 
end up being the only metro region on the entire East Coast that’s within a protected, rural, and primeval landscape,” says Dana Beach. “That is, if we’re not all underwater.” With that, the executive director of the Coastal Conservation League dims the lights in the great room of the old Charleston single house his organization calls home and fires up a projector. A pretty satellite projection of the coast of South Carolina from Cherry Grove down to the Savannah River comes into focus. It’s dated 1985. Red shades indicate the metro areas of Charleston, Myrtle Beach, and Hilton Head. Dark green highlights revered sites — the Francis Marion National Forest and the Cape Romain and Savannah River national wildlife refuges. The screen animates into a year-over-year progression: Each year, as one might expect, the urban footprints slowly grow; at the same time, though, new parcels of green unfurl across the Lowcountry like pieces of a living jigsaw puzzle. South of Charleston the green represents storied plantations — Ashepoo, Lavington, Hope, Laurel Hill, and Mary’s Island. To the east, verdant clusters appear around Four Hole Swamp, with its one-thousand-year-old cypress trees. Outside Awendaw, vast timber tracts give the Francis Marion National Forest new boundaries, while nine-thousand-acre Sandy Island, with its tiny traditional Gullah community, becomes the centerpiece for the vast new Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge. When the story ends with 2007, the map is twice as green as it was in 1985: While Charleston, Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head, and Bluffton have spread, their growth is fought acre for acre by rapidly accelerating conservation. Today South Carolina holds more than 1.8 million acres of protected land — the majority in the Lowcountry. That is more protected land than in the Everglades, and a greater percentage of total acreage under public and private conservation than any other state in the Southeast. Beach’s map is simple, but the tale it tells is astonishing. It documents a tireless mission by a group of conservationists whose love of land and sense of place are thwarting the sprawl that has engulfed so much of the Southeastern coast. In the process, they are recasting the fate of wild, rural South Carolina and setting a precedent for others to follow. Beach and his fellow conservationists say this is only the beginning. People once scoffed at their dreams of a nearly unbroken rural greenbelt surrounding Charleston, or of vast wildlife and estuarine refuge areas stretching from Georgetown County clear to the Savannah River. Not anymore. “The people leading this fight are from here for the most part, and they care deeply about the same mission,” says Charles Lane, one of the founding fathers of the ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge. “It’s landowners, bird-watchers, hunters, environmentalists, and historic-preservation-minded people who adore the culture of the Lowcountry. We know that the enemies of nature are well funded, well endowed, and have been working for a long time. But we’re committed and we’re serious about winning. We’re saying to developers, ‘You can go and ruin other places, but you’re not going to ruin this place.’” It’s working. Beach’s map shows how effective trusts, the state’s conservation bank, and simple neighbor-to-neighbor efforts have been at protecting vast tracts of land. The goal is the protection of more than seven million acres of the state’s land and water. “You need [to protect] 35 percent of land to maintain wildlife, quality of life, good fishing, clean water, and the environmental integrity of a place,” says Lane. “That will leave developers with 65 percent of the state. They should be happy with that.” Lane, fifty-three, speaks in a lazy drawl that belies his industriousness. His sunglasses shade tanned features etched through a lifetime of fishing, hunting, and tromping through the pluff mud of his family’s Willtown Bluff Plantation, along the Edisto River. As a kid, Lane didn’t know what a conservationist was. But even at ten years old, he watched Charleston sprawl — with alarm. “They were hanging another stoplight down Highway 17,” he recalls. “I said to my dad, ‘If they don’t do something, there are going to be stoplights all the way down to Willtown.’ Dad said, ‘Well, it’s going to be up to your generation to do something about it.’” After leaving Charleston for college and a career as an executive at Fluor Corporation, in 1987 Lane returned and started working with a real estate group that today specializes in easements and rural transactions on farms, plantations, and timberland. He came home just in time to learn that a land speculator, Michael Tang, had bought Prospect Hill Plantation, a thousand-plus-acre spread along the Edisto River adjacent to Willtown Bluff, and intended to develop a massive resort and marina. “I said, this will ruin Willtown,” says Lane. Lane called on Beach. A year earlier, on behalf of the Sierra Club, Beach had written a request that the tannin-stained waters of the Edisto be given the top-tier designation of Outstanding Resource Water. Beach was smart and well connected, and Lane saw in him a formidable ally. He’d need it: South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control had given initial approval to Tang’s marina. Lane was flummoxed, but a confident Beach appealed — and won. Shortly thereafter, Ducks Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy bulked up their operations, while homegrown entities such as the Lowcountry Open Land Trust and the Coastal Conservation League took shape. In the ensuing years, the lands surrounding the Ashepoo, Congaree, and Edisto rivers were turned into a focus area for a national wildlife refuge that would become the ACE Basin. Ted Turner, who owns the 5,300-acre Hope Plantation, helped the Lanes convince landowners to sign the development rights to their land into what were then little-known tax relief vehicles called easements. Tang was convinced to sell Prospect Hill into an ACE Basin easement. Since then, more than one hundred and thirty thousand acres have been preserved throughout the ACE, and more are in the works. In the meantime, conservationists have been fighting, and winning, pitched battles against the kind of poorly planned development that has long been the hallmark of the traffic- and sprawl-plagued Myrtle Beach area; they have placed under easement more and more private lands along Charleston’s Ashley and Cooper rivers and Georgetown County’s Waccamaw and Black rivers. The Nature Conservancy’s most ambitious North American project now is the protection of a seven-hundred-thousand-acre area along the lower Savannah River, between South Carolina and Georgia. The project was spurred by national studies showing the presence of large contiguous tracts of vital wildlife habitat. “Our marshland, longleaf pine, cypress tupelo, and bottomland hardwood habitats rank very highly on a global scale,” says Mark Robertson, the Nature Conservancy’s South Carolina executive director. Evidently, South Carolina landowners appreciate that distinction: The Nature Conservancy alone holds more than one hundred easements in South Carolina, ranking the state sixth in the nation. “There’s just an incredibly strong land ethic in South Carolina. It’s part of this tradition of family lands — hunting and fishing,” says Robertson. “I worked in the Florida chapter for twelve years. In that time, we didn’t receive one donated easement.” The process of saving land, meanwhile, is teaching conservationists the need to mesh their interests with the people who live in — and are deeply tied to — the rural landscapes they’re seeking to preserve. Last fall, Samuel Robinson, a longtime black resident of Awendaw, partnered with white conservationist Nell Daniels to take on a pair of entrenched black council members who had voted to approve a high-density subdivision between Cape Romain and the Francis Marion National Forest. They took the election in a landslide. Robinson is among a growing coalition of Gullah activists teaming with people like Beach and the Nature Conservancy’s Noel Thorn to address local needs while avoiding the kind of Hilton Head sprawl that has driven black families from Civil War-era communities. “My people have not historically worked hand in hand with environmental groups. Many haven’t realized that the environmentalist, in his or her quest to preserve, is at the same time preserving our heritage,” Robinson says. “But they are figuring it out.” Not long ago, Charles Lane and his friend Edwin Cooper made a call on a group of landowners in Greenville, South Carolina, who held a sizeable tract adjacent to the ACE Basin. “We showed them the protected lands map,” says Lane. “When they saw it, and saw the scale of what’s been done, they said they were embarrassed that they hadn’t become a part of it sooner.” The landowners signed an easement. “Everyone comes at it from a slightly different angle,” says Lane. “But we all realize that if we don’t work hard, this little slice of Lowcountry heaven could all go away.” |
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