Gathering Roots Golf Club: Pt.1

Constructing the most environmentally-positive golf course on Earth
Part 1 (Origin)

Together, we’re going to discover how we can use golf to help reverse the impact of climate change.

But first, let’s zoom out.

Earth is essentially a rockpool (rock and sea) with some moss (land) on the side in a bubble (ozone) floating in space, surrounded by a few other floating rocks (planets) who are also swinging around a very hot ball of glowing gasses (sun).

Our rockpool spins around so we get an even coverage of the light emissions which heat the inside of the bubble a little bit to help us survive and grow. With clean air in the bubble, a lot of the heat was able to pass through the bubble and not heat it too much.

Let’s press⏩…

I’m skipping through a lot of time here to the arrival of homo sapiens, a species with a lot of potential on the rockpool.

The purpose of any species is to create offspring and prolong life in the long-term.

As a result of winning the biological lottery, homo sapiens inherited the Earth by becoming the most cognitively and physically advanced species. The brain combined with our complex physicalities has provided us with the tools to conquer our environment, including large and dangerous predators, with tools, strategies and infrastructure.

By gradually overcoming threats in the environment over time, those programmed behaviours and tools were inherited by the offspring. We went from controlled fires to weapons to structured homes to towns to class systems to taxes to economies to The FedEx Cup.

I’m going to press ⏩ again here, but that’s essentially how you get from the dawn of homo sapiens up until 2021.

During this jump to the present, we’re “figuring it out”, thinking it’s all about us, how no one can take us down and asking ourselves the deep questions about existence. Then at the start of the 20th century, the discovering of fossil fuels to generate energy through steam allowed society to grow and generate great measures of wealth and innovation.

Variations of these activities, like burning fossil fuels, have caused a lot of pollution to be generated whilst creating amazing things. This pollution has seen significant growth up until today.

Sadly, these measures affected the air inside the bubble which meant that the heat from the sun wasn’t able to escape our bubble as it did in the past. Life inside the bubble has started heating up and a new balance will need to be established to survive.

Now, I have oversimplified a lot of dignified scientific history and research there (whilst also leaving out the majority of 600 million years of history) and I am sorry - Gather said I only had 500 words!

The idea of this preface was to set the scene for what we’re trying to achieve and what needs to be addressed in today’s society. I think we need more of a foundational understanding to be explained instead of just slapping the general public with facts and figures with the rationale of “because climate change”.

Somewhere in between the dawn of man and the industrial revolution came the creation of a game that we’re all very thankful for. The origins of golf are broad and mixed but many believe it was started by bored shepherds hitting stones towards rabbit holes in the 13th century. The challenging small hole was created by the natural world, a very rare find in the origins of most modern sports.

We are here for a thought experiment - “create the most environmentally positive golf course on Earth”.

We have no budget and there are will be no committee votes, just the purpose to create a positive ecology whilst providing enjoyable human recreation.

Over the coming weeks, I will be breaking down the ingredients that make up a golf facility and bringing ideas from outside of golf, as well as present-day progressing golf clubs, to create our environmental utopia named Gathering Roots Golf Club. All of our practices will aim to achieve at least one of the following:

● Reduce carbon and methane emissions

● Preserve water

● Preserve and encourage wildlife

● Reduce deforestation

● Reduce the production and use of cement

Whilst we lay out these ideas and inspirational practices, we can take ownership in our places of work and demand more from the industry to be a beacon for others to follow. One person can make a difference - it all depends on you.

Related Content:

● Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

● David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet