Corey Pavin on Taking a Shot at Making Golf Greens More Green

Though golf courses offer long acres of lush grass, tall trees and rippling ponds, they’re not the most popular venues among environmentalists. Citing their effect on wildlife and the potential impact on a venue’s water table, those worried about conservation and sustainability find much to dislike on any 18-hole tract.

For more than a decade, 1995 U.S. Open champion Corey Pavin has worked to improve golf’s relationships with the world hosting it. Known as one of the more amiable and self-effacing players on the PGA Tour (and, currently, the Champions Tour), the 64-year-old native of Southern California remains one of the leading proponents of sustainability in golf.

During preparations to play the 2024 Senior PGA Championship at Michigan’s Harbor Shores—a course built on a reclaimed industrial dumping ground in Benton Harbor—Pavin explored what brought him into the sustainability movement and why he continues to push more environmentally responsible golf courses.

Penta : You claimed a Major Championship, won 15 times on the PGA Tour and captained a Ryder Cup team during four decades of professional golf. How did you find an interest in sustainability along the way?

Corey Pavin: I grew up in California, so recycling was always a big deal there before the movement expanded across the United States and around the world. So, I came into golf already aware of the need to recycle and look after the environment.

What brought you into a leadership position working toward environmental sustainability in golf?

I do most of this work due to my association with Dow Chemical. I’ve been with them for 15 years now, and they started a big program for sustainability and recycling. They’ve done a lot to make me aware of what needs to be done and helped me to reduce my own carbon footprint. … I also worked with the nonprofit GEO Foundation for Sustainable Golf, which is dedicated to making golf and the golf community ecologically friendly.

Have you found there to be tension between the sport of golf and the environmentalist movement?

I knew growing up the environmental effects of golf and golf courses was a huge concern and a cause of a lot of conversation. There were debates over the chemicals used on a course and how they can affect groundwater and other elements.

I think a lot of strides are being made with what materials get used on a golf course with an eye toward what effect they could have on the environment. There’s been a lot of work in the last two decades to make courses less harmful.

What advancements have golf operations made in course design, building, and management?

First of all, there’s been a push for years now with course designers to avoid bringing in any outside species such as grass or other plants that could change the ecology of an area. You’re seeing so many more courses now that use only native elements. There’s also been a lot of strides made on how courses are maintained, what grasses they use, and how the greens crews treat the grasses.

Is it difficult to balance environmental factors with efforts to provide a quality golf course?

You want to design and build a quality course and keep it in good shape, but we have the means now to eliminate negative environmental impact from a golf course being built or operating. For example, concepts such as using recycled, non-potable water for the grass or choosing salt-resistant grasses that can be fed with brackish seawater keep fresh water preserved and entirely off the course.

Beyond water usage, what positive effects can a modern golf course have on the environment?

You also have to consider the adjacent land near a course. The presence of golf near a forest or marshland can lead to an effort to preserve that space that wasn’t a priority earlier.

Are you seeing efforts to update or reimagine golf courses built before the environmental movement came to the fore?

Yes, there are so many modification ideas a golf course can use to limit or reduce the amount of grass that needs to be watered. I’m seeing courses add natural waste areas of plants that require very little water or more sandy areas that require no water at all. Over the last decade, I’ve seen courses all around the world shifting to those designs. Beyond saving water, those ideas also reduce the amount of necessary maintenance and save energy.

Way back when, crews used to just bulldoze everything and transform an area into a course without giving thought of what that could do. Once it became clear that we could build golf courses that can involve more of the natural habitat and disturb much less of the natural environment that was already in place, I think it became obvious there was no reason to design or build courses any other way.

As a player, does it just make you happy seeing these sustainable changes?

I love seeing it, not just because I’m aware of how important clean water is, but because I’ve always liked golf courses that have a natural look to them.

The 2024 Senior PGA Championship was at Harbor Shores this year—a course developed on wetlands reclaimed from an industrial waste site. Could we see golf actually restoring the environment in cases like we find in Benton Harbor, Mich.?

I think that’s a great example of responsible course building and management. Initially, [Harbor Shores] was more a case of recycling and reclamation, but it operates now within those wetlands as a sustainable model. We can see more cases of dump sites becoming courses because you’re dealing with land that can’t really be used for much else. Once the ground is cleaned and treated, I can’t think of any better place to build a golf course because just the act of creating the venue cleans that garbage from the land.

We can now make golf courses that look like they were always supposed to be there from the beginning.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Corey Pavin on Taking a Shot at Making Golf Greens More Green

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.