Blame it on television, if you like — the precious and buttoned-down game that golf has become. (Pricey too, in case you hadn’t noticed.) Blame it on colour television, to be exact, because in ushering out the grainy shadows of old black and white and bringing us instead a bright range of greens, it suddenly put more emphasis on how a golf course looked than on how it played. While we’re at it, let’s blame ourselves too: the TV-addicted golfers who for too long have expected (demanded, even) that the courses we play look as lush and as groomed as the ones the pros do.

And there’s the problem, right there. Trying to maintain a golf course in that condition — trying to satisfy the tastes of an image-conscious North America — has always been an expensive and unnatural practice. What we’ve come to realize is that it’s also an unsustainable one. (Here’s a stat: Washington, D.C.-based World Watch Institute estimates the amount of water used per day to irrigate the world's golf courses at 9.5 billion litres. That's enough water to support 4.7 billion people at the UN daily minimium.) The time of change has come, and if golfers and golf course operators don’t make that change willingly, it just might be that local governments and environmentalists will leave us no choice at all.

Audubon International established a program back in 1991 to certify courses that meet certain standards for water use, chemical input and native vegetation. Of the roughly 2,400 courses in Canada, 89 are certified to those greener standards.

How did we get here? Well, pick a date, say, sometime in early April 1966. Back then, with the azaleas in bloom and the birds a-twittering, the Augusta National Invitation (The Masters) became the first golf tournament to be broadcast in colour. Jack Nicklaus won the third of his six Green Jackets, but more importantly golf itself — the game born and shaped by the raw and tumbling and brown-tinged Scottish links-land — was set on the not-so-long road that’s led us right to here: to the immaculately manicured carpets of grass that only (it seems increasingly clear) Augusta and a few of its well-heeled private-or-corporate-course brethren can afford, or afford to get away with.

We don’t want to single out Augusta National for blame. Come the snowy springtime in Canada, we eagerly await The Masters, and love the stage it sets for the world’s greatest golfers. We can mark the passing years with Tiger’s Win for the Ages in 1997, and the Yes Sir! of Jack’s electrifying win in 1986. But to set that stage, Augusta practises an intensive maintenance regime that, however inadvertently, has inflated the expectations of millions of golfers and led thousands of high-end daily fee courses and private golf clubs across North America into attempting to replicate its perfect fairways and unblemished greens.

It’s an attempt that was doomed to fail. Augusta is unique amongst golf courses, even amongst a very select group of the most historic, famous and exclusively private American golf courses. It is closed for play for a full six months of the year, starting immediately after The Masters and right through the hot Georgia summer and fall, and high-powered fans are set up next to especially vulnerable greens to keep them cool (and alive) until the course re-opens in late October. During the playing season, fairways can be “perfectly” watered while the greens kept fast and firm because of an irrigation system that’s integrated with Augusta’s own weather station and a high-powered suction system installed under each of the 18 greens that ensures any surface water can be quickly dried out. We don’t know (and can’t imagine) how much fertilizer and pesticides are needed to make sure not a single weed ever gets a chance to poke its head above ground and spoil the view.

The place, in short, is pristine; the cathedral of golf, you can call it. And here’s the thing: ignore for a moment that golf courses in Canada and the United States have strained their budgets or raised their green fees trying to mimic that beatific quality (and that more and more golfers are struggling to pay those higher fees, or even to justify paying them); and forget that water is becoming an increasingly precious commodity, and that local governments and environmental groups from California to New York are imposing or urging sever restrictions on golf course water-use (even the effluent/grey water that is often used for irrigation) — the thing is, golf was never meant to be pristine. It was meant to be played in natural settings, in natural conditions, on ground that was hard and firm and often brown, with the wind blowing — one day more, one day less — and the rain coming along in its own sweet time to keep the grass alive.

When the old thrifty Scots invented the game, they chose to play it on seaside links-land not because it was great ground for golf, but because it wasn’t good for anything more important, like growing food for example. They certainly weren’t about to waste fresh water keeping the grass green (a hearty variety that grass was, in part because it was never artificially watered in the first place). To this day, some of the great and historic British golf courses still honour that ethos — think of the Old Course at St. Andrews, or of Hoylake in 2006 when Tiger tailored his game to perfectly fit the dry, hard fairways, the conditioning of those courses almost wholly dependent on mother nature, not the hand of man.

The great old British golf courses look natural (very pleasingly so, I think) and they play naturally too — the golf ball running along the fast ground, this way and that, unpredictably sometimes, sometimes even bouncing into bunkers or hazards if the shot, though well struck, wasn’t properly shaped. To some golfers, maybe even to most in North America, that type of result is considered “unfair.” (On a lush North American course, the golf ball usually has the decency to stop dead in its tracks, and then to sit up on the soft green grass, perfectly perched up for the next shot as if on a tee. Which, it must be said, is a boon and balm to the typical male ego, letting us pretend that we’re better than we really are.) But of course, golf was never meant to be a fair game, either; a golfer was encouraged to take the good breaks and bad with equal composure, and to make the best of it without complaint, and to get on with it.

What’s interesting is that now, with the economy still tender, with both golf courses operators and golfers trying to cut back on expenses, with environmental issues more prominent than ever and with a growing belief that only ecologically friendly golf will prove to be sustainable golf, this traditional Scottish ethos has slowly been spreading throughout North America. One of the major golf magazines (famous for its Top 100 list) has alread changed the instructions it gives to its ranking panellists. Under the “conditioning” criteria, panellists are no longer to award high marks based on how well manicured a golf course is, but on “how firm, fast and rolling” its fairways were.

Of course, what’s also interesting is that, under this new criteria, the panellists ranked Augusta National as the No. 1 golf course in America. Maybe some things never change; maybe it’s that most of those rankers can still remember (fondly, with chills even) the Yes Sir! moment as if it was yesterday.