The Environment and GOLF
Increasingly joined up thinking is helping agencies, authorities and the golf industry unite under the realisation that golf courses are the key to the nurturing and protection of flora and fauna.
Report by JAMES SPRIGHTLEY
The environment continues to move up the agenda within the golf club management sector. Since the first publicly proclaimed forays into protection of the flora and fauna on Britain’s courses, the momentum for change and sustainability on and around our greens and fairways has gathered strength to the point where few secretaries can claim to be unconversant with at least some of the environmental and ecological issues affecting their acres.
Slowly but inexorably, the wider public too is beginning to appreciate the ecological value of golf courses as custodians of precious (and vanishing) wildlife habits. That shifting perception is coming about, in part because of strenuous efforts by national agencies and industry bodies growing increasingly collaborative, not only in Britain but throughout Europe.
The diversity of habitats on golf courses is vast, from that of the famous Natterjack toad, seen on some of North-
west England’s courses around the Wirral, to ponds preserving the livelihood of great-crested newts and links courses that succour plants found only in sea-salty coastal climates. Clubs are self-policing environmental standards with help from agencies such as the Sports Turf Research Institute (STRI), part of a universally felt need to maintain codes of practice to protect flora and fauna rather than introduce draconian legislation.
“Most courses have studied the species they need to protect,” says John Lockyer, a consultant agronomist at the STRI but for those still in the ecological ‘wildnerness’, there are steps that clubs can take to develop an environmental strategy.
The Institute, for example, runs a dedicated ecology department charged with the task of visiting clubs, planning environmental programmes then working with clubs on rolling them out. Among a mounting list of
environmentally well-managed clubs, Lockyer singles out such courses as
Pyramidal Orchid
Hankley Common, Beaconsfield and Royal St George’s for their quality of ecological stewardship. To take just one example, Beaconsfield
proudly proclaims that its “Eco-Rough” is home to an increasingly diverse range of wild flowers, butterflies, insects and fungi. “The rare pyramidal orchid, Anacamptis pyramidalis, has been spotted on the course this year,” the club reports and urges anyone who has “the necessary skills to identify these and other items of interest” to join its ecological sub- committee.
Not only the environmental question comes into the equation, Lockyer goes on. “It’s in clubs’ best interests to reduce
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