Spring/Summer 2021 Magazine

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Profiles in Conservation Meet some of our team and discover the passion behind the expertise, the drive behind their determination

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The Staff Laura Cantral, Executive Director

Reed Rayborn, Special Projects Manager and Board Liaison

Programs

Emily Cedzo, Senior Program Director, Land, Water, and Wildlife Riley Egger, Project Manager, Land, Water, and Wildlife Rachel Hawes, Project Manager, Land, Water, and Wildlife Jason Crowley, Senior Program Director, Communities and Transportation Betsy La Force, Senior Project Manager, Communities and Transportation Robby Maynor, Project Manager, Berkeley County Eddy Moore, Senior Program Director, Energy Rikki Parker, Senior Program Director, Legal and Program Support

Spring/Summer 2021 VOL.31 • NO. 1

NORTH COAST Becky Ryon, Office Director, North Coast COLUMBIA Merrill McGregor, Director of Government Relations SOUTH COAST Jessie White, Office Director, South Coast Juliana Smith, Office Director, South Coast

GrowFood Carolina

COVER IMAGE: Juliana Smith, Project Manager, South Coast pictured at Whitehall Park on Lady’s Island.

Photograph by Gately Williams

Offices Charleston 131 Spring Street Charleston, SC 29403 843.723.8035 Beaufort 1212 King Street Beaufort, SC 29902 843.522.1800 Columbia 1219 Assembly Street Suite 202 Columbia, SC 29201 803.771.7102/803.758.5800 GrowFood Carolina 990 Morrison Drive Charleston, SC 29403 843.727.0091

Anthony Mirisciotta, General Manager Shaunda Fifer, Sales and Marketing Director Richard Finne, Warehouse Operations and Distribution Manager Kevin Gilly, Warehouse Operations and Distribution Manager Paul Haire, Inventory Control and Quality Assurance Specialist Austin Lucas, Warehouse Operations and Distribution Manager Dave McAhron, Warehouse and Distribution Associate Benton Montgomery, Director of Operations Deirdre Tanner, Supply Chain Wizard Brita Van Fossen, Sales and Marketing Manager Anna Ware, Sales and Marketing Associate Rebecca Watson, Farm Coordinator

Administration

FINANCE Mike Mistler, Controller DeAnna Ridley, Bookkeeper Kim Larson, Accountant HUMAN RESOURCES Deb Davidson, Human Resources Officer TECHNOLOGY AND OPERATIONS Andy Hollis, Director of Technology & Operations Stacie Loeffler, Database Administrator Jamie Roschal, Office Coordinator

Communications

Alan Hancock, Communications Director Jasmine Gil, Outreach Coordinator Diane Knich, Communications Manager Catie Lucey, Creative Services Associate

Development

Nancy Appel, Development Director Kati McArdle, Grants & Donor Communications Manager Taryn Mason, Annual Fund Manager

Board of Directors

Ceara Donnelley, Chair John Thompson, Vice Chair Margot T. Rose, Secretary Kent Griffin, Treasurer Johnston C. Adams

Magazine

Dan W. Boone, III Bill Brenizer Lee Edwards George Gephart Cynthia Kellogg

Stephanie Hunt, Editor and Writer Braxton Crim, Designer Gately Williams, Photographer

Pierre Manigault Jeremiah “Jerry” Milbank, III David Westerlund Steve Zoukis

Become a Monthly Donor Today!

Making a monthly gift is one of the most effective ways to show your dedication to protecting our coastal communities and critters.

This ongoing support helps ensure the resources are available to continue to fight for a healthy, resilient coast.

As our most dedicated members, monthly donors are recognized as Coastal GEMs (Giving Every Month) and receive a variety of benefits.

To become a monthly donor today, go to coastalconservationleague.org/monthly We appreciate your support­—you are a true GEM!

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10 Years of GrowFood This year we are excited to be celebrating GrowFood Carolina’s 10 year anniversary. We have been helping South Carolina farmers stay on their land and encouraging eating local for a decade, and the results show.

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Looking forward to ten more years to come!

F R OM T H E D I R E CTO R

Friends, Hope comes with the springtime! We’re pleased to report that we are seeing the contours of progress on policies that address climate change and also the dramatic population growth we’re experiencing along the coast. Power companies are making plans to close the state’s five remaining coal-burning power plants. Governor Henry McMaster has appointed our state’s first Chief Resilience Officer. Charleston County listened to concerns of the Phillips Community on the proposed widening of Highway 41, opening up pathways for a more appropriate solution.

With Charleston Waterkeeper and our lawyers at Southern Environmental Law Center, we settled a case with a plastic pellet manufacturer that should keep nurdles out of Charleston Harbor.

And on top of continuing the good work they’ve been doing for a decade, the GrowFood Carolina team has been delivering SC-grown food to hundreds of children and families through the HeadStart program and to patients at MUSC and Roper St. Francis. Collectively these programs keep our farmers and local food system strong and promote healthy eating, with less of an impact on our air, water, and soil. We must continue to strengthen our local food economy as we strive to build a healthier, more resilient Lowcountry.

In this issue of our magazine, we are highlighting some of the people behind the work at the Coastal Conservation League. Like all of our team, these folks put in the long hours and work hard to protect this special place. Our professionals are experts who find the right levers that can bring about the changes we need. Our experts have testified at virtual Statehouse hearings and in proceedings at the Public Service Commission, and have hosted dozens of webinars to share quality information with the public. They’re savvy, they get things done, and I am so proud of the results.

I want to highlight one of this issue’s stories, Stephanie Hunt’s profile of Becca Watson, our farm coordinator. The story really captures the great work that GrowFood is doing to build a healthier, more resilient food system in South Carolina.

We’re celebrating GrowFood’s tenth anniversary this fall—and we’re planning a move from our warehouse at 990 Morrison Drive in the next couple of years. Look out for events to celebrate the anniversary and to chart the course for the next ten years.

The work that our team is doing to protect working lands, support farmers, and build a more resilient food system has never been more vital. I am eager to celebrate the tenth anniversary of this program with you, the supporters who make it possible—and maybe even in person!

Laura Cantral Executive Director

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Profiles Conser

s in rvation

“Our professionals are experts who find the right levers that can bring about the changes we need,” says Executive Director Laura Cantral. Here we meet a few, up close and personal. photography by GATELY WILLIAMS words by STEPHANIE HUNT

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Becca Watson, GrowFood Carolina’s Farm Coordinator, pictured in Sidi Limehouse’s cabbage fields at Rosebank Farms on Johns Island.

Farmers First

Becca Watson’s passion for farming has deep roots. She knows it’s not always peachy.

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t a certain time of the year, when the spring sun beams strong and the days grow warmer and longer, Becca Watson dreams of hitting the road. A very specific road. “There’s just nothing like the drive along Highway 23, from Monetta to Ridge Spring to Johnston. When the peach trees are in bloom, it’s an incredible drive with gorgeous pink blossoms lining both sides of the road,” she says. Having grown up traveling these roads and working in these very peach fields, she knows this terrain by heart—literally. This is land she loves, and a farming lifestyle she loves, which in turn inspires her work as Farm Coordinator at GrowFood Carolina.

Watson is the fourth generation of her family to have worked at what is now Watsonia Farm in Monetta, South Carolina. When her paternal great grandfather, Joseph Watson, began farming this land in 1918, he grew asparagus, and served as manager of the Monetta Asparagus Association.

By 1925 he challenged five neighboring farmers to diversify and try planting 60 acres of peach trees each. Turns out, those peaches thrived here in

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“The Ridge” area, and thus the beginning of what has blossomed into the state’s largest fruit commodity (and the state becoming the nation’s second largest peach producer) was well underway.

