Greening Golf Courses the Audubon Way

“It seems like athletic events have fallen behind the environmental movement,” says a marathon race director in an article in Thursday's NY Times regarding greening road races. Kevin Fletcher, the Executive Director of Audubon International, an organization that has been helping green the golf community for 17 years, agrees. Audubon's Green Golf Program, oversees a certification process containing 100 criteria covering issues such as water use, chemical/pesticide use and on-sight natural habitat protection. 700 golf courses have already achieved certification. An additional 1500 are actively working towards that goal.

Being able to hit the links on a course that respects the planet is very much in line with the tenets of lazy green living. But currently Audubon certified courses represent a mere 2-3% of all golf courses in the US. Finding a course is easy, but but still not quite as easy as stepping onto your favorite course and teeing off. To motivate more golf courses to join the movement, Bonterra, the official wine sponsor of the PGA tour (and maker of fabulous, award-winning organic wines), is paying for up to 100 golf courses to sign up as members and receive the professional materials and individual golf course consulting that comes with such privileges.

Much of the focus in greening the greens is encouraging course superintendents to return parts of the rough area, back to naturally "rough". The average golf course spans 300 acres with about 22 acres of unplayable and even unhackable rough zones. In hopes of bringing back habitat and cutting back on maintenance resources for these areas, the first step to golf course greening is to stop mowing, watering, and maintaining these areas on the course. That simple step begins a process for golfers of rethinking golf and experiencing the sport in a whole new way.

-- Margaret