can you think of anyone who isn't good or at least now tries to make moves in the right direction?
Yes, much
if not most of golf culture. That's the problem.
You have the insanely wasteful practice of overseeding dormant bermuda with rye,
even though dormant bermuda is a better playing surface, simply because some fancy pants people might have to deign to play off of yellowish-brown turf for half a season... never mind that the oldest courses in Scotland aren't exactly verdant in the high season. We are literally overseeding courses operating on precious Colorado river water... it's pretty nuts. The fact that the C&C Pinehurst restoration was even mildly controversial is a testament that the augustification of golf is a rampant cultural problem.
We also have a culture of faster-is-better green speeds, which means we have to dump a bunch of poison on grass that can barely survive just so we can run or greens at speed literally double what they were designed for. Lord knows, we've been permanently flattening our most iconic greens just so this stupid fashion of keeping up with the Oakmonts can continue. I mean, we already butchered the Eden green, I can't wait to see what we do with 16 at Pasatiempo. /s
The general point is that most of the clubs want to flex on being manicured, and our access culture prevents most people actually saying anything about it. I get it, that most people want to focus on perfect playing conditions even if it means trying to force a piece of land to be something that it's not... even if we'll rip it up 50 years later just to restore it to an earlier state when these fashions change.
We don't need to run diesel guzzling mowers every day, we just want to because it's prettier. We don't need to use insecticides we know are contributing to major fauna population collapses, we just want to because it's prettier. And worst of all, nobody is going to say shit about the horrible stewardship that these fancy pants places represent and perpetuate, because nobody wants to get blacklisted. A worst offenders list is almost laughable, because it would probably include many of the courses that people here herald as "golf as it was meant to be played."
It's so bad I regularly joke to folks, after they complain about Sharp Park's "horrible conditions" that Sharp Park is very probably the most authentic MacKenzie course you can play because it's the only one that hasn't been converted into some ridiculous hundred-acre bowling green. Golf courses could be significant wildlife refuges in urban centers, they could be praised by environmental groups for being the best stewards of urban land. Instead we do ridiculous things like create
a fake Audubon Society, that I'm sure everyone here knows is totally independent of the other, much more famous Audubon Society.
I know that things are changing. I know that much of the modern courses are designed with sustainability in mind, but as long as decadent courses like Augusta are sitting on the top of all the lists, and as long as I get complaints about how terrible it is to play at Sharp Park because they actually care about the wildlife, I'll keep insisting golf has a deep cultural problem that prioritizes a pretend environment over our actual environment.