On her mother’s side, Watson’s maternal great grandfather, a French Canadian who migrated to New York in 1914, worked for a produce company, and eventually moved to Virginia, where his son became an apple farmer. “I have deep ag roots going back on both sides of my family,” says Watson, whose mother studied horticulture at Virginia Tech, then became a school teacher, but still sold peaches at farmers’ markets all summer. “My earliest memories are of waking up at 4 a.m. on Saturdays to help my mother and my Aunt Tonya unload the trucks and set up at the state farmers’ market. I’d help cut fruit samples, and carry peach baskets to customers’ cars,” Watson recalls. Back on the farm late at night, after the machinery was quiet, she’d go to the packing shed and gather up the peaches that had fallen to the wayside. Sweet, juicy memories, to be sure.

From middle school through college and then after college, Watson worked in various capacities for Watsonia Farms, a 2000-acre enterprise that grows a variety of organic produce in addition to peaches. “I’ve wrapped pallets, made boxes, graded peaches. One of my jobs entailed monitoring the control panel for the production line,” recounts the Clemson graduate, who has also worked in the farm’s retail shop (Peaches-n-Such), and worked in the office assisting with payroll and with the farm’s workforce housing compliance for seasonal workers. When she came back to the farm in 2014 fresh with her political science degree, her plan was to work and save some money before figuring out next steps. That’s when her dad said: “I’ve got a project for you. I want you to help us get a more advanced food safety certification,” and so Watson spent the next two years doing just that. However for a vibrant single young woman, Monetta has its limitations, so when a friend was looking for someone to sublease an apartment in Charleston, “I took that ticket,” she says.

In Charleston she began looking for ways to capitalize on her agricultural experience, and quickly discovered GrowFood Carolina. She was hired in 2017 as a quality assurance specialist, and was promoted to Farm Coordinator in 2018, a job that more than hits home.

“Having grown up in an agricultural family, I’ve been indoctrinated from early age to understand

A peach farm, like the one Watson grew up on, and cabbage fields may not seem comparable, but Watson understands that both require sensitivity to climate and market demands, and uses her depth of experience to help farmers navigate those variables.

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“I’ve been indoctrinated at an early age to understand the plight and challenges of being a farmer,” says Watson, who uses that innate understanding to help farmers plan market-ready crops, including this field of sugar snap peas at Rosebank Farms.

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plight and challenges of being a farmer,” says Watson. She recalls constant dinner table conversation about the struggles: about times her father would complain about a load of peaches being rejected after five days straight of rain, or having planted five acres for a specific customer who then didn’t buy a single box. “I’ll never forget my father coming home after having lost an entire peach crop due to a late freeze,” she says. “It was as if there had been a death in the family.”

Experiences like these remain top of mind as Watson works with GrowFood’s farmers as their primary point of contact. She both helps ensure that the grower is a good fit for GrowFood, and then once the relationship is established, helps them plan their next season’s crops based on what she and the GrowFood team can discern about market demand. “I know that our farmers are planting product based on our word, our recommendation, and that’s something I take very seriously. My conversations with them aren’t a frivolous thing,” she says. “I remember my father’s disappointment after a buyer didn’t follow through on an order. Having had these experiences, I believe, helps me be a better food and farmer advocate.”

Given her political science background, Watson is also interested in broader issues of food policy, and is passionate about GrowFood’s role in helping build a resilient, sustainable local food system. The need for a strong network of small, local farmers was heightened nationally during the pandemic, when supply chains involving toilet paper to products from meatpacking plants were interrupted. According to Watson and her GrowFood colleagues, having diverse, trustworthy, local, healthy food sources increases nutrition, lowers environmental impact, reduces food waste, and strengthens the local economy. “I know first hand what it takes to get product from field to table,” she says. “Strengthening our domestic food system is critical for us as a nation, and what we’re doing at GrowFood is developing a strong, hyper-local reliable food system,” she adds, citing efforts like developing new seed sources for regional produce, for example.

The springtime days of full peach blossom glory along Highway 23 are numbered, and whether Watson makes it up there this year to bask in that beauty remains to be seen. It’s a busy time at GrowFood as well, and with restaurants finally coming back on line after the Covid-19 shutdown, there’s plenty to be done to get back to near-nor-

From greenhouse to the GrowFood warehouse, Watson supports farmers in creating a stronger, more resilient local food system.

mal operations, even as GrowFood continues its Covid-pivot initiatives like Soil to Sustenance and a new food box program in partnership with Head Start. But even if the peach blossom days are limited, Watson’s memories of growing up on Watsonia Farm stay with her every day. “My experience working on a family farm is what inspires me,” she says. “I understand the struggle, and having experienced it makes me want to work even harder for our own growers.”

