Lowcountry’s ‘Nature comes 1st’ growth philosophy has been forgotten

I’m back home again from a trip to Charlottesville, Va., to see my daughter Camden and granddaughter Alice and meet my grandson Benjamin, now 7 weeks old, for the first time. It was so nice waking up to temperatures in the mid-60s that I almost didn’t want to come back — but here I am.

Checking my email, I was surprised how many folks responded to my column last week about king mackerel fishing with lots of questions about where and how to catch these awesome fish. It was so refreshing that the word “cobia” wasn’t mentioned once in all those emails, because I was tired of being bummed out watching cobia by the thousands killed.

I am a pretty chill kind of guy and hate being mad, so maybe now I can get back to my old self, laughing and whistling with my pet bluebird on my shoulder. But before I call that bluebird over, I have one more issue I want to get off my chest.

Having lived here since I was 5 years old, you can only imagine the changes I have seen. When people find out just how long I have lived here, one question comes up each and every time — “Do all the changes bother you?”

Of course I would rather have it the way it was, but time has mellowed me a bit and I accept that change occurs. But as of late, some changes bother the heck out of me. Maybe a lot of you aren’t all that familiar with the original concept that brought fame to the Lowcountry, because when that concept evolved, it is was regarded as a radical new way of developing and has since been adopted by other developments all over the world.

In a nutshell, Charles Fraser, who started Sea Pines Resort on Hilton Head Island, decided that nature should come first and building second. Homes should be built around nature and not the other way around.

I will say even though Hilton Head is pretty much maxed out, at least they have done a fairly good job sticking to that noble concept. It was inevitable that as Hilton Head’s popularity exploded, surrounding areas would be the next to be developed, but I never in a million years would have thought that his concept for development would be tossed in the trash — especially since it was directly responsible for the appeal of this area.

A perfect example of what I am talking about can be seen in Bluffton on the corner of U.S. 278 and Highway 46, where the new Walmart and Sam’s are being built and on Lady’s Island where a Walmart is being constructed.

When I read letters to the editor where a lot of folks are complaining about the buildings being so close to the road along with the entire site being cleared of trees, I chuckled. Why? In the case of the Bluffton project, Al Stokes — director of the Waddell Mariculture Center — and I were the only two people that attended the County Council meeting as they were deciding whether to give the green light to the developer.

Our primary concern was stormwater runoff heading to either the Colleton River or May River, but with only two of us there, we didn’t stand a chance.

Probably the change that bothers me most is the lack of involvement by the public on how this area is to proceed. If it weren’t for local involvement, all of you that live in Colleton River Plantation would now be living next door to a BASF chemical plant, known as one of the worst polluters in the world.

I sadly watch large tracts of land being clear-cut for new developments with a few token trees planted after the fact. What happened to “nature comes first,” the standard that brought so many of you here in the first place?

Our roads can barely keep up with the traffic we currently have, but every single day more and more building permits are handed out with seemingly no thought whatsoever to the consequences. As far as I understand, there are very few rules governing what flora can be removed and where runoff goes. Greed has trumped rationale.

I hate to make this comparison, but it’s like a locust plague as developers, usually from far away, come to this beautiful area, strip the land bare, build box houses, make their money and head on to the next place to repeat the process.

I love the Lowcountry so much, or I wouldn’t say these things. It is not too late to make some meaningful changes that will preserve this unique way of life, but only if we all get together as one voice.

It’s so easy if you live in one of the developments that followed the “nature first” theory to hide behind closed gates, but this is your Lowcountry too. Each and every person that owns land here has a responsibility to make this a place a model for responsible growth.

Nature is letting us borrow her beauty, so isn’t caring for her the right thing to do? I think so.

This story was originally published July 2, 2016 at 3:23 PM with the headline "Lowcountry’s ‘Nature comes 1st’ growth philosophy has been forgotten."