Golf courses aren’t exactly known as bastions of environmental responsibility. Their landscapes are artificial and many have an unhealthy reliance on pesticides and fertilizers, not to mention excessive water waste.

But Stephen Whipp, a certified financial planner with Manulife Securities Inc. in Victoria and a devoted environmentalist, happens to love the sport of golf. He reconciles his green ideology with his favourite pastime by encouraging local golf courses to follow more sustainable practices.

“Over the years, I would talk to whomever would listen to me and just plant seeds,” says Whipp.

At the time, golf courses were all about monoculture, curbing all natural elements with the liberal use of chemicals. Biodiversity had no place in the quest for perfectly groomed fairways and greens.

Whipp, who has a stubborn streak when it comes to environmental causes, pressed on. And his efforts have paid off. Olympic View Golf Club, a golf course he frequents on Vancouver Island, is now certified in the Audubon Co-operative Sanctuary program, which encourages the enhancement of natural areas and the protection of wildlife habitats on golf courses.

The award-winning course now features untouched marshlands and cordoned-off wildlife habitats. It’s a welcome change, Whipp says, noting that it’s now common to see soaring eagles — of the avian kind — and grazing deer while playing the course: “That’s why I golf there.”

This quietly persistent approach toward encouraging change — admittedly, a calmer, more discussion-based strategy than the one he preferred in his environmentally active youth — is something that has evolved over the years for the 59-year-old Whipp.

As is de rigueur for many of his generation, Whipp spent much of his younger years on a more outspoken path. He admits warming the back seat of at least one police cruiser in an effort to get his message across.

Whipp had followed several career paths — most focusing on the environment — before becoming a financial advisor a dozen years ago. He spent some of the influential 1970s at the now defunct Telkwa Foundation in Smithers, B.C., which carried out environmental research that it then passed along to environmental activist organizations; its two notable areas of study were salmon and forestry. “Of course, no one believed that there was overharvesting going on in either industry,” he says. “Sad story, but true.”

He also worked as a band manager for an aboriginal community outside Smithers and spent 18 months working for former member of Parliament Jim Fulton, the New Democratic Party’s environmental and northern affairs critic during the Mulroney years. Whipp also worked on land-claim negotiations in the Northwest Territories.

Since moving to Victoria, Whipp’s focus has been on socially responsible investing and being a committed environmentalist. He has a hybrid car, but tries to bike to work as much as he can.

“I don’t ride as much as I should,” he admits, adding that Victoria is a bicycle city and that many of his friends get on their bikes every day. In fact, he says, living in Victoria influences his commitment to the environment because it’s full of people who appreciate their good fortune: “I’m surrounded by beauty.”

Whipp is committed to avoiding the overpackaging so endemic in our culture. And he’s diligent about energy conservation, although his youngest son, 17, likes to give Whipp a hard time if he forgets to turn off a light at home. (He and his wife, Kate Irving also have two older sons living away from home.)

Much of Whipp’s downtime is still devoted to environmental causes, but his approach these days is that of a calm advocate rather than an ardent activist. “As you age, you become more conservative or maybe it’s just more insightful, trying to go down a different path,” he says.

Take one of his current passions, for instance. As chairman of the Vancouver Island Legacy Campaign for Royal Roads University, Whipp’s mission is to help develop the Robert Bateman Centre for Environmental Sustainability. (The name may well change before the centre is built, he adds.)

Whipp wants not only to honour the famous environmentalist and his art but to develop a centre that people from around the world will visit to seek solutions for the climate crisis, he says: “I want to create a place in which people can create a dialogue and solve the problem.”

@page_break@Another area in which he spends much of his volunteer hours is as vice president of the WestShore Chamber of Commerce; he’s also chairman of its economic development committee, which is spearheading a Green Business Certification program for local businesses. The chamber has 350 members and the program is aimed at the retail and services industries eager to embrace greener business practices.

“To date, I’ve had nobody turn me down,” Whipp says of the endeavour, which will rank businesses by their green practices and showcase their level of achievement with something tangible, such as a window sticker. The plan is to have something in place to take around to local businesses by mid-year.

Whipp also participates on a local community’s mayoral task force for energy, which is examining the feasibility of creating a sewage plant that reuses its resources, creating heat and saving water. For the past year, the project has been running pilot tests, he says: “Now, we’re at the stage at which we’re looking at where we’d lay the sewage lines.”

Also, the committee is often trying to anticipate the most sustainable approaches toward a particular issue. For instance, Whipp says, it needs to consider the latest trend of laying fibre-optic cables in existing sewage systems to alleviate infrastructure costs (by splitting them with broadband providers.)

Whipp is also devoted to the local food movement, tending a patio garden at his work and planting 27 pots of fruits and vegetables on his deck at home. He supports local agriculture; last year, he volunteered as the master of ceremonies for the Organic Islands Festival, Canada’s largest outdoor green festival. These days, he’s working on sourcing supplies for an annual local food- and spirits-tasting event, Defending your Backyard, which is scheduled for May.

Whipp tries to keep his community environmental commitments down to about 20 hours a month. But he has learned the hard way that this isn’t always easy to do.

A few years ago, he worked with several community members to set up the Values-based Business Network, which represents local businesses that are operating from a sustainability perspective. Getting this project up and running took a lot of work, Whipp says, adding he spent many weeks working 10 to 15 hours on it. “My wife finally said, ‘Are you running a business or a not-for-profit?’”

Whipp was also recently elected to the board of the Social Investment Organization, the national non-profit association for the SRI industry. It’s a job he considers to be very important.

Furthermore, Whipp encourages his clients to get involved in shareholder actions. And his soon-to-be-launched webinar series will focus not only on SRI but also on different environmental issues such as climate change. “We want to make it a whole-person approach,” he says.

If there’s one thing Whipp wants to emphasize to other advisors who are tempted to be more involved in environmental causes, it’s that work and life don’t have to be separate.

“Quite often, when we work, we put that in a box. It’s separate from our lives,” Whipp says. “But what if we used the values we use as parents to bring up our children in our everyday decisions? I wonder what kind of world this would be?” IE