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A Girl in the Woods

From birds to bobcats to Bay Point, Juliana Smith brings an artist’s eye and an advocate’s tenacity to protecting the South Coast

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Juliana Smith credits her father with inspiring her natural curiosity and love of the outdoors. Though she grew up exploring the riverbanks of North Augusta, the South Coast program director, pictured at Whitehall Park on Lady’s Island, has now fallen for the Lowcountry landscape.

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ust how tightly does an American Bald eagle grip, you ask? Juliana Smith knows first hand, or first talons, rather. “It’s unnerving.

The eagle’s grip keeps getting tighter and tighter,” she says.

Memory of that vise-like grasp on her wrist remains visceral long after Smith first held “Liberty,” the South Carolina Aquarium’s resident bald eagle, while working as an aviculturalist intern there.

Like the eagle’s fierce hold, that aquarium job, one of Smith’s first after graduating from the College of Charleston, grabbed her interest and fueled her desire to work with and around wildlife. Today as project manager for the Coastal Conservation League’s South Coast office, Smith has gone from using her arm as an eagle perch to using her voice and strategic savvy to ensure the native habitats of eagles and other species remain healthy.

But even before encountering the mighty Liberty and working with the aquarium’s other birds and animals, Smith was a nature lover, a girl drawn to the woods. She grew up in North Augusta, South Carolina, along the Georgia state line and the banks of the Savannah River. “I was a border baby,” she says. ‘The river was a big part of my life, just the fact that it was there.” Smith credits her father with nurturing her love of exploring the outdoors, taking Smith and her two younger siblings on bike rides along the Augusta canal, veering off the greenway to look at the river and wildlife. “He was always pointing out birds and insects, showing us where the 17

hawks were. He made sure we were paying attention as kids. Still does,” she says, though it sounds more like a case of Like Father, Like Daughter. According to family legend, her parents would park baby Juliana’s stroller under a low shrubby tree where she’d be thoroughly entertained looking up at leaves, clouds, and birds.

Fourth of July celebrations on her mother’s family land in Waynesboro, Georgia, were equally formative. Every summer the extended family, including 30-some young cousins, would gather for a big picnic around a natural spring on the property. “My cousins and I spent a lot of time roaming the pastures and pine forests, following the creek beds— it’s where I ran into my first snakes, got my first bee stings—poking around in all those wet, lush places in the middle of the arid pineland. And we’d always end up on those hot, hot Georgia days swimming in the frigid water of the spring-fed pond,” Smith recalls. “I both loved it and was startled by it—that slimy bottom!”

In high school, Smith cultivated dual interests in art and science. She excelled in biology, and took up photography, thinking perhaps she’d become a photographer—a hobby she still enjoys. But in college she gravitated toward psychology. “I blame it on Harriet the Spy—I loved the movie, which gave me the grand idea of becoming a child psychologist.” Instead, Smith found her interests gravitating toward animal behavior. She focused her studies, including two summers spent doing paid research

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Dover, Kohl & Partners

Nature photography and birding are two ways Smith keeps her naturalist passion primed despite long days in the Conservation League’s Beaufort office.

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“Everyday is a quick pace of strategically thinking about what our next move is, and plugging away at our goals. But I get to revel in the celebration of making positive change.”

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(“teaching rats to count”), on the field of enrichment psychology—where novel stimuli are introduced to animals whose wild instincts have been modified due to captivity, to try to change their behavior. She volunteered for a short while at the Center for Birds of Prey, and later, while interning at the Aquarium, she proposed and created an internship program focused specifically on enrichment—a program that continues today.

Meanwhile, a mentor at the Aquarium began picking up where Smith’s dad left off, teaching her more and more about birds. “I had my dad’s old binoculars, and we’d go out birding to Caw Caw and Beidler Forest. We went birding on the Edisto River, where I saw my first swallow-tailed kite, my first prothonotary warbler. It was also my first time in a swamp, which has become my favorite landscape. I love a swamp,” she says.

