A Delicate Balance: Constructing a Conservation Culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry

Foreword

FOREWORD When Hurricane Hugo battered coastal South Carolina through the night of September 21, 1989, its winds and waters swept beach houses off foundations, damaged 80 percent of the homes in downtown Charleston, and uprooted oaks that had survived the Civil War—becoming the costliest storm in U.S. history up to that time. Americans watched on television as tens of thousands of coastal residents discovered their homes crushed, bridges toppled, barrier islands drowned. A massive clean-up followed, with victims struggling in the muggy southern heat with no electricity and little water, food, and fuel. What happened after the lights came on and the TV crews went home shapes one of the many surprising stories in political scientist Angela Halfacre’s A Delicate Balance: Constructing a Conservation Culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry. As many shell-shocked locals sold their homes to flee the risk of another storm, many more newcomers—large numbers of whom had first glimpsed its indigenous beauty during the extensive media coverage of Hugo—flocked to the lowcountry . Not splintered frame houses and forests, rising insurance premiums, or the danger of future hurricanes weakened the lowcountry’s pull, strong as the tidal force along South Carolina’s coastal shoreline and half-million acres of golden salt marsh. Halfacre captures the allure as both storyteller and academic, weaving oyster-briny memoirs from local voices such as novelist Pat Conroy seamlessly with ethnography and history. But her foremost contribution is identifying and detailing the “conservation culture” that emerged in the lowcountry during the building/rebuilding boom that Hugo triggered. The conservation culture is atypical of environmentalism, shepherded with the help of some of the most conservative residents in the region and grounded in traditional property and hunting rights. It is sensitive to not only land and water proper, but land- and water-based livelihoods and traditions such as African American sweetgrass basket making. The most remarkable story may be how, more than two decades after Hugo, the conservation culture continues to flourish. While parts of the lowcountry have succumbed to sprawl as willingly as the rest of the United States, the region xii Foreword has done a better job maintaining its distinctive place and ecology than most have. Historic Charleston is one of a kind. Few other Atlantic coastlines remain contoured with sand dunes and maritime forests. Other ports of southern history are more likely to censor the slave past than to honor its heritage artwork in roadside stands. For any special place, the ultimate risk is to be loved to death: loved by more and more people bringing even more of what they were used to somewhere else— a corporate drugstore on every corner, Kentucky bluegrass on every lawn—until the special has dissolved into the common. Halfacre explores how one special place has refused to let it happen. Her book carries rich lessons for other distinctive places seeking sustainable ways to grow and prosper that maintain respect for the environment as they preserve a distinctive quality of life and cultural heritage. The wisdom in A Delicate Balance could not be timelier for the United States in the early twenty-first century, a country paralyzed by uncompromising divisions between political parties, between cultures, between classes. The preservation of one of the largest undeveloped estuaries on the Eastern Seaboard, the Ashepoo, Combahee, and South Edisto Basin provides an invaluable habitat for endangered species such as woodstorks and loggerheads as it continues traditions including farming and commercial fishing. The effort here is an inspiration for other special places, such as the Everglades recharge area in Central Florida. South Carolina’s conservation culture offers hope that practical consensus among committed private landowners, environmentalists, and sportsmen may yet overcome extremist rhetoric surrounding the proposal for a new Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge. The lowcountry’s conservation culture is not always harmonious. A Delicate Balance shows how its political, social, and cultural threads have become woven so tightly around common goals that it can endure—much like a unique coiled basket woven from historic memory with grasses harvested from the region’s singular marshlands. Cynthia Barnett ...