What crazed tree-hugger said this in 1969?
“When civilized man looks out from the padded cell of urban life, what a destruction of the human environment he would see if only his eyes had not become too narrowly focused on his house, his motor car, his golf course, his cocktail bar and his television set. he would see a countryside despoiled, wild life being exterminated, vegetation withered, air and sea polluted, rivers made foul, green fields turned into dumps for rubbish and old model cars, and the night and day hideous with a blasphemous blare of uncontrolled noise. Is the only remedy for this to thicken the insulation and increase the comfort of the padded cell, or can we do more to mitigate or check this destruction.”
Why that would be the then governor-general of Australia, Paul Hasluck, who’d been a Liberal politician for decades. This was back when conservatives were trying to conserve things (1).
Hasluck was speaking in Adelaide, at the opening of a Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science. This was just as what we call the modern Environment Movement was kicking off.
Adelaide, btw, is where the Labor Government is busy destroying a portion of the parklands for the ‘upgrade’ of a golf course. I could go on I did, here).
On golf’s ecological impact, well – I have no doubt that
a) there are some academic studies
b) that the golfing industry have hired plenty of spin-Doctors and spin-Professors (see what I did there?) to muddy the waters.
I wasn’t planning to write long, and don’t have time, so I will just post a book cover (borrowed it today from the library) and move on.
Footnotes
(1) Yes, I know they were trying to “conserve” a very specific patriarchal and anthropocentric – and, frankly, Eurocentric and racist as fuck – version of “Nature”, but still…