Like many recent college grads, Smith worked some food & bev stints prior to landing her first “real” job in the environmental realm, working as a naturalist on Kiawah Island. “It was a lot of sweat equity at first, I was earning barely enough to afford living in Charleston, but everyday was so beautiful, it was worth it,” she says. “I’d take guests on twilight paddles as birds flew overhead returning to their roosting spots—it was dark so you could barely see the flock coming toward you, but you could hear the thrum of their wings.” She watched dolphins play21

ing volleyball with jellyfish, encountered octopus and caught squids, and was one of the few women on staff to earn her boat captain’s license. “My time there really fostered my love of the water and marshes, and how these ecosystems are constantly interacting,” says Smith, who also earned her masters in education during her six years at Kiawah.

Her goal as a naturalist and outdoor educator: “to get as many people as possible to fall in love with these places, so when they went home, they’d work to protect them,” she says. That includes local Johns Island high school students, many of whom had never been on Kiawah Island, for whom she began a grant-funded outreach program called OWLS (Outdoor Wildlife Lessons in Science).

Ultimately, however, Smith realized she wanted to do more to protect these places and landscapes she was passionate about. “I would take visitors to Captain Sams Spit, and like me, they’d fall in love with it. But when you find a special place like that and learn that someone wants to develop it, you panic. It feels like a bald eagle has just squeezed your heart—you feel enraged and overwhelmed, because at first you think no body is doing anything about it. But the League is doing something about it.” When she learned about an opening at the Conservation League’s Beaufort office, she applied. “I’ve always thought of myself as tenacious, but wasn’t sure I had the gumption and tenacity for this work.

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Facing page, from left: A bumper crop of bumper stickers make clear where Smith’s interests lie. She and colleague Jessie White stay busy at the South Coast office, located in this quaint old cottage in historic Beaufort. And it’s boots on the ground (muddy, preferably) as often as possible for Smith.

It turns out, I do,” says Smith, who joined the South Coast office in 2019.

Being part of a team that is working to save Captain Sams and to protect the bobcat population on Kiawah brings Smith full circle. While she still volunteers to lead monthly bird walks with Wild Birds Unlimited in Beaufort, and led one for Conservation League members in partnership with Hilton Head’s Audubon chapter, her daily work protecting landscapes and wildlife in Colleton, Beaufort, Jasper, and Hampton Counties is different from being a naturalist.

“As a tour guide, you want to keep it light and airy and beautiful, to share that joy in nature. This,” she says, “is the underbelly. Everyday I am faced with the controversies and work to address complex issues, knowing we’re going to meet resistance. I’m still working with these landscapes I love, but it’s the other side of the coin,” adds Smith, who works alongside South Coast office director Jessie White.

“Everyday is a quick pace of strategically thinking about what our next move is, and plugging away at our goals. But I get to revel in the celebration of making positive change.”

One of her biggest revels to date came after a hard-

fought campaign, in the midst of Covid no less, to successfully advocate for a zoning board ruling denying a proposed development on Bay Point Island.

“We pushed hard for a Covid-friendly, in-person meeting, and got it. Dozens of community members showed up to speak out. For five hours I was on the edge of my seat. I never would have imagined a zoning board meeting would be exciting, but it was riveting,” she says. “I’m so proud that we prevailed in a time of Covid when everything was topsy-turvy and our team was relatively new.”

In between hearings and keeping track of new land use proposals and advocating for rat poison regulation to prevent harm to bobcats and other wildlife, Smith still finds time to create nature-inspired art—including custom designed t-shirts, block prints, and paintings (find it @knowyourearth_ on Instagram)—and outdoor photography (insects, flowers, and landscapes). These artistic expressions reflect that fundamental Juliana jubilance of a woman in the thralls of the natural world.

The tenacity of an eagle’s grip may be evident in her advocacy work making policy change, yet there’s still the tender, joyful attention of a young girl in the woods showing us how beautiful it all is.

