A Delicate Balance

Angela C. Halfacre

Description

Sustainability of the natural environment and of our society has become one of the most urgent challenges facing modern Americans. Communities across the country are seeking a viable pattern of growth that promotes prosperity, protects the environment, and preserves the distinctive quality of life of their regions. The coastal zone of South Carolina is one of the most endangered, culturally complex regions in the state and perhaps in all of the American South. A Delicate Balance examines how a multilayered culture of environmental conservation and sustainable development has emerged in the lowcountry of South Carolina. Angela C. Halfacre, a political scientist, describes how sprawl shock, natural disaster, climate change, and other factors spawned and sustain—but also threaten and hinder—the culture of conservation.

Since Hurricane Hugo in 1989, the coastal region of South Carolina has experienced unprecedented increases in residential and commercial development. A Delicate Balance uses interdisciplinary literature and ethnographic, historical, and spatial methods to show how growing numbers of lowcountry residents, bolstered by substantial political, corporate, and media support, have sought to maintain the region's distinctive sense of place as well as its fragile ecology. The diverse social and cultural threads forming the fabric of the lowcountry conservation culture include those who make their living from the land, such as African American basket makers and multigenerational famers, as well as those who own, manage, and develop the land and homeowner association members. Evolving perceptions, policies, and practices that characterize community priorities and help to achieve the ultimate goal of sustainability are highlighted here.

As Halfacre demonstrates, maintaining the quality of the environment while accommodating residential, commercial, and industrial growth is a balancing act replete with compromises. This book documents the origins, goals, programs, leaders, tactics, and effectiveness of a conservation culture. A Delicate Balance deftly illustrates that a resilient culture of conservation that wields growing influence in the lowcountry has become an important regional model for conservation efforts across the nation.

A Delicate Balance also includes a foreword by journalist Cynthia Barnett, author of Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis and Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.

Sujets

• Environmental Protection
• Environmental Conservation
• HISTORY
• Make A Difference
• Mary Alice Monroe
• Sense of Place
• Elitism
• Disenchantment
• Kieran Suckling
• Picturesque
• Massive resistance
• Bundle of rights
• Contingent valuation
• Swampy
• Unincorporated area
• NIMBY
• Protectionism
• Unintended consequences
• Punctuated equilibrium
• History of the Americas
• Disaster
• Endangered Species Act
• United States
• FL
• Alternatives
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• GA
• Nature
• Jane Jacobs

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172799
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

a delicate balance
Constructing a Conservation Culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry
Angela C. Halfacre

