Our Driving the Green community creates a future for golf to be a bridge of social equity, economic prosperity and environmental sustainability in the communities where the game lives.
Municipal golf can become an inspiring cornerstone of how municipalities meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. In the latest edition of our Sustainability Spotlight Series, we are excited to share the process, results and methodology behind the National Links Trust’s first materiality assessment and stakeholder survey, and how we used the UN SDG framework to prioritize NLT’s current and future sustainable development programs in Washington, D.C.
We spoke with Andrew Glen, Superintendent at KDV Sports Complex on the Gold Coast of Australia to learn more about his one-of-a-kind, 100% organic golf course and how to make organic golf scalable across the industry.
At least 35% of the food we eat is directly dependent on the pollination services of bees. With their numbers in decline, might a symbiotic relationship with golf be the change needed to restore their numbers?
Can the secret ingredient to fertile grasslands be the key to golf courses creating engineered carbon sinks? Will Bowden of New Zealand Turf Management Solutions seems to think so.
Happy Gilmore 2 highlights the ethics & essence of golf (integrity) vs the forces trying to separate and commercialize it for maximizing personal, short-term gain (i.e. “Maxi Golf”). The sequel is a respectable comedy in a modern world that’s devoid of fun comedy movies. Happy Gilmore 2 brings in hot-button subjects and portrays the wrestling of golf’s core ethics within its economic model for success (something like financial sustainability vs socio-cultural and interpersonal sustainability).
Nobody:
Literally not a soul:
Andre: Here’s my 4000+ word in-depth take on the psychology of Happy Gilmore, a classic 90s comedy with hidden depth and commentary on the nature of golf.
The California Community Golf Summit brought over 130 municipal golf stakeholders together to discuss a range of issues including rising operational costs, diminishing natural resources, and conflicts over land use, just to name a few. Director of Sustainability at National Links Trust (NLT) and Co-Founder of Driving the Green, Andrew Szunyog, discusses his participation in key panels:
Existential Threats to the Game
Are You a Welcoming Golf Course?
Maximizing Efficiency in Golf Course Agronomy
Community Programming Success Stories
Enhancing Community Golf Through Design
Emerging Markets
To save “the environment” is to live in harmony with the whole of life. This is not about promoting domination, isolation, or even passivism -- but alignment -- and golf is the ultimate game of alignment. It starts and ends with being fully present.
The lessons in Hutchins’ book “Nature Works” are absolutely profound, IF one takes the time to: “Practice, Practice, Practice; Integrate, Integrate, Integrate”
One such Way is through playing golf – hearing its deeper calls for self-development, honoring its emergent ethics, and dying to the present moment in order to affirm life as a Whole (Being-in-Flow).
If we cast our gaze from the conventional wisdom of golf course management over to the quickly ballooning adoption of regenerative principles and practices in agriculture, we may find ways, completely out of the box, to think about and manage our courses differently (and perhaps a lot more profitably).