nurselofwyr:solarpunkarchivist:sanguineheavens:thefingerfuckingfemalefury:zooophagous:ralf
nurselofwyr: solarpunkarchivist: sanguineheavens: thefingerfuckingfemalefury: zooophagous: ralfmaximus: princeloki: f1rstperson: Glad to see my lifelong disinterest in golf is paying off let me tell you about golf i grew up in a little desert valley called Tucson, Arizona, where it only rains 2 inches a year on average. the majority of the city’s water is pumped from an underground aquifer, which took millions of years to fill. one of the biggest conservation efforts in our city was for water, naturally, and i spent a lot of time learning about low flow toilets and 5 minute showers. i learned that filling your sink basin and washing your dishes in that water is less costly than running the tap. i learned that it only takes 2 days without water on the desert for someone to die the city was sinking as the aquifer drained. neighborhoods fell into flood zones that didnt exist 10 years ago there’s a road called Golf Links in the city and it is lined with golf courses. miles of green grass where grass doesn’t grow, in a valley where it doesn’t rain. why? because the rich white retirees who moved there to stop the aching in their joints decided they should also get to play golf. meanwhile our public schools taught small children like me that taking long showers would kill the world let the golf industry burn There are 15,500+ golf courses in the United States alone. Each one consumes ~312,000 gallons of water per day. That consumption is equivalent to 55+ million humans per day in the United States… roughly 1/6 the entire population. We simply cannot sustain this frivolity, especially for something 99% of us will never use. Destroy golf courses and plant wild grasses and butterfly bushes in their place. This was literally the plot of an actual movie that got made though okay there is legitimately a movie out there about people who want to destroy golf at all costs The thing that really gets me is that this is another problem caused by globalizing something that started in a really specific place. Like, there are golf courses in Scotland that don’t water their grass and that are mostly composed of naturally occurring grasses and plants? Places where people have been playing golf for 500 years. And because it is always raining in Scotland, they’re relatively healthy and no one really complains? Of course, if you want to play the game somewhere that doesn’t have, on average, 250 days of rainfall a year, you have a problem. (Which isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of BAD golf courses here, too, but… Like, there are legitimately golf courses that are just “Some people made holes in a field. Balls were hit at them. Nearby, other people admired nature.”)Golf is like a really early and abiding example of one of those super food crazes. There was no problem with this thing existing until EVERYONE EVERYWHERE had to do it in defiance of logic and moderation. Also the golf course in the centre of our capital city is free to use by anyone at anytime. Or there’s the Coober Pedy Opal Fields Golf Club, which is quite proud of its grassless state: -- source link