This makes me think about golf courses...
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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Can't think of a more immediately remediable and useless thing than golf courses. Well, Generative AI. But golf courses.
No water wastage there!
Harmful chemicals? Nah!
Those are nothing compared to the damage done by other means, not even worth the sweat.
As a child, the ocean fascinated me. I wanted to learn everything I could. As I got older, and the world got worse, the things I learned grew more and more terrifying, until I eventually stopped trying to learn more because it was just too depressing.
I don't know how Marine Biologists and Oceanographers do it. To be surrounded every day with thousands of indicators and unquestionable data that all shows our oceans are fucked. And from hundreds of different ways too; it doesn't even matter if you somehow fix global warming, there are so many other issues remaining that it's still all fucked. It's like if a guy walked into a hospital with every disease. Where the hell do you even start?
A friend of mine dedicated his life to birds and wildlife. He spent six months in Argentina weighing and banding penguins, worked to design autonomous buoys that track ocean data, and his personal birdwatching species count was over, 10k.
He passed away suddenly last March at the age of 33. He just got married the month before.
As tragic as his death was (especially for his widow), part of me thinks that there was some mercy in him dying so young rather than potentially living a long life of watching everything he cared about and worked to save get destroyed.
This is a sort of "but it's weird that it happened twice" thing, but I had a friend out researching Orangutans in I think Indonesia and he dropped dead after (supposedly) recovering from a fever.
Probably only a few years younger than your friend.
I've not kept up with his research but I suspect the species is almost certainly declining worse than when he was there.
Not sure what I'm saying, but yeah.
Weird that it happened twice.
Yeah in this case, he dropped dead in a university lab. Nobody else was with him. Fucker was a marathon runner. Nobody knows what happened, but nobody suspects foul play.
My first degree is in oceanography. I didn't make a career of it - went on to study other fields.
It's really difficult, and hits you in unexpected places. For example, watching avatar 2 broke me emotionally during the whale hunting scenes.
There's a real sense of powerlessness with respect to the health of the ocean.
:yea: Whenever I'm working next to a turf lawn, I always take the time to remind whoever I'm speaking to that living within 1.6km/1mi of a golf course increases your risk of Parkinson's Disease by 126% and that sharing a water supply with them in our drought-stressed region increases the risk by 96%: https://www.parkinson.org/blog/science-news/golf-courses . Whenever a suburbanite reaches Peak American Psychosis and gleefully describes how they murder any wildlife that touches their property, I start going into cascading impacts and zoonotic disease. If I wasn't a communist, the socioecological side of horticulture would force me to become a communist or a prepper. When you can see the world ecologically it's just a world full of slow motion car crashes with all the drivers cheering at each other.
Yeah, I feel like I went kinda crazy after I took a more ecological route in my research lol. Probably a healthier way to be, though, to be honest.
Luckily it meshed well with my other interests and politics so it was just one more piece in the Manmade Horrors Beyond Comprehension Puzzle. I can deal with the rest as an absurdist and absurdism lends itself beautifully to a field like horticulture.
I also walked down this path, lmao. I shitpost to cope.
Edit: Political Ecology is a term you should check out if you do not know it, gonna drop a link here for others too...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_ecology
These guys have some good reads: https://grassrootsjpe.org/
Marxist ecology/Marxist geography are what I'm trying to go all the way to a PhD with but there are very few avenues for it. The work of theorists like Richard Lewontin, James O'Connor, David Harvey, Paul Burkett, Kohei Saito, and especially John Bellamy Foster is exactly the kind of stuff I want to do in applied science. Urban greenspace is one of those ultimate interdisciplinary subjects that demands being as radical as reality itself.
You might also like Anthony Ince.
https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/118242/
https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/incea
I might know someone to talk to if you still wanted to look down this path. DM me I have a few thoughts. Note, I have a little backlog of messages I need to deal with, but I will.
With global warming we're in triage mode now. Not every ecosystem is going to make it. Gotta focus efforts on the ecosystems that can survive... while there's a bunch of maniacs in the operating room trying to set fire to everything.
Hoping a cascade failure won't happen is probably the only thing to work towards.
It isn't that the world will not be habitable, it will just be inhospitable to humans in large groups. Humans are probably well past stopping temperature gains that will collapse marine ecosystems. Once those collapse what is going to collapse next? Bears rely on salmon coming back, forests rely on the minerals from the bears feeding and smaller scavenger mammals rely on the the fish too.
Heavy is the burden of the wise one, when no one believes a word that they could say.
The more I learn about local flora and fauna the more this hurts
I recently found a berry bush while on a trail of a kind of berry I hadn't seen in years
It was bitter sweet
One of the penalties of an ~~ecological~~ education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. [...]
Hm, I have the opposite feeling as well. In a heavily fragmented area without any primary forests left (Germany) I still find sooo many species that were invisible to me before I dared to look. I cannot imagine how it must have been before when humans hadn't had such an impact on the ecosystem.
But then I also notice how all of these species exist despite our influence. How they try to keep on living in our cities. And that's indeed very sad.
Keep up the good fight
I think Team Cherry might have read this excerpt.
Quit injecting Hollow Knight into everything
I mean the game is literally about civilization and how they think it will chug on as a broken machine far past its natural life because it sacrifices the lives of those who live under it starting at the the bottom until the rot grows enough to take all but those that can't see that it is dead.
Its actually a pretty cool tool for looking at civilization and even has a minimum wage machine in silksong.
Seems to me we need some Aldo "Raine" Leopold 
ALDO!
So was Wendell Berry.