This isn't a golf protest, otherwise they'd be protesting at
Poxabogue Golf Course down the road. They are, quite obviously protesting because this course is in South Hampton, and even had a nice little
article in Links Magazine about how ludicrously expensive it is to join.
The memberships of unwelcoming, private, exclusive golf club are a perfect metaphor for the types of folks who would happily ignore the concerns of the general public, simply because they can afford to do so. Climate change will be a mild annoyance to the folks at Sebonack, Shinnecock, and the National GL. It is exactly that folks who have $500k in disposable income, and choose to spend it on the frivolity of "slightly better golf," that makes these protestors angry.
Peter Singer illustrated these types of concerns in Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972) (
PDF):
if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it. An application of this principle would be as follows: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.
The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is deceptive. If it were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed. For the principle takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position.
Singer went on to write exactly about how the impacts of individuals
do matter in his 2009 book
The Life You Can Save.
As we continue to watch the entirely predictable (hell, scientist were trying to explain to Jimmy Carter that exactly this would happen
in 1979), slow-motion train wreck that is our climate downward spiral, we can expect that the people without the resources to do something to be angry with the folks who very much do have the physical and political capital to do something about it, but instead use that capital on "slightly better golf."
I love golf and I love golf architecture, but spending upwards of $50M (or at least half a million per member) to build
another exclusive golf retreat in one of the most expensive areas of the country is a testament to placement of luxury and convenience by many of those who have the means to change things, over real and increasingly pressing concerns.
The cost of the club or that it's associated with golf doesn't matter. What matters is the amount of capital that is being spent on conspicuous consumption in the face of a very real, multi-pronged crisis of deteriorating quality-of-life for the next generations. I'm not trying to get on some easy, convenient soapbox here. I understand that people have choices in life, and personal quality of life matters. I'm just saying that a club like Sebonack does, even to me, seem like it's... a bit much.