A lot of folks love cats
because they seem so self-sufficient.
But in the age of humans,
that's not a prerequisite for success.
For the next replacement we'll move heaven and earth,
even in places it can never survive on its own.
Because abundant sunshine.
Golfers have access to scores
of course, year round.
Here in Palm Springs to walk the walk,
you got to dress the part
♪
Lined up there.
Perfect. Looks good.
Yeah.
Bam!
Yeah.
You got it.
I did not.
All right.
Nope. It's still there.
Okay.
See what we can do.
Boom.
I was feeling real good about myself until just now.
Turf grass.
It covers more of the U.S.
than almost any other plant.
And there's nowhere grass is more pampered
than the golf courses of Palm Springs, California.
Good golf requires good grass, in your opinion?
I would think so, yes.
Okay.
And good grass requires you.
Well, I like to think so.
♪
Jonas takes
care of some of the world's most prestigious golf courses.
And it's not just a profession.
It's a love affair.
♪Then breaking my back to make it out got me feeling like.♪
I look at parks,
football stadiums, soccer fields, and golf courses.
I love it all.
Oh, yeah.
According to Jonas, this whole golf
thing started with a bunch of Scots
drinking whiskey and whacking balls with sticks.
Some of those Scots emigrated to the U.S.
and brought the game with them, along with its emerald
green landscape.
Hey, they had things out there.
Tiger, here I come.
You literally created an oasis.
There's not a whole lot of people that can say that.
Yeah.
Turns out grass isn't just grass.
You got your bermudas, your fescues, your rye.
And each species plays a different role.
A good bermudagrass is going to be your base
for probably most of the golf courses here in the valley.
Just because the temperatures in the summer get so warm.
And that's the only grass that we really will be able
to thrive and survive through that.
It's a good, hard working, sturdy.
It's solid.
But these turf grasses are just a tiny subset
of the 12,000 species of grass that grow on every continent,
many of which are disappearing thanks to us.
Okay.
All right, let's see it.
Let's take it back, then go.
Oh, that was heartbreaking.
Oh, a little piece of my soul died just now.
Humans go to ridiculous lengths to make turf happy.
We have a set of mowers that will mow down
to eight hundredths of an inch.
We have large mowers.
We have a greens
roller to firm up the surface and make it faster.
Little bit. Little more. Right.
Okay.
Not that much.
Right there.
Okay.
Back and straight through.
Then go.
Yeah.
Hello.
You're going pro!
I mean, if you're just measuring success and impact,
if grass was playing golf, it definitely got the hole in one.
Underneath this thin veneer of green lies
a massive engineered life support system.
And without it, this desert oasis would turn to dust.
What you're looking at right here
is essentially what we call our war room.
400 acres, several thousand
sprinkler heads on two golf courses.
Wow.
So it's pretty massive.
How do you decide what gets watered when?
So up here, 358,000 gallons of water run last night.
So this is putting out
a lot of like 300,000 some odd gallons of water.
Yep.
Every single day.
Yep.
On this course.
Then you have this golf course, which would be very similar
to it.
Where is all of this water coming from?
Because we're basically in the middle of a desert, right?
Absolutely. Yeah.
Here on this property, we're fortunate
to be a part of the Mid Valley pipeline,
which is where they connect water to the Colorado River.
So it comes, you know, from a long way away.
To keep these courses green
millions of gallons of water travel, hundreds of miles
to be sprayed out of thousands of sprinklers.
If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is.
But golf courses are just the beginning.
There are more than 40 million acres of turf in the U.S.
Each year
they consume 80 million pounds of fertilizer and trillions
of gallons of water.
While legions of people and machines
keep them manicured and green,
It's the most resource intensive plant in the country.
Yet the vast majority of it grows not on a farm,
but in neat squares around our homes.
Little patches of paradise.
Perfect for a drink with a friend.
This is Marc Norman.
He's an urban planner. For Marc, building a great city
or neighborhood is kind of like making a great cocktail.
You need to know all the ingredients and predict
how they'll interact
once mixed together.
Thank you.
Cheers.
Now, that is a tasty beverage.
As a biologist, it's kind of weird to me, right.
It's like wherever you go, in whatever environment,
humans settle down and then there's grass.
Yeah.
Every place that we inhabit is artificial in some way.
Although this is a pretty nice situation.
I'm not going to lie.
This is some good living.
I'm going
to blame the Brits
Okay, I█m okay with that.
Yeah.
This notion of the sort of manor of the estate.
Oh, hello.
You mix that with the kind of individualism of the U.S.
and you have now people with quarter acre lots,
that's their castle surrounded by this space.
So its status is, is what you're saying.
It signals that I own this territory
and also that I maintain it.
I think, baked into the way
we expanded as a country.
RIght, we had too much land.
People needed to populate that.
Manifest Destiny.
Manifest destiny. Exactly.
If you farmed it or ranched it or timbered it
for five years, then that land was yours.
Right.
I mean, if you were white and male
Yeah, of course.
But that sets a precedent, right?
Like that,
you can't just sit on land.
You have to prove that you're cultivating it.
But grass isn't just baked into American psychology.
It forms the economic foundation of American homeownership.
Let's say you're driving around a neighborhood in suburban
Boston or Tulsa or Northern California.
They look relatively similar, and that's
because these standards had to be met in order
for those home buyers to get a 30 year mortgage.
They had covenants saying you had to have grass
and you had to cut it once a week.
Wow. Okay.
That's very specific.
Right.
And we have homeowners association that enforce that.
They legally enforce that. Okay.
Legally enforce that.
Okay.
Are the same rules applied to the back
like you have to, like, mow your backyard the same way?
You know,
the regulations might not go to the back of the house.
It's like the suburban mullet
is like business in the front and party in the back
kind of thing going on. Okay.
Driving around Palm Springs, you can see
just how deeply grass is rooted in the American psyche.
I love the Christmas decorations.
That's such a Christmas atmosphere
we got going on here.
Yes.
Just when you think about this desert landscape
and the amount of lawn we're passing by now.
It's a lot of grass. It's a lot of damn grass.
Yeah.
In a country where we talk about productivity
and it's so unproductive.
Is, is I think the irony of it all.
Yeah.
Grass is a signal.
Just having it tells the world and ourselves
that we're part of the community.
People think this is freedom of choice,
but if they ever wanted to make different choices, they're
forbidden to.
It takes a whole slew of federal state regulatory
frameworks to make this happen.
No matter what was there before.
We dig it up, chop it down, irrigate, fertilize
and replace it with, you guessed it, grass.
Honestly, I can't even tell if that's real grass or not.
I think it's real grass.
That's incredibly uniform.
But what's interesting is that.
so many damn cul-de-sac, literally everything is
a cul-de-sac.
Everything is a cul-de-sac.
Everywhere we go, humans reshape the landscape,
not just to suit our needs,
but to match our ideas of what we want it to be.
And grass is an idea that's so powerful
it compelled us to transform a desert into a lawn.