What’s worse – industry fouling the SC Lowcountry, or too many people? | Opinion

It’s never over until it’s over, and it will never be over.

That’s a fair description of the fight to keep people from ruining the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Last month, we celebrated the greatest victory yet in preserving our lifeblood — the pristine waterways of the Port Royal Sound estuary.

The Town of Hilton Head Island unveiled an informational kiosk and mural telling of the historic time, circa 1970, when Gullah shrimpers joined forces with the island’s major developers and incensed citizens to stave off a petrochemical plant on the Colleton River that would have done unknown harm to the water and air.

But here’s the point.

It wasn’t over when BASF backed out of the deal that all the powers-that-be promoted and set up shop in an area of Louisiana now known as “Cancer Alley.”

Within a decade, Chicago Bridge and Iron wanted to build gigantic domes used in offshore oil drilling on the same Victoria Bluff site.

That too was fought, and that too never happened.

The die was cast. We would not be a place of industrial smokestacks but one of a real estate and tourism economy.

WE are the heavy industry. And there is no end in sight of the WE flooding the Lowcountry.

The question is whether WE are as toxic as the industry our forebears fought off so passionately.

It was addressed head-on at the ceremony last month to celebrate the new recognition of the Hilton Head Fishing Cooperative’s role in fighting off the BASF debacle.

State Sen. Tom Davis of Bluffton said, “We won it over 50 years ago, but we’re looking at a similar battle now.”

The battle is over development, now sprawling into rural Jasper County.

Clear-cutting is the new norm. And every tributary within the estuary carries a growing burden of processing all the runoff of humankind.

Think of the traffic congestion that clogs the intersection of U.S. 278 and S.C. 170 in Okatie. That is the same burden the industry of people is putting on the marshes and waterways.

“It’s changing who we are,” Davis said.

One of the leading voices in the fight against BASF and Chicago Bridge and Iron was the late Fred C. Hack.

He was in the original developers of Hilton Head, beginning in 1950.

He and his brother, Orion Hack, who may have been the heart and soul of the BASF fight, had a reverence for the environment and knew its every leaf and wing.

Fred Hack’s company planned and built neighborhoods on Hilton Head, including Port Royal and Shipyard, but he was convinced responsible development could be done in concert with nature and that the Lowcountry’s environment was its greatest blessing.

Hack warned time and again that we had only one chance to save the Port Royal Sound estuary because once it was ruined, it would be ruined forever.

He chided local elected officials and bureaucrats for selling our soul for a bowl of pottage.

He reminded us that the fight is never won, and that it is up to people to become activists for the environment. And to never give up.

Fred Hack wrote a series of newspaper op-eds in late 1977, when the CBI plant seemed so much a done deal that land had been cleared for it.

He was urgently rallying the troops, saying it’s never over. He said, “CBI’s contribution to blend into nature’s works will be large structures including a 22-story-tall crane that will be almost in front of the Mackays Creek bridge, impressive thoughtlessness for the natural landscape.”

And, in his final op-ed that was published two weeks before his untimely death at the age of 63, Fred Hack put an onus on readers that is as real in today’s fight as it was in his fight.

“We seem to have drifted into a state of contentment or an irresponsibly tranquil mood,” Hack wrote in The Island Packet. “Let somebody else do those required chores to keep our paradise in top shape, many seem to say.”

That too, then as now, is “impressive thoughtlessness for the natural landscape.”

This story was originally published June 1, 2024 at 8:00 AM with the headline "What’s worse – industry fouling the SC Lowcountry, or too many people? | Opinion."