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High Energy

The Conservation League’s energy director powers his way to and from work on his trusty bike, often toting along his pooch, Huey.

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When it comes to South Carolina’s energy policies, Eddy Moore is plugged in.

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onstant trips back and forth to Columbia put plenty of miles on Eddy Moore’s Chevy Volt, but fortunately the emissions impact for his electric hybrid vehicle is low—just how Moore likes it. Granted, he’d rather have even lower impact (and more fun) by pedaling his bike the few blocks from his Bee Street home to the Conservation League’s office, but when the Public Services Commission (PSC) or the General Assembly meets in the state capital, Moore is there. He’s a watchdog, even more so than his trusty Italian greyhound, Huey, who often bums a ride on Moore’s cargo bike to the office.

As energy director for the Conservation League, Moore spends the majority of his time tracking legal briefs and testimony on matters that come before the Public Services Commission, which is the state regulatory body for most public utilities. This work is not sexy. It entails following endless paper trails and keeping tabs on complex details. It’s wonky and often tedious. And Moore loves it. “My view is that if you care about energy, then you have to learn about the PSC. Very few people know this,” he says. “It’s where the rubber hits the road in terms of energy issues that affect the environment.”

It’s ok if you’re one of those who don’t know this about the PSC. In fact, Moore didn’t really know much about the role and function of a public service commission until he worked for one in Arkansas. After graduating from Yale as an English major, the Spartanburg native first spent ten years as an aide for late Senator Earnest “Fritz” Hollings.

“I hoped to do environmental work for Senator Hollings, but it was characteristic of the Senator that his aides stayed with him for decades, so the environmental aide position never opened up,” says Moore, who instead served as his health and education aide.

To move more directly into the environmental realm, he took a position with the Planning and Conservation League in Sacramento, California, an organization similar to the Coastal Conservation League in terms of its range of policy work covering urban planning, coastal protection, land and water policy, and energy. “I worked on transit issues and public transit funding, which was somewhat satisfying because transportation policy strongly affects energy policy,” says Moore, whose accomplishments there also included helping extend a program that supported clean energy development. “I was there during the deregulation crisis and Enron,” he recounts, “which put a big 25

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An attorney experienced in working with public service commissions across the country, Moore understands that watchdogging the state’s utilities and energy regulation is key to addressing climate change.

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Huey, an Italian Greyhound, is one of several canine companions who keep the Conservation League’s office a tail-wagging place.

spotlight on regulation of electric companies.”

From there Moore went to law school in Arkansas, but he’d gotten a taste of working on energy issues, and he liked it. During law school, he interned in the Attorney General’s office, which serves as the consumer advocate for the state’s public service commission. “It was another education in how energy issues are affected by the public service commission,” he notes.

Soon after law school, when he was representing Audubon Arkansas for his first hearing at the Public Service Commission, the chair of the Commission asked him to come work for them, which he did for six years. All the while, however, Moore was itching to return to his home state, and more specifically, to the South Carolina coast. This is where he spent childhood summers, roaming around on Hunting Island. “We’d camp and sometimes rent one of the cabins, and spent days shrimping and crabbing and fishing. It’s where I got my apprecia-

was more than ready.

The unrelenting nature of his job—the sheer volume of regulatory fillings to keep up with, and the “almost impossible” task of keeping track of the legislature and the PSC when both are in session—means long days in the office, or Volting on I-26. But a newfound love of surfing re-energizes Moore, as does his passion for cooking and Ultimate Frisbee (pre-Covid, at least). On weekends he often goes fossil hunting with his sister, who along with his parents, have all migrated from Spartanburg to Charleston.

But the work also fuels him. Moore is optimistic about how changes in energy policy can quickly and positively impact climate change. “Two-thirds of power plant pollution in South Carolina comes from five power plants, all of which should be retired by 2030,” he points out. “So, setting a retirement date for these means reducing a huge chunk of emissions. I don’t think people realize how tangibly and

“The energy sector is really in transition right now.

If our voice is heard, we can make a big difference in terms of climate pollution.” tion for the diverse species in our marshes and my first inklings of environmental awareness,” he says.

