To keep the sand from blowing away, most courses rake three or four gallons of vegetable oil into each green once or twice a year. (Not too long ago, they used motor oil.) Sand greens are about one-third the speed of grass, but the oil quickens them up a bit, too.

WSJ: Sand-Greens Golf: A Game Lives On in the Great Plains

He played semi-pro football on Pittsburgh fields so devoid of grass they were sprayed with oil to keep the dust from rising.

BBC: How pro football hooked America

Nicholas Rushlow, a 14-year-old eighth-grader from Lancaster, Ohio, was eliminated when he misspelled "vetiver, " an aeromatic grass whose especially fragrant root yields an oil used in perfumery and mats in India.

CNN: June 1, 2012 -- Updated 1329 GMT (2129 HKT)

They will soon bioengineer bacteria to melt oil out of tar sands, turn grass into diesel fuel and scavenge natural resources of every kind out of low-grade, thinly dispersed deposits.

FORBES: Techno-Optimism

There has been little evidence that growing grass could actually make a dent in the demand for oil.

NPR: Study Boosts Switchgrass as New Alternative Fuel

All organic crop rotations contain three to four years of no ploughing because grass leys use the sun's energy to fix nitrogen for subsequent crops in place of oil-based artificial fertiliser.

ECONOMIST: Organic matter

Fresh, green grass has begun growing again in some of the hardest-hit marshes of southern Louisiana, but oil continues to wash ashore in places.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

After a visit to an oil spill in 1969, he came up with the idea of involving students in a nationwide grass-roots day of environmental awareness.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS