Links that Live Lightly on the Land

From PRWeb, an announcement that the Queenstown Harbor golf courses in Maryland will offset all of their carbon emissions with purchases of green tags from NativeEnergy. This is an additional step for the course's owners, who from the beginning have attempted to make their property "green" (and not just in the golfing sense of the word):

In 1990, Atlantic Golf purchased 750 acres of farmland in Queenstown for its flagship course, and wanted to ensure that the design of its new activity would not only maintain the natural environment, but also improve local water quality and animal habitat. “We’ve succeeding in that, and now we are going further to completely offset Queenstown Harbor’s climate impact by purchasing renewable energy credits from NativeEnergy”, says Bill Shirk, President of Atlantic Golf. The purchase will also help the Schrack family dairy farm in Pennsylvania to better manage its impact on waters leading to the Chesapeake Bay by building a manure digester that generates electricity from methane gas. The farm-based renewable energy program has been officially named Remooable Energysm.

Admittedly, when I think of sustainable land use, golf courses aren't the first things that come to mind. And while the idea of turning farmland into links will likely always rub me the wrong way (and, I should say, I'm not a golfer), I admire Atlantic Golf's attempts to minimize the ecological footprint of this operation.

Technorati tags: golf, green tags, carbon emissions, Maryland