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The message at a meeting organized by the Northwest Golf Course Environmetal Alliance and held yesterday at Chambers Bay in University Place was loud and clear; golf's reputation for environmetal negligence is largely undeserved. Yes, the game has certainly been guilty of poor environmetal practices in the past but many of today's courses, especially here in the northwest, are no longer over-watered and over-manicured using a potent cocktail of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides but safe havens for wildlife and responsible recyclers that have cut chemical usage by as much as 80% over the last 20 to 30 years.
 David Wienecke
In addition to using relatively little water - 165,000 gallons a day in the middle of summer (a third of which comes from a waste water treatment plant, the rest from two acquifers that are part of the Chambers Creek Drainage Basin) - Chambers Bay recycles somewhere between 80% and 90% of its trash, and has identified several corridors for habitat development. It uses barley straw, a bacteriological digester, a photosynthetic filter and activated carbon to manage algae, and has grown a Riparian Buffer along nearby waterways to help prevent sediment, nitrogen, phosphorus, pesticides and other pollutants from reaching the water. Carbon adsorbants are used to restrict the growth of weeds.
One of the welcome, not to say surprising, results of these initiatives is that Chambers Bay, for 100 years a barren gravel pit with no sign of life past the men who worked there, is now home to 36 species of birds, ten species of mammals, three species of amphibians and a species of lizard. Canadian Geese frequent the fairways - not altogther ideal for golfers, but two labs, a chow and a retriever; Tucker, Zoie, Tabatha and Jake, have been trained to scatter them safely - a move fully supported by the Audubon Society . A waterfowl management program is also in place. 'It is my intention to make Chambers Bay a self-sustaining eco-system,' said Wienecke. 'There's still a lot to do. But we're well on course.'
Also on the panel were Paul Backman of the Western Washington Golf Course Superintendent's Assoiciation, Chris Goodman of Meadow Park GC in Tacoma, Dr. Eric Miltner from Washington State University, David Burger from Salmon Safe and Stewardship Partners, and Karen Armstead from the First Green of Washington. Also 'appearing' was outspoken Golf Director for Seattle, Andy Soden, who claimed that changing the way people think about golf despite the hundreds of schemes in operation around the world, including several here in the Northwest, will take a long time. 'It will probably be a generation before golf earns a good reputation among the public,' he said. 'Probably more.'
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