Pebble Beach: Golf hotspot and nature reserve

It’s a dream destination: Pebble Beach, the world famous golf resort, 17-Mile Drive, the Del Monte Forest with the famous Monterey pine trees in it, native to only three very limited sectors in the USA. One of these is the Monterey Peninsula . The area is a tourist hotspot – with a total of ten golf courses on the limited part of the peninsula alone.

Pebble Beach, a kind of Mecca for golfers as the venue for major tournaments, is also an essential piece of nature for the local population and the state of California that needs to be protected. The sea area around the peninsula is largely a water protection zone and partly a marine reserve. Point Lobos National Park is around the corner. Golf tourism is only possible here in California, if the sustainability aspects are taken into account – which is why the Pebble Beach Company not only sells tee times at exorbitant prices, but has also launched various “green initiatives”, some of which are remarkable even by European standards.

As beautiful as the world-famous seventh hole at Pebble Beach is: Countless golf balls sink into the sea every year on this par 3 here. “The accumulation of plastic golf balls” in the sea is a long-term problem that adds up to thousands and thousands of balls. Which is why the resort has been employing ball divers for years, who continuously ensure that not too much ball waste ends up in the ocean and, on top of that, collect the balls individually on the beach sections.
The complete irrigation of the golf courses works with recycled water from the area. The so-called Wastewater Reclamation Project costs 67 million dollars and supplies a total of seven places on the Monterey Peninsula. To date, this has saved the use of 31.8 billion liters of drinking water.
Pebble Beach has installed a storm water pollution prevention program and participates in the appropriate projects of the Monterey Regional Stormwater Management Program. In coastal areas, drinking water pollution from flooding and storms is otherwise often a problem.
70.000 trees, bushes and small plants per year are planted in the Del Monte Forest area as part of a reforestation program by ten ecologists and forest rangers. Untypical plants are uprooted.
Energy consumption has been reduced by 17 percent since 2008 with numerous small measures, such as replacing all lamps, a carpool system for transporting guests in the resort, switching to hybrid and electric vehicles and new technologies for freezers or air conditioning systems. The CO2 savings achieved through optimization in the past two years alone was 8,618 tons.
The Styrofoam food containers popular in the US have been banned entirely and replaced with recycled or reusable boxes.
An extensive recycling and composting program —rather unusual in the United States—now ensures that much of the resort’s nearly three million kilograms of waste annually is composted, recycled, or donated to local institutions.

And then there are the sea lions, which roam the Carmel coast and nearby Point Lobos National Park. In view of the enormous influx of golfers and tourists, the animals must be protected from people getting too close, especially when the young are being reared. Since 1987, the rocks on the coast have been fenced off annually by a team from the Pebble Beach Company as part of the “Harbor Seal Protection Program“. Reassuring for the guest: If you pay a green fee of 575 dollars for 18 holes on America’s No. 1 who pays for public courses also finances the sea lion project.

Pebble Beach: Golf hotspot and nature reserve

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