Why, the Balls
Okay, since I don't golf I really have no business approaching such a subject. Not that I haven't tried it, from once hitting a bucket of balls at a driving range to actually venturing out on a public course and, with my rented clubs, pounding through nine holes with my brother and his friends. And don't get me wrong, because many (dare I say "most") of my male friends are golfers. Some are real players out to play and improve their game, some are out to have a few drinks as they motor around the back nine in their golf carts (the days of carrying their clubs are long past for most of my friends), and some are out to just try and play new courses wherever they travel. But for me I never could get into the game...I became sort of like Einstein who, when asked if he ever played golf, replied, "No, no. Too complicated." I couldn't understand the rules such as gripping the club with your thumb and pinkie finger wrapped and bound tightly underneath your palms like a mummy; looking at the club and the ball it seemed to me that there was little difference between holding a baseball bat and a holding a golf club...one just had to bend down for golf but the physics seemed the same: keep your eye on the ball, use your hips and not your arms, swing through the stroke. But over and over I was chastised, despite my balls sailing through the air every now and then. And then there were the long waits, the five practice strokes before a drive, repeated over and over and multiplied once on the green before the (usually multiple) putts. And the fees! Yikes, someone told me that it's $300 a round at the Wynn in Vegas...which leads me to what is perhaps my biggest grumble, that most courses use an enormous amount of water and fertilizer and pesticides, even if they're plastered in the desert (which is where many golf courses --from Dubai to Las Vegas to Palm Springs-- are nurtured). Admittedly many of them (such as the waterfalls at the Wynn) are beautiful examples of landscaping. But let those courses and their maintenance falter even a bit and they can look pretty ratty (since many of these courses sit on prime property, those courses going bankrupt here --over 800 in the past decade in the U.S.-- are slowly being sold off and redeveloped as homes). But this post isn't really about any of that...
Recall in my earlier post that micro-plastics were entering our food chain ever so quickly, and that we were gobbling down those beads purposely placed in our toothpastes and chewing gum and slathering it onto our faces in makeup and sunscreens? Ahem, but that's just the start of it because another source is now proving to be playing a part...golf balls. What do you think would be the number of golf balls lost, say in lakes and bushes and oceans?; go ahead, you can guess high if you want, throwing in all those cruise ships and hilltop ritzy homes and any number of the 32,000 golf courses of which many are located in coastal locations. What would you think? Several hundred thousand? Maybe even a million? According to marine biologists and others now studying the problem, the figure is closer to a thousand times that...as in a billion! Hakai magazine* had just such a piece, although they note that other reports put the figure at closer to 300-500 million (the one billion figure comes from author Mohamed Noorani's book, Sandy Parr at the 19th Hole). Says the piece: ...for every 1,000 submerged golf balls, several kilograms of microplastic are shed into the ocean. Such debris may enter the food chain through creatures such as copepods and anchovies. Plastic tends to attach to a variety of contaminants that may be present in the water, including PCBs, and research has shown these particles can bioaccumulate in aquatic organisms, disrupting behavior and cellular functions. University of Toronto scientist Chelsea Rochman studies microplastics, one of the planet’s most concerning but least understood forms of pollution. “It’s ubiquitous now,” she says. “We find microplastic virtually everywhere we sample. It affects wildlife, and it’s in our seafood.”
It's a popular game, even if our current U.S. president once complained about former President Obama's golfing, tweeting: Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf...Worse than Carter...I'm going to be working for you. I'm not going to have time to go play golf. Already 25% of Trumps days have been spent golfing (luckily there are fewer "problems and difficulties" facing the U.S. today, at least in the views of Washington). But this isn't a post to rag on what does or doesn't happen both in politics and on the golf course...and one can almost dispel the microplastics emerging from these millions of deteriorating golf balls; after all, we slap far more micro-plastics onto our faces when using any of the 10,000+ cosmetics and other unregulated creams (the U.S has banned a total of 9 such creams while Europe has banned over 1000; you can find a partial list inside Brett Blumenthal's book, 52 Small Changes). Rather, I was struck by something from the late Ursula K. Le Guin's book in which she somewhat questions what readers want from her as a writer (and I somehow extrapolated it into a broader question of what we as humans would want or question from a higher being about life, via religion or spirtuality or whatever). In her book No Time to Spare she writes: "What it means," to you, is what it means to you. If you have trouble deciding what, if anything, it means to you, I can see why you might want to ask me, but please don't...Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains...Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you're being honest or not?
So, shame on me in a way. For one thing, I'm guilty of these generalizations...such as tackling a thing like golf when I have only about a 2% understanding of the game (even if I tied it into the earlier topic of microplastics). But all along my effort has been to bring a rather broad (read: general) list of topics to get you --the reader-- to explore further or to simply hit the delete button. No more, no less. No hate mail and no praise mail expected. Our lives are just that, our lives, each as individual and as varied as ants, which is a good thing; after all, ants are spectacularly diverse even in their colonial ways (ask E.O. Wilson who spent much of his life studying them). All of which makes me close with author Karen Jay Fowler's introduction to Le Guin's observations: Today the trip to the Le Guin cave is less arduous but no less dangerous than the archetypal climb to the mountaintop. You must cross the Wikipedian swamp, with its uncertain footing. Tiptoe by any and all comments sections so as not to wake the trolls. Remember, it you can see them, they can see you! Avoid the monster YouTube, that great eater of hours. Make your way instead to the wormhole known as Google and slide on through...Somewhere inside us, I think, we all carry the Mowgli dream -- that the other animals will see and accept us as one among them. And then we fail this dream when the wrong animals ask it of us. We think we wish to join the wild animals in the jungle but will not tolerate the wild animals in our kitchen. There are too many ants, we think, reaching for the spray, when it is equally true that there are too many humans. Did I mention that most bug and cleaning sprays also don't have to list their (often carcinogenic) ingredients? Maybe asking too many questions will only agitate that higher being out there, and out will come that spray...too many humans invading the kitchen.
