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NINE Conserving AgriCulture The concerted efforts to preserve the lowcountry basket-making tradition demonstrate that the culture of conservation encompasses much more than conventional efforts to preserve and protect the natural environment. One of the most endangered elements of the coastal region’s historic way of life is agriculture . In recent years South Carolina has been losing about thirty-five acres of farmland daily to residential and commercial development, and the lowcountry has experienced the greatest of those losses. Concern about the loss of farmlands has led the conservation coalition to focus more attention on the issue. Land trusts have been buying dormant farms and executing conservation easements to preserve others. The Charleston County Greenbelt Bank Board also purchases rural land to protect it from development. Saving farmland has become an urgent issue. As James Island attorney Margaret Fabri stressed in 2000, “we don’t have many rural spaces left, and if we don’t protect them now, we will have none left.” She and others pointed to examples throughout the lowcountry of farmlands being gobbled up by suburban development. “If we don’t keep the country in lowcountry , we don’t have a lowcountry,” said Jim Hare, coordinator of the Ashley River Conservation Coalition.1 Rockville, a quaint creekside town on rural Wadmalaw Island, south of Charleston , illustrates the pressures exerted by sprawling development on rural life in the lowcountry. That the hamlet’s economy has long depended on the activity of shrimpers and farmers helps explain why year-round residents are so determined to preserve the rural way of life. Town dwellers emphatically oppose new development in the form of condominiums, gas stations, and bed-and-breakfast inns. “We don’t want Wal-Mart, and we don’t want McDonald’s. We don’t want paved streets and don’t want stores. We don’t need ‘progress,’ and we don’t want it,” said longtime resident Jimmie Davis in 2006. His neighbor Nancy Stafford agreed, asserting that “we hate development. We want Rockville to stay really, really rural.”2 Sam Brownlee, a resident of Johns Island, shared such sentiments. In the late 1980s he decided to move across the Stono River to the rural island from suburban James Island. He wanted “to get away from the hustle and bustle” of traffic jams, crowds, radio towers, and litter so as to “increase our quality of life,” 220 A Delicate Balance he explained. By 2004, however, he saw the same forces threatening his rural serenity on Johns Island. “We’re turning into another Mount Pleasant or James Island,” he sighed. To fend off such “progress,” Brownlee devoted about twenty hours a week to attending zoning hearings and public meetings. While acknowledging the right of property owners to develop their rural land, he affirmed the need for smart-growth planning and zoning.3 To protect and preserve rural areas county planning commissions across the lowcountry at the end of the twentieth century crafted new land-use regulations intended to slow the advance of sprawling development into rural areas by limiting the ability of property owners to subdivide their land, creating new setback requirements, tree protections, sign ordinances, and other guidelines for green development. The rationale for such restrictions was to keep the county’s rural areas from being overrun by incompatible developments as well as by an influx of new residents. Such regulations intended to protect the rural character of the lowcountry, however, have collided with the rights of private property owners to dispose of their land as they see fit. Critics argued that the new landuse requirements had the effect of depriving owners of the ability to garner the highest possible profit. The rural zoning densities effectively prevented people from subdividing their land for sale or for family use. The most equitable proposed solution, as demonstrated in Beaufort County, is to create a countymanaged fund to “buy” the development rights (“highest and best use”) of rural property owners. In essence such a program compensates farmers for placing their lands in a conservation easement rather than selling the property to the highest bidder. Purchasing development rights is less expensive than buying property outright, and it does not encroach on private property rights. Such a voluntary program, said longtime Johns Island farmer Thomas Legare, would be “a win, win situation for everybody. We want to preserve our property as farmland, but we can’t afford to give away a [conservation] easement.” Few counties have created such funds, however. As a result, Adair...

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