Beaufort County has good reason not to do things like they do up North -- our marshes

By now everybody in Beaufort County has heard, "We don't care how you did it up North."

But there's a better way to say it: "It doesn't matter how you did it up North."

That's because the Lowcountry is different. And Beaufort County is different from the rest of the Lowcountry. And it must be treated differently -- very, very differently.

The secret is to know Beaufort County and why it must be treated differently.

So when Paula Williams invited me to a seminar Monday called "River Smart: What We Should Know About the State of our Lowcountry Waterways," I wanted to stand up and applaud. She is a Colleton River Plantation resident who chairs that private community's Lifelong Learning Group.

They have been learning about the Gullah culture, the ACE Basin and more. In the spring they will take a guided stroll through Beaufort.

Their eagerness to learn is an example for all of us.

At Monday's seminar, they learned that 46 percent of Beaufort County consists of salt marsh and tidal rivers. Almost half of South Carolina's salt marsh is in Beaufort County. What the uninformed may call swamp is actually a nursery and sanctuary for all the seafood we enjoy and the state's $1.5 billion sportfishing industry.

They learned that Beaufort County has the highest tides south of Maine -- much higher than other Lowcountry counties. This flushes the deep tidal creeks and rivers of our Port Royal Sound estuary daily. But in the headwaters, the water doesn't rush in and out like that, and that's the dilemma because that's where the stormwater runoff from all the new development goes.

Also with development comes insecticides. And whatever kills insects is going to kill crustaceans when it gets into the salt marsh.

The group was shown aerial photos of the Okatie area taken in 1994 and 2006. It looked like a bomb had fallen, except for a circle of green where Beaufort County bought land. From the air, it's easier to see that in many ways we live in the ocean, often on land that at one time was marsh or a dune. Flood insurance opened the floodgates to development on land that cannot be treated like land elsewhere, no matter what the out-of-town corporate offices think.

We must be willing to look "rural," or even "poor," the class was told. In Beaufort County, we need weedy edges to the highways, not "curb and gutter." We need natural vegetation, especially by the water and marsh, not green, manicured lawns. We need less pavement.

As one of the speakers, David Harter, told the group, "Port Royal Sound is not like other areas. We have to create our own rules. We've got to do it our way down here."