After Shutting Down, These Golf Courses Went Wild

There was scraggly grass in one sand trap and wooden blocks and a toy castle in another, evidence of children at play. People were walking their dogs on the fairway, which was looking rather ragged and unkempt. This was only to be expected.

Nowadays, these grounds are mowed just twice a year, and haven’t been doused with pesticides or rodenticides since 2018, which was when this 157-acre stretch of land stopped being the San Geronimo Golf Course, and began a journey toward becoming wild, or at least wilder, once again.

A small number of shuttered golf courses around the country have been bought by land trusts, municipalities and nonprofit groups and transformed into nature preserves, parks and wetlands. Among them are sites in Detroit, Pennsylvania, Colorado, the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and at least four in California.

“We quickly recognized the high restoration value, the conservation value, and the public access recreational value,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, California state director with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which bought the San Geronimo course, in Marin County, for $8.9 million in 2018 and renamed it San Geronimo Commons.

During a recent tour of the land, which sits low in San Geronimo Valley, less than an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, Mr. Rodriguez motioned to rolling hills that serve as habitat for wildlife, including hawks that were wheeling overhead. “On either side, you have public lands,” he said. “This was the missing link.”

The restoration of the San Geronimo land is still underway. Floodplains will be reconnected, and a fish barrier has been removed, allowing access to more robust migratory and breeding grounds for endangered coho salmon and threatened steelhead trout. Trails are planned that would skirt sensitive habitat, making the land a publicly accessible ecological life raft, starkly different from its time as a golf course.

“It’s a great place, and it’s beautiful,” said Charles Esposito, 76, a retiree who was enjoying a recent stroll. “I love it.”

In recent years, the golf industry has taken steps to lighten its environmental toll in places by using less water, sowing pollinator-friendly plants and decreasing pesticide and fertilizer use.

Yet the resources and chemicals needed for pristine emerald turf have made the sport an environmentalists’ bête noire. America’s roughly 16,000 golf courses use 1.5 billion gallons of water a day, according to the United States Golf Association, and are collectively treated with 100,000 tons of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium a year.

The United States has more golf courses than McDonald’s locations and also has more than any other country, accounting for about 42 percent of all courses worldwide, according to the National Golf Foundation.

That oversupply, coupled with development pressures, has led more golf courses to close than to open since 2006. A return to nature, or a version of it, is still relatively rarity for…