How a grass-roots movement helped save Edisto

May anyone who attempts to despoil Edisto with high-rises and other high-density developments suffer from corns, bunions, neuritis, neuralgia, the heartbreak of psoriasis and mother-in-law problems. May they also suffer bankruptcy before they cut down three-hundred-year-old oaks or fill the marsh. May they decide to move back to wherever they came from before they build anything that can't be quickly and inexpensively torn down.

EDISTO ISLAND-- Those words from Cantey Wright's book "Edisto: A Guide to Life on the Island" were not recited at the first-ever annual meeting of the Edisto Island Preservation Alliance Tuesday night, but maybe they didn't need to be.

They pump through the veins of more than 200 citizens -- old and young, black and white -- who filled the family hall of a Presbyterian church serving the Lowcountry since 1685.

On their minds this night were more recent dates like the 1940s, when America came roaring out of a horrible world war and wanted to act like the victors -- paving their way to progress. Or the 1970s when something called condominiums turned the coast of South Carolina into a gold rush. Or 1986 when the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society started insisting that the old ways weren't something to be tossed out like a Dixie cup.

Or 2003 when a few Edisto citizens caught wind of a secret meeting between local governments. It was aimed at putting a hotel in the Edisto Beach State Park, and the citizens reacted like fire ants.

They actually came to be called the Fire Ants. Their goal was to swarm fast and sting hard.

Their story culminated at this meeting where keynote speaker Alex Sanders somehow connected Walt Whitman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Prine and "The Three Little Pigs" to South Carolina's fleeting sense of place. Their story, from just a few islands up the coast from Hilton Head Island, is the human struggle that has consumed the Lowcountry for the last half century.

"All up and down the South Carolina coast, residents are trying to make their voices heard," island native Bud Skidmore told Tom Mason, the original Fire Ant, for his story in the current issue of Colleton Magazine. "There is a fatalistic attitude that people are going to come here whether we like it or not, and we simply have to accommodate them. My question is 'Why?'

"Where is it written that our little island should let everyone who could conceivably want to come here do so? Particularly when doing so means we must watch our way of life be changed forever, losing our culture, our rural lifestyle, our environment, and everything that makes us what we are."

STRENGTH IN UNITY

The hotel in the state park didn't happen.

What did happen is that nine local organizations that share at least one common trait -- a love of Edisto -- came together to form an alliance. It includes the Fire Ants, the historic preservation society, the Edisto Island Open Land Trust, the Edisto Island Community Association, Edisto Beach Property Owners Association, the Town of Edisto Beach, Edisto Chamber of Commerce, Edisto Pride and the Friends of Edisto Beach.

They have found strength in numbers, and the new alliance enables them to duke it out in the arena of public policy. They have united on specific projects, like getting S.C. 174 designated a National Scenic Byway. That led to a Byway Corridor Management Plan -- a blueprint for preserving Edisto and creating economic opportunity.

They have protested state permits for two ridiculously large docks.

Last year, the land trust doubled its protected acreage. And when the state Department of Natural Resources inherited the 4,500-acre Botany Bay plantation, it meant that 47 percent of the island is now under some form of protection.

On Tuesday night, the Community Association circulated petitions calling for four specific improvements to the Charleston County Comprehensive Plan.

A panel discussion including two politicians and a conservationist drove home the point that grass-roots voices are needed -- and they count.

The new Friends of the ACE Basin organization distributed pamphlets.

And a lady from DNR was recruiting "Botany Bay Buddies" to volunteer at the new Botany Bay Wildlife Management Area, now open to the public.

NIGHT OF HOPE

Alex Sanders is a beloved former judge, legislator, college president and law school founder who remains one of the state's best storytellers, cooks and friends of conservation. He managed to bring a sense of perspective to a gathering place older than our nation.

Sanders was a child of the Depression, reared in a Columbia home ordered from Sears and Roebuck. Everyone recycled and conserved, they just didn't call it that.

Then came the march of progress, and consumption swallowed forests, farms and neighborhoods whole.

"Terms like 'quality of life' and 'natural resources' were for college professors," Sanders said. "It was none of our business."

All the development "seemed right," he said. Then came a haze in the clouds and clear-cut forests, and "some of us began to fear its consequences," Sanders said. Now the question looms: Were we the beneficiaries of progress, or victims of it?

Sanders said trips to Edisto were the high point of his childhood. He stayed in a home across Palmetto Avenue from the ocean. "Nobody would be so foolhardy as to build a house actually on the beach," he said. "We knew that as children. We had read 'The Three Little Pigs.' "

Today, Sanders looks along our coastline and fears that the state he has given his all to is schizophrenic.

"We seem bent on tearing it apart for short-term gain," he said. "In the past decade, particularly, we have lost ground. Our world needs less short-term greed."

Sanders asked the assembled if they were willing to get their hands dirty and make politics represent the will of the people.

The Fire Ants stood and cheered. Their alliance was now officially in place.

The Rev. A.C. "Chick" Morrison of the New First Missionary Baptist Church said the blessing, asking God to "make us ever mindful of the needs of others."

And island restaurant owner Robert E. Lee, who goes by "BoBo," served everybody chicken over white rice, cole slaw, butter beans and sweet tea.

For a moment, nobody worried about their corns or bunions or mothers-in-law. It was a night of great hope in the Lowcountry.