While in Arkansas, Moore followed the work of the Conservation League from afar. “I was keeping an eye out,” he says. Which made him aware of two or three “historical things converging,” he says: the fact that the state’s two largest utility companies attempted to build a nuclear plant, only to abandon it, which was brewing at the same time that the Obama administration issued its first climate regulations. Plus the Conservation League and its partners had gotten a solar bill passed in 2014, and spent another year hammering out the regulations to implement the act. The upshot: it was a ripe and ready time to address energy regulation issues in South Carolina, and Moore had done his prep work. “If there’s a recipe for getting people to pay attention to the state regulatory process, this was it,” he says of the nuclear plant fiasco. When the Conservation League’s energy and climate program director position came open in 2016, Moore

quickly we can reduce emissions at the state level, and at a cost-benefit. The real question is what replaces those five plants—that is a state-level decision that will determine South Carolina’s climate emissions for the next sixty years.”

Moore understands that change comes from paying attention. From watchdogging, and from knowing, thanks to an in-depth understanding of how state regulatory oversight works, when and how to effectively to intervene. “The energy sector is really in transition right now,” he says. “If our voice is heard, we can make a big difference in terms of climate pollution.” A major side-benefit is that this same transition will improve air quality—particularly in communities most closely affected by power plant emissions. And now that the broader automotive sector is finally catching up with Moore and his Volt and going electric, “the decisions we make today about our power system,” he adds, “will determine the emissions profile of much of our motor vehicle sector for decades to come.”

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FROM THE BOARD CHAIR

Coming Home to Conservation On pondering a recurring question about scope: Are we trying to do too much?

by CEARA DONNELLEY

Board chair Ceara Donnelley pictured at the Ashepoo home of her grandparents in the ACE Basin.

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s those who have served on non-profit boards can attest, there are certain recurring conversations—conversations that come in like the tide, sometimes gently, sometimes more urgently, but always with an irrepressible consistency that makes you both smile and wring your hands. For the board of the Coastal Conservation League, that conversation often circles back to breadth—the sheer vastness of the work taken on. It is a vastness inherent in the Conservation League’s broad mission to protect the threatened resources of the South Carolina coastal plain and foster a healthy, resilient landscape in which humans and natural ecosystems mutually thrive.

The programs and projects explored in this magazine issue—tackling climate change by targeting carbon emissions in the power sector; advocating for more thoughtful growth in Beaufort County; supporting a healthier, more resilient food system— speak to that breadth. At any level, from the weeds (or perhaps more aptly, the marsh) to the skies, a survey of the Conservation League’s work quickly becomes overwhelming—such a wide range of issues requires complex tapestry of technical expertise, political savvy, rhetorical acumen, and abundant energy to address them, and do it well. Are we simply trying to do too much?

Invariably, that question leads to a meandering discussion of what we could sacrifice, if pressed.

Would it be the energy work? GrowFood? The eagle eye ever-trained on rampant development and lazy permitting? The threatened bobcats on Kiawah, the dwindling oyster beds lining our shores, the highways clumsily plotted through the most culturally and ecologically threatened communities?

There has never been a ready answer. It all feels mission critical.

During my seven-year tenure on the board, I’ve learned to take my cues from our staff at such moments of questioning. In my early years, I observed founding executive director Dana Beach, and more recently, Laura Cantral, respond to whether the net is perhaps cast too wide, the resources spread too thin, with steady confidence. Their confidence is anchored by two enduring realities: first, that the scope of this work is necessarily vast; and second, that the Conservation League staff has such strong command of the work that what may look to the lay person (and your average board member) like a dizzying portfolio of efforts and objectives, is to them simply what needs to be done.

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I’ve come to understand that our challenge is not winnowing our focus, but showing all of us who love this part of the world that it could—and undoubtedly would—look and smell and feel vastly different if not for the arsenal of advocacy tools and expertise the Conservation League’s staff, members, and partners deploy daily. I suspect most of us agree that it would be hard to imagine what life in the Lowcocunty would be like today without the Conservation League’s advocacy and accomplishments over the last 32 years. For me personally, it is not a hypothetical. Nor is it hyperbole to say that the Conservation League’s dogged determination to protect South Carolina’s coastal plain has shaped my life trajectory.

