Scotland vs. Phoenix: Par For The Course?

View of the Old Course in Saint Andrews, Scotland. Image taken from the St Andrews links website.

Golf. It’s Donald Trump’s favorite sport, which is probably adjacent to at least some of the reasons why it’s one of the most controversial sports in today’s world. Indeed, do I even need to add the “probably” qualifier? Probably not.

On the surface, the sport is as simple as they get. All you need to do is hit a ball into a hole in as few “strokes” as possible. Seriously, could they not have chosen a less unfortunate word for it? To some extent, the sport is seen as “elitist” - a lot of people say that only rich people play it. 

Now, I might get some hate for this from my fellow progressives, but I’m not inherently against golf. If you don’t use a cart, it’s a good source of exercise, and it truly is a game of patience. These days, a lot of us could use more patience. But that’s not why the continued existence of the sport is so contentious.

Rather, the reason is due to its environmental impact and resource use. It’s no secret that in order to keep all that grass green, country clubs need to use a lot of water. Lots of Redditors complain about perfectly manicured lawns and how wasteful they are, but golf courses take up far more land and water than the average lawn.

It wasn’t always this way. You see, golf is considered to have begun in Scotland in the 15th century, and one of the oldest and most famous courses is the Old Course in the town of Saint Andrews. Now, because this was more than five hundred years ago, technology wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now. It was not yet possible to grow tomatoes in Norway, since greenhouses weren’t a thing. Likewise, it was far more difficult to make land something it wasn’t.

Much of Scotland’s coast is made up of linksland, a type of gently rolling sandy terrain with light elevation and short grasses throughout most of the surface area. At first, the coast was the only place where golf could be played, but as the game grew more popular, demand grew for more courses inland. But in order to understand why so many courses emulated the design of the linksland (though, since it’s naturally occurring, can we really call it “design”?), it’s helpful to understand what makes this landscape so ideal for golf.

As of October 2023, according to Scottish governmental sources, Scotland had nearly seven million sheep. This number is greater than Scotland’s human population, but is a slight decline from the previous year. The northernmost part of the United Kingdom has always been fertile ground for these adorable woolly creatures, and these creatures in turn made Scottish linksland into fertile ground for golf.

You see, sheep eat grass. This act is fancifully known as “grazing”, and it’s necessary for the sheep to survive. With so many sheep feasting on the verdant linksland near the ocean, this ensured that the grass would never grow extraordinarily high, certainly not prohibitively high for golf. No industrial-strength lawn mower would be necessary to keep the grass at the proper level - the sheep would take care of that!

Additionally, if you’ve ever been to a golf course (or even if you’ve merely seen a picture of one), you’ll know that there are pits known as sand traps. Golfers strive to avoid hitting their ball into these hazards, but they actually formed naturally at first. Whenever a storm hit in the oceanic climate of Scotland, sheep would burrow into the ground in order to escape the wind. The resulting holes in the Earth would become today’s sand traps, which is why they’re also referred to as “bunkers.” And whenever a golf bunker is brought up, I always picture this.

I’m not the sort of person to say that everything is preordained. Perhaps everything happens for a reason, but sometimes that reason is because you’re stupid and make bad decisions. In the case of golf, there’s an important reason as to why it originated where it did. And there’s a time and place for everything.

Now, I’m not naïve to the fact that climate change poses an existential threat to the future of skiing. But you’ve never been able to ski in Florida. 

The reader is probably wondering: Why the hell is he using such a ludicrous example to prove a point? And what point is he trying to prove, anyway?

In all my time on this planet, I have never seen or heard anyone complain, at least unironically, that you can’t ski in Florida. In all probability, I will pass from this Earth without ever hearing that. Florida is a popular destination for domestic tourists even in the face of Ron DeSantis’ horrific policies; the mass boycott of it, at least among Americans, is far more prominent online than it is in real life. 

But when it comes to skiing in Florida, everyone just accepts that it’s not the place for that. Nobody’s talked about building mountains on the Gulf Coast and trucking in boatloads of snow to create pistes. That’s just not something any serious person even brings up. If you want to ski, you don’t travel to Florida.

Golf in Arizona is a different story.

A Google Maps screenshot of some golf courses in Greater Phoenix, Arizona, United States.

The Phoenix metro area, also known as the Valley of the Sun, has a lot of golf courses. In fact, some estimates say it’s as many as two hundred. This would mean that the courses featured in this Google Maps screenshot are a fraction of the total, the ones who were able and willing to pay their “Google dues” to be featured more prominently. 

The mild, rainy climate of Scotland is an ideal location for golf. Yes, with climate change upon us, droughts will become more frequent in Scotland, but they’re still abnormal. Most of the time, it still rains enough to keep the courses relatively green without needing to water them an absurd amount.

Contrast this to Greater Phoenix. Yes, I am aware that the fifth-largest city in the US, with a metro area of about five million people, experiences a monsoon season. I’m not denying that. However, for most of the year, it’s dry enough in general that the word drought hardly means anything. If it’s a desert, to what extent can it really be called a drought as opposed to the way things are? 

That being said, as climate change gets worse, Phoenix will get dryer, and the continued maintenance of these two hundred golf courses will become increasingly difficult to justify. It’s already causing lots of problems, as this ArcGIS article explains.

I’ll confess that whenever I’m on Discord and talking to someone in Europe, a continent that largely designs its cities far more sustainably than the United States, I love telling them about Phoenix. It’s so insane that they can’t believe it! Or at least, they’re so shocked that it exists the way it does. And I realize that I have only so many stones to throw, given that I live elsewhere in the United States, one of the world’s biggest climate villains. But as shocking as most American cities are for Europeans, Phoenix is a particularly egregious example due to its sheer number of golf courses.

I talked to a friend of mine from Spain not long ago. I’m not going to name names, but he literally told me that whenever there’s a drought in his autonomous region, they aren’t even allowed to fill swimming pools. Meanwhile in Arizona, they keep the golf courses green no matter the weather, which has led many to brand Phoenix as the world’s “least sustainable city.”

Now, the problem isn’t so much building a city in the desert. There have been desert cities before - indigenous peoples lived in the area we now know as Phoenix for many centuries. But as far as we know, they didn’t have massive lawns and golf courses. 

Aerial view of a golf course in suburban Phoenix. Image taken from Meridian CondoResorts.

A different Native American group, the Iroquois, practiced the “seven-generation sustainability” principle. Decisions on environmental policies, particularly those related to natural resources, were meant to be filtered through the lens of making sure these resources could remain extant through seven more generations of such policies. As this blogger on indigenous issues in Canada notes, it was rather ironic that the authors of the U.S. Constitution referred to the indigenous peoples as “savages”, or maybe projection is the better word here.

To be clear, Phoenix is far from the only American city that can’t environmentally sustain itself. It’s only one instance of the suburban sprawl that swept the nation following its victory in World War II. Now, if anything, the United States wasn’t as helpful as some other Allies in defeating the Axis powers, but that's a separate conversation. 

But it is my belief that this country got too big for its britches after winning history’s deadliest armed conflict to date. Uncle Sam, the personification of the United States, probably thought: If we could beat the Nazis, we can build a giant, sprawling metropolis in the desert! 

Here’s the thing, though. Phoenix serves as an important exhibit in the following lesson: Just because you have the money to do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.