Pioneering in South Carolina

Does a poverty-stricken area need more industry or more conservation? Last year the usual answer--more industry--seemed obvious to South Carolina boosters. They cheered when West Germany's Badische Anilin-&-Soda Fabrik (B.A.S.F.), one of the world's biggest chemical manufacturers, announced plans to build a $200 million dyestuff and petrochemical complex on an estuary of the state's Port Royal Sound. More than a third of the work force in surrounding Beaufort and Jasper counties earns less than $3,000 a year; the new industry would bring jobs and income in a region where poor blacks and some whites actually go hungry.

Much to the surprise of B.A.S.F. and local boosters, a strong and unlikely coalition of conservationists, retired businessmen and black fishermen fought the plan. Despite promised safeguards, they argued, the scheme would probably pollute Port Royal Sound, thus destroying the existing tourism and shell-fishing industries (TIME, Jan. 26, 1970). Last month the giant company completely abandoned its plans.

Indigenous Innovation. The region, adjoining industrial Savannah, Ga., lost an immediate source of new tax revenue, but it gained a broad land-use plan that could order and enhance future development.

The plan is the result of one large landowner's wish to develop 11,000 acres on Hilton Head Island, a coastal oasis for well-to-do retired executives, who hotly opposed the B.A.S.F. plan. Fred Hack, president of the Hilton Head Co., asked the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to draw up a suitable land plan. What Planner John Galston of S.O.M. suggested is a regional plan to develop indigenous industry (fishing, farming, wood products), a step that he feels will create the greatest economic growth. As Galston sees it, "an artificially created economy" like B.A.S.F. would actually remove 4,000 to 9,000 local jobs. "Though it would probably create just as many," he says, "it would take at least ten to 15 years to do it." Galston's far more subtle plan calls for protecting the environment by welcoming light industry around major existing towns inland. Heavy industry would be confined to the environs of Savannah.

Fish and Men. The problem with such a broad plan is how to muster political support to carry it out. The Hilton Head Co. is eager to start, but other South Carolinians have deep reservations. J. Bonner Manly, director of the South Carolina Development Board, argues that the plan will take up to 20 years to complete--while hunger continues. Manly adds that he will seek far more industry for the region, because "I still put human beings ahead of birds and fish."

By contrast, the S.O.M. plan is warmly backed by Thomas Barnwell Jr., an official of the black-run Hilton Head Fishing Cooperative. Barnwell is for development--as long as nothing harms the area's shrimp fishing. "Too often," he says, "environmentalists worry only about industrial pollution while ignoring the needs of the poor." In this case, birds and fish may be crucial to saving human beings.

The differing opinions graphically illustrate the special economic problems of coastal estuaries. The rich breeding grounds of two-thirds of the nation's commercial fish and the sites of some of the country's loveliest landscapes, U.S. estuaries are vanishing fast, victims of heedless developers and waterfront land speculators. The S.O.M. plan is a model of what to do: a shrewd effort to blend ecology and economy in a region that badly needs both.

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