As a native New Yorker, I never imagined settling anywhere other than the city, despite a deep love of wild landscapes instilled in me by a long line of conservationists and their recreational pursuits. The Lowcountry was one such landscape; each year, my parents, five sisters, and I decamped from the Upper West Side for an annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage to Ashepoo, where my father’s parents, Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley, had laid ACE Basin roots in the late 1960s. That one week was arguably my favorite of the year, enveloped as I was by a magic mix of salt marsh, prehistoric alligators and armadillos, blithe shorebirds, clouds of ducks, the earthy scent of pluff mud, pine straw crunching underfoot, countless dogs, long-lost cousins, the din of boisterous family meals, bottomless chocolate chip cookies—all the tangible and intangible elements that make a place a central character in the one’s life story. Yet until ten or so years ago, I never contemplated that such a landscape could sustain the stuff of real life—jobs, kids, the daily grind.

But here I am. And here, very likely, you are, because of the reality that this is extraordinary place to make a life. Whether you are of this place, or “like me” from “off,” whether you live here fulltime or part-time or visit one mere week a year, this place has a way of blurring those binaries and inviting us to experience a weaving together of work and play, culture and nature, the life of the mind and that of the body.

There is an ineffable power to this place. And a lot of people now know it—which makes it terribly fragile. The Coastal Conservation League was founded with knowledge of this power and foresight of its fragility, and it has become the well-oiled engine of conservation and environmental advocacy it is today by meeting squarely today’s threats while see-

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ing clearly what is on tomorrow’s horizon.

If you are like me, sometimes (often) you lay awake at night, worried about all you are not doing, or doing well enough. It turns out the Lowcountry can more than sustain a “real” and busy life—nearly a decade in, I have just as much on my plate here as I might have had in New York City (maybe more): two kids, five animals, a home lovingly made but always in need of attention, a business I am growing, friendships to nurture, books to read, meals to cook, muscles to strengthen. Some nights that worry widens to include a broken political system; a rapidly and irreversibly changing climate; disappearing species and farmland; tides that are rising, people who are starving, structural inequities and deep-rooted racism that has been ignored for far too long. It is, in a word, overwhelming. Dizzying. Messy.

On these nights, I often think of the Coastal Conservation League. I do not spend my days fighting bad development and scarring highways, or drafting highly technical legislation that supports clean energy, or helping farmers with crop planning so that they can turn a profit and remain on their land, or critically evaluating multi-billion-dollar city plans to combat rising seas and devastating flooding. I wouldn’t begin to know how to do those things.

But this team does, and it does them so well. I find that if I can support the Conservation League—with my resources and my time, meager tools buttressed by an abiding love of this place and an inherited ethic of reciprocity—then I can sleep a little easier, with confidence that there is a talented team of experts and advocates whose passion it is to protect this place I call home.

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Shem Creek has long been an iconic waterway, important to the Native Americans who gave it its name, and later to Lowcountry shrimpers, whose fleets once lined both sides of the picturesque Mount Pleasant spot.

Crab Bank, a critical bird sanctuary and nesting ground, lies at the mouth of the creek, and was in danger of eroding away. Thanks to a successful campaign with our conservation partners, the Coastal Conservation League has helped secure a restoration plan for Crab Bank, ensuring that the Shem Creek environs will continue to be iconic not just for tourists and shrimpers but also for sea and shore birds. photograph by GATELY WILLIAMS 33

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Gately Willaims

Lowcountry Snapshot

Gutter Credit

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Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage

PAID

P.O. Box 1765 • Charleston, SC 29402-1765

T

Permit No. 168 Charleston, SC

he mission of the Coastal Conservation League is to protect the threatened resources of the South Carolina coastal plain—its natural landscapes, abundant wildlife, clean water, and quality of life—by working with citizens and government on proactive, comprehensive solutions to environmental challenges.

Gutter Credit

For more information about the Coastal Conservation League, visit coastalconservationleague.org.

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