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
© 2012 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012 Paperback and ebook editions published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Halfacre, Angela C.    A delicate balance : constructing a conservation culture in the South Carolina lowcountry / Angela C. Halfacre.             p. cm.       Includes bibliographical references and index.       ISBN 978-1-61117-071-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Historic conservation—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast. 2. Cultural property—Protection—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast. 3. Nature conservation—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast. 4. Environmental protection—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast. 5. Historic conservation—Social aspects—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast. 6. Historic sites—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast. 7. Natural areas—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast. 8. Atlantic Coast (S.C.)—History, Local. 9. Atlantic Coast (S.C.)—Environmental conditions. 10. South Carolina—Cultural policy. I. Title.    F277.A86H35 2012    975.7'6—dc23                                                                                              2011050453
Title page: detail, lowcountry landscape with rice trunks. Courtesy of David Soliday.
ISBN 978-1-61117-278-2 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-61117-279-9 (ebook)
To my family
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Foreword     Cynthia Barnett
Acknowledgments
Timeline of Key Conservation Events and Legislation
Introduction
        ONE    The Lowcountry Environment—Past and Present
       TWO    The Emergence of a Conservation Culture
    THREE    Leveraged Leadership
      FOUR    The Primacy of Land and Partnerships
       FIVE     Growing by Choice: Community Planning
         SIX     Conservation Communities
    SEVEN     Sustainable Subdivisions, Conservation Communities
     EIGHT     Weaving Tensions into a Cultural Heritage
      NINE      Conserving Agri Culture
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Lowcountry landscape
Skimmer in flight
Traffic at Litchfield Beach
Wicker chair in the marsh at Francis Marion National Forest
Map of the lowcountry waterbodies
Map of coastal plantations in 1932
Planting Irish potatoes on Edisto Island
Hurricane damage to Charleston Ferry Wharf in 1911
House near Beaufort in the late 1800s
Hunting at Oakton Plantation on Winyah Bay, 1923
Myrtle Beach in the 1960s
Traffic in Mount Pleasant
Map that gained support for lowcountry conservation
Land for sale along Highway 17
Damage from Hurricane Hugo on Sullivan's Island
House on stilts at Folly Beach
Dana Beach
Mayor Joseph P. Riley
Elizabeth Hagood
Charles and Hugh Lane
Thomasena Stokes-Marshall
Lowcountry protected lands, 1985
Lowcountry protected lands, 1985–2010
Protected lands in the ACE Basin
Sandy Island boat dock
McClellanville swing and dock
Litchfield marsh docks
Sewee Preserve Plan
Charles E. Fraser
Ruins and house, Old Tabby Links
I'On, up close
The town of I'On
Aerial view of I'On
Basket stand along Highway 17
Sweetgrass harvest
Girl weaving a sweetgrass basket
Farmer off to work
Abandoned tractor in Beaufort County
Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge
Map of Proposed I-526 Mark Clark Expressway
Egret taking flight
Bridge over marsh on Pawleys Island
FOREWORD
When Hurricane Hugo battered coastal South Carolina through the night of September 21, 1989, its winds and waters swept beach houses off foundations, damaged 80 percent of the homes in downtown Charleston, and uprooted oaks that had survived the Civil War—becoming the costliest storm in U.S. history up to that time.
Americans watched on television as tens of thousands of coastal residents discovered their homes crushed, bridges toppled, barrier islands drowned. A massive clean-up followed, with victims struggling in the muggy southern heat with no electricity and little water, food, and fuel.
What happened after the lights came on and the TV crews went home shapes one of the many surprising stories in political scientist Angela Halfacre's A Delicate Balance: Constructing a Conservation Culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry . As many shell-shocked locals sold their homes to flee the risk of another storm, many more newcomers—large numbers of whom had first glimpsed its indigenous beauty during the extensive media coverage of Hugo—flocked to the lowcountry.
Not splintered frame houses and forests, rising insurance premiums, or the danger of future hurricanes weakened the lowcountry's pull, strong as the tidal force along South Carolina's coastal shoreline and half-million acres of golden salt marsh. Halfacre captures the allure as both storyteller and academic, weaving oyster-briny memoirs from local voices such as novelist Pat Conroy seamlessly with ethnography and history.
But her foremost contribution is identifying and detailing the “conservation culture” that emerged in the lowcountry during the building/rebuilding boom that Hugo triggered. The conservation culture is atypical of environmentalism, shepherded with the help of some of the most conservative residents in the region and grounded in traditional property and hunting rights. It is sensitive to not only land and water proper, but land- and water-based livelihoods and traditions such as African American sweetgrass basket making.
The most remarkable story may be how, more than two decades after Hugo, the conservation culture continues to flourish. While parts of the lowcountry have succumbed to sprawl as willingly as the rest of the United States, the region has done a better job maintaining its distinctive place and ecology than most have. Historic Charleston is one of a kind. Few other Atlantic coastlines remain contoured with sand dunes and maritime forests. Other ports of southern history are more likely to censor the slave past than to honor its heritage artwork in roadside stands.
For any special place, the ultimate risk is to be loved to death: loved by more and more people bringing even more of what they were used to somewhere else—a corporate drugstore on every corner, Kentucky bluegrass on every lawn—until the special has dissolved into the common. Halfacre explores how one special place has refused to let it happen. Her book carries rich lessons for other distinctive places seeking sustainable ways to grow and prosper that maintain respect for the environment as they preserve a distinctive quality of life and cultural heritage.
The wisdom in A Delicate Balance could not be timelier for the United States in the early twenty-first century, a country paralyzed by uncompromising divisions between political parties, between cultures, between classes. The preservation of one of the largest undeveloped estuaries on the Eastern Seaboard, the Ashepoo, Combahee, and South Edisto Basin provides an invaluable habitat for endangered species such as woodstorks and loggerheads as it continues traditions including farming and commercial fishing. The effort here is an inspiration for other special places, such as the Everglades recharge area in Central Florida. South Carolina's conservation culture offers hope that practical consensus among committed private landowners, environmentalists, and sportsmen may yet overcome extremist rhetoric surrounding the proposal for a new Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge.
The lowcountry's conservation culture is not always harmonious. A Delicate Balance shows how its political, social, and cultural threads have become woven so tightly around common goals that it can endure—much like a unique coiled basket woven from historic memory with grasses harvested from the region's singular marshlands.
Cynthia Barnett
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have enjoyed a lifelong love affair with the lowcountry. My own introduction to the region began at the age of two; our family vacationed each summer at Litchfield Beach and