*Those of you remembering that paradise-like vacation in Hawaii, maybe even that Zodiac ride to the remote Kalalau valley and its pristine beaches on the island of Kauai, you may want to peek at this magazine's piece on just who resides there now...and a hint, it's human but it's not the locals.
Recall in my earlier post that micro-plastics were entering our food chain ever so quickly, and that we were gobbling down those beads purposely placed in our toothpastes and chewing gum and slathering it onto our faces in makeup and sunscreens? Ahem, but that's just the start of it because another source is now proving to be playing a part...golf balls. What do you think would be the number of golf balls lost, say in lakes and bushes and oceans?; go ahead, you can guess high if you want, throwing in all those cruise ships and hilltop ritzy homes and any number of the 32,000 golf courses of which many are located in coastal locations. What would you think? Several hundred thousand? Maybe even a million? According to marine biologists and others now studying the problem, the figure is closer to a thousand times that...as in a billion! Hakai magazine* had just such a piece, although they note that other reports put the figure at closer to 300-500 million (the one billion figure comes from author Mohamed Noorani's book, Sandy Parr at the 19th Hole). Says the piece: ...for every 1,000 submerged golf balls, several kilograms of microplastic are shed into the ocean. Such debris may enter the food chain through creatures such as copepods and anchovies. Plastic tends to attach to a variety of contaminants that may be present in the water, including PCBs, and research has shown these particles can bioaccumulate in aquatic organisms, disrupting behavior and cellular functions. University of Toronto scientist Chelsea Rochman studies microplastics, one of the planet’s most concerning but least understood forms of pollution. “It’s ubiquitous now,” she says. “We find microplastic virtually everywhere we sample. It affects wildlife, and it’s in our seafood.”
It's a popular game, even if our current U.S. president once complained about former President Obama's golfing, tweeting: Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf...Worse than Carter...I'm going to be working for you. I'm not going to have time to go play golf. Already 25% of Trumps days have been spent golfing (luckily there are fewer "problems and difficulties" facing the U.S. today, at least in the views of Washington). But this isn't a post to rag on what does or doesn't happen both in politics and on the golf course...and one can almost dispel the microplastics emerging from these millions of deteriorating golf balls; after all, we slap far more micro-plastics onto our faces when using any of the 10,000+ cosmetics and other unregulated creams (the U.S has banned a total of 9 such creams while Europe has banned over 1000; you can find a partial list inside Brett Blumenthal's book, 52 Small Changes). Rather, I was struck by something from the late Ursula K. Le Guin's book in which she somewhat questions what readers want from her as a writer (and I somehow extrapolated it into a broader question of what we as humans would want or question from a higher being about life, via religion or spirtuality or whatever). In her book No Time to Spare she writes: "What it means," to you, is what it means to you. If you have trouble deciding what, if anything, it means to you, I can see why you might want to ask me, but please don't...Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains...Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you're being honest or not?
So, shame on me in a way. For one thing, I'm guilty of these generalizations...such as tackling a thing like golf when I have only about a 2% understanding of the game (even if I tied it into the earlier topic of microplastics). But all along my effort has been to bring a rather broad (read: general) list of topics to get you --the reader-- to explore further or to simply hit the delete button. No more, no less. No hate mail and no praise mail expected. Our lives are just that, our lives, each as individual and as varied as ants, which is a good thing; after all, ants are spectacularly diverse even in their colonial ways (ask E.O. Wilson who spent much of his life studying them). All of which makes me close with author Karen Jay Fowler's introduction to Le Guin's observations: Today the trip to the Le Guin cave is less arduous but no less dangerous than the archetypal climb to the mountaintop. You must cross the Wikipedian swamp, with its uncertain footing. Tiptoe by any and all comments sections so as not to wake the trolls. Remember, it you can see them, they can see you! Avoid the monster YouTube, that great eater of hours. Make your way instead to the wormhole known as Google and slide on through...Somewhere inside us, I think, we all carry the Mowgli dream -- that the other animals will see and accept us as one among them. And then we fail this dream when the wrong animals ask it of us. We think we wish to join the wild animals in the jungle but will not tolerate the wild animals in our kitchen. There are too many ants, we think, reaching for the spray, when it is equally true that there are too many humans. Did I mention that most bug and cleaning sprays also don't have to list their (often carcinogenic) ingredients? Maybe asking too many questions will only agitate that higher being out there, and out will come that spray...too many humans invading the kitchen.
*Those of you remembering that paradise-like vacation in Hawaii, maybe even that Zodiac ride to the remote Kalalau valley and its pristine beaches on the island of Kauai, you may want to peek at this magazine's piece on just who resides there now...and a hint, it's human but it's not the locals.
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