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It is great because, by and large, it has been left alone. Its natural attributes are legion, and its traditional land uses have sustained generations.
How it has been preserved in the face of intense demand for change, is an instructive story for conservation-minded people across the globe.
Twenty years ago this September, just a week before Hurricane Hugo would smash ashore near Charleston, a figurative line was drawn in the sand. A handful of conservationists and landowners gathered beneath the great oaks of Willtown Bluff Plantation to plan a fight. They did not want to see a proposal for 1,000 homes around a golf course dramatically change laid-back Edisto Island.
As a result, the development was nixed, and the Nature Conservancy of South Carolina bought the land.
But a much more far-reaching result came of it. It was the formation of a broad-based coalition that promoted and enabled land conservation on a grand scale.
Today, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of that great achievement that became known as the ACE Basin Project.
It consists of nearly 400,000 acres of mostly undeveloped coastal land along the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers. It is a one-of-a-kind, public-private, ecological preserve.
That land total includes publicly owned tracts, but also some 200,000 acres of privately held lands placed under conservation easements by about 130 families.
These family values, and appreciation for a Lowcountry way of life, have been especially important as the ecologically sensitive region has been inundated with development over the past 20 years.
The land is not shelved or devalued. Quite the opposite. It remains in use for farming crops and timber, hunting, fishing and living. Some 50,000 acres in the basin are open to the public.
ACE Basin Task Force chairman Charles Lane told The Post and Courier in Charleston, "The basin has a culture, a history and a way of life, and the only tools we have to keep it is the willingness of property owners. The people live in these areas because they want to live here."
The challenge will be for future generations to honor the easements and not try to undo them.
But the greatest lesson of the ACE Basin involves a team larger than any family. The ACE Basin is the result of cooperation between governments, hunters, corporations, nonprofits and conservation organizations.
Major players include the S.C. Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, the Lowcountry Open Land Trust, the S.C. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, MeadWestvaco and Nemours Wildlife Foundation.
The movement has been spurred by such Lowcountry giants as the late philanthropists Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley and retired U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings of Charleston. Hollings' contributions to the effort were recognized when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service named a large, public tract the Ernest F. Hollings ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge.
This collaboration, and these shared values, will have to be repeated well into the future. Each new day brings new environmental challenges to the ACE Basin and the full Lowcountry.
The power of teamwork is easily measured. The ACE Basin Project protected land worth $500 million at an actual cost of about $30 million, according to Dana Beach, director of the Coastal Conservation League.
What a legacy that is -- for a way of life, for stewardship of rare land and for the human spirit.
"You've done something very unique," Matthew Connolly, retired executive director of Ducks Unlimited, told several hundred who celebrated the ACE Basin anniversary under the great oaks of the Lane family's Willtown Bluff Plantation.
"What you've done here in the ACE Basin is the embodiment of what Americans can do."
