogenous patch of green.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: I mean, don’t get me wrong. There are beautiful golf courses everywhere. Again, we’re not here to talk shit about them, but they’re unnatural. They’re unnatural looking, so I like the idea of taking these unused ones and then returning them back. And one thing that I’m noticing — and we’ll link the article that we’re looking at in the show notes — is a lot of these projects want to turn these back into public use spaces.
MARISA: Yeah. Yeah.
CLARICE: So, you know, in my mind I’m envisioning the possibility — and it didn’t go into a ton of detail — but the possibility of having trails going through it, nature walks. You know, if I’m being super hopeful and altruistic maybe a nature center. That would be nice. Something like that where it’s inviting people to come in and see the space again, so overall it’s a good use to a space that’s otherwise not being used.
MARISA: One of the examples that this group talks about — and let me just cite –the group that’s putting forward these environmental articles is Call to Earth which is a CNN editorial series together with Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative. And the goal of these two groups working together is to try to drive awareness and education around sustainability. So the example — it gives many good examples about which golf courses are being converted, but one of them that I thought was interesting is located in Ocean Meadows, California. I guess it’s part of Santa Barbara which is a lovely area and there is a former golf course. It’s a smaller golf course, only nine holes. It was built in the 1960s and it was built on a coastal wetland. I know.
CLARICE: Oh, this is an audio medium.
MARISA: I know. I know.
CLARICE: For folks who aren’t watching on YouTube, I just looked extremely shocked.
[0:08:56] MARISA: Yeah. So 1960s, freshwater wetlands and costal wetlands were not necessary regulated. I think in Rhode Island the Freshwater Wetlands Act and the Coastal Wetlands Act didn’t go into effect until 1976, 1978. I know a lot of the federal statutes like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act didn’t pass in the legislature until the 70s. So in the 60s there were a lot of examples of wetlands being clear-cut, development going into wetlands as well as people dumping solvents into our rivers. I could go on and on.
In any event, this particular golf course built in the 1960s in a wetland is being reclaimed. It’s about 64 acres and in 2013 the golf course was on the way down, so that’s when this project started. Since 2013 when the wetlands have started to come back through planting of native vegetation as well as just nature reclaiming migratory birds and threatened Western Snowy Plovers are successfully breeding in the area.
And, again, because I’m not necessarily a positive person, I would just like to point out that the group that is working on this and the group that put together the article references this Ocean Meadows Golf Course returning to its wetland state which doubles as a flood defense for the city. No. No. I mean, it’s the same concept that I just referenced that reclaiming golf courses can fight climate change. Well, the wetland is a flood protection and shouldn’t have been converted into a golf course to begin with. I find it odd that — maybe it’s a marketing idea, or maybe our society is trying to get people to want more sustainability and projects like this.
CLARICE: Well, I feel like it’s —
MARISA: But it doesn’t make sense to —
CLARICE: I mean, not to be glib or to take the Marisa seat in this, but have you ever seen at the grocery store when they slap gluten free on things that are very clearly gluten free? Like they’ll put gluten free on ice creams. Like you know it’s gluten free.
MARISA: No. I haven’t seen that.
CLARICE: Oh, there are some times if you go to — and, listeners, sometimes go to the grocery store and find some sort of treat. Like it’s typically some sort of snack or something.
[0:12:02] MARISA: A Hershey bar?
CLARICE: Yeah. Some sort of treat and it will say gluten free on it when it is designed to be gluten free just by nature.
MARISA: So it’s a marketing thing.
CLARICE: Exactly.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: This is what it is.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: You’ve called this wetland doing what it’s naturally supposed to do, how it’s just always been gluten free.
MARISA: Yeah. It’s the same concept and I don’t know what the point behind it is. I guess in the gluten free context it’s to capture part of a market that had previously not considered ice cream or Hershey bars. It just really —
CLARICE: To make it seem better.
MARISA: — just makes me nuts.
CLARICE: Adding a positive.
MARISA: It makes me nuts. Don’t people know that natural wetlands and coastal wetlands and sand dunes and the beach as it naturally exists is a — okay. Never mind.
CLARICE: No. No. Sometimes they don’t.
MARISA: What are people doing with their time?
CLARICE: But I do want to shift to another kind of tangent topic.
MARISA: Okay.
CLARICE: So this idea of reintroducing biodiversity and going back to how a golf course by nature has almost no diversity, especially in the lawns.
MARISA: It’s all white people.
CLARICE: White people, green lawns and typically one type of lawn. Have you seen this movement to make people’s home lawns more diverse —
MARISA: Yes. Yes.
CLARICE: — or remove the grass altogether?
MARISA: Yes. Yes. Wildflowers.
CLARICE: Yes.
MARISA: Yes. I’ve seen that.
CLARICE: And different mosses and things like that.
MARISA: Uh-huh.
CLARICE: Do you have any — and we haven’t researched this, or at least I haven’t researched this a ton yet, but do you have any thoughts on this, any initial reactions?
MARISA: I love it. I think it’s great. I grew up in Foster and that’s what I grew up with and I didn’t know any different. I have a lawn now and we’ve started replanting and looking at different ways to convert what we’ve got and kind of what that would look like. The problem is getting someone over here to help me actually do the work..
CLARICE: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a big task.
MARISA: Yeah. Everyone’s busy right now. But, yeah, I love that idea. How about you?
CLARICE: I actually had a coworker who started teaching me about this. She doesn’t have a huge backyard, but she had a substantial front yard which she turned into a garden and in the spaces in between the garden she planted creeping thyme which, I guess, flowers purple and blue.
MARISA: Oh.
CLARICE: So it was just like this really beautiful rolling hill and then she had a garden happening and it was just this — I mean, it looked stunning to me.
MARISA: Yeah. Yeah.
[0:15:02] CLARICE: And to me they’re much more interesting than grass.
MARISA: They’re really beautiful. Yeah. And I don’t know if this is related or not, but leaving leaves instead of raking them or gathering them up and putting them in a bag and bringing them to the landfill — what a waste. They’re going to break down naturally. They provide habitat for certain species over winter including queen honeybees. I didn’t know this. They will make a home under leaves and get through the winter. The leaves act as a little bit of a thermal barrier. They provide habitat.
CLARICE: And fireflies.
MARISA: Yeah. I think moths. So we’re doing that now. I mean, I don’t rake leaves anyway, but I see people just going bananas raking leaves and putting them in bags and it’s like you can maybe just mow them if you’re concerned —
CLARICE: Yeah. That’s what we do.
MARISA: — about the grass dying and leave them.
CLARICE: Actually, I was going to say last year we mowed them, so they were mulched up a little bit.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: Our grass came back greener.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: It’s food.
MARISA: They’re natural fertilizer, yeah.
CLARICE: Our neighbors don’t love it, but it’s fine.
MARISA: Well, I don’t love your neighbors.
CLARICE: So on that we’re looking at golf carts differently. We’re thinking about our lawns differently.
MARISA: Golf carts?
CLARICE: Oh, golf courses.
MARISA: Well, it’s funny that you say that because I would love to have a golf cart at my house. If anyone has one for sale —
CLARICE: Yeah. There we go.
MARISA: — let us know.
CLARICE: All right. You can catch us on the socials on Facebook, Instagram, always going to call it Twitter at Desautel Browning. You can reach out to us via e-mail at —
MARISA: info@DesautelBrowning.com.
CLARICE: Have a great one.
MARISA: Thank you.
