The Wild and the Water

~ In Partnership with the Southern Environmental Law Center ~

As a beloved Southern city is challenged by development, a vital question arises: What is the inherent worth of wild spaces?

Words by Stephanie Burt | Photos by Gavin McIntyre

Robby Maynor (left), communities and transportation program director at the Coastal Conservation League, and Andrew Wunderley, with Charleston Waterkeeper, make their way along Nowell Creek within the Cainhoy Peninsula in Berkeley County, S.C.

This tract of land, in Berkeley County and within Charleston’s city limits, mere minutes by boat from the bridge, is bigger than Hunting Island State Park down in Beaufort (which clocks in at 5,000 acres) and slightly smaller than the 11,815-acre ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge, west of Edisto, both protected areas in the Lowcountry. While the land is privately held, Cainhoy’s waterways are public, and generations of Charlestonians have fished and crabbed and lived in the shadow of some of its trees. It’s one of the biggest of the few wild tracts that remain within the city limits.

A decade ago, an 18,000-unit development on Cainhoy was approved by Charleston, and that approval still stands. The developer currently plans to build 9,000 residential units, filling in more than 180 acres of wetland in the process. Clearing has already begun. 

The Cainhoy project would bring a significant amount of wetland infill, and in response the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and the Coastal Conservation League (CCL) partnered together to offer multiple alternative plans for the developers to consider: three options that keep the 9,000 homes but impact only 14 acres, and one version reducing the number of homes to 6,000, with no wetland affected. 

However, in the written proposal the two organizations assert that offering alternatives is not an endorsement for development; there is also a case to be made “that Cainhoy should be left as it is to conserve its unique Lowcountry beauty and cultural resources, provide a buffer to the Francis Marion National Forest, and maintain the critical wetlands and wildlife habitat at the site.”

“Cainhoy is one of the most ecologically important undeveloped tracts of land in coastal South Carolina,” says Chris DeScherer, South Carolina Office Director at the Southern Environmental Law Center. "It’s adjacent to the National Forest, supports stands of valuable longleaf pine habitat, is home to rare plants and wildlife, and has scores of wetlands that store floodwater and trap pollutants before they reach nearby tidal creeks. This inherently wild and valuable place is worth protecting.”

The lengthening shadow of development across this peninsula highlights a deeper question for the soul of the city: What worth do wild places have in today’s Charleston? And, as environmentalist Christiana Figueres asserts, if in truth we are nature — not just extracting from it or living with it — how do these places that we have not fashioned, or some might say have left fallow, feed us? How do their inherent natures mirror our own and the stories that weave together to be the Charleston so many love?

Charleston feels as much like water as land, and there’s a lot of in-between, the rich fecundity of “pluff mud” a scent story for the region just as much as the jasmine blooming on walls and fences. The dark, claylike stuff is part of the magic of the salt marsh, a rich world of death, decay, birth, and breeding. As the boat makes its way around Cainhoy, I spy small gray crabs scurrying over the pluff mud as it dries at low tide around the marsh grasses at the water's edge.

The salt marsh is a living shoreline, shifting and changing tide by tide as the grasses advance through rhizomes in the pluff mud; the salty waters ebbing and flowing around that grass hold a kaleidoscope of creatures that mark time by the rising and falling of the tide. 

The salt marsh has always been the main engine that feeds Charleston. According to Holly Binns, director of U.S. Conservation for PEW Trusts, salt marshes, and the estuaries that support them, provide shelter, food, and nursery grounds for more than 75 percent of commercial and recreational fish species in the country, including white shrimp, blue crab, redfish, and flounder. 

It’s the culture of the Lowcountry and the fish that thrive here that brought Charleston native and James Beard-nominated chef James London back home after stints cooking in New York and San Francisco. 

“I came to realize that the seafood I worked with as a young cook in Charleston was far superior than anything I could get in the big cities,” London says. “The diversity of species that we are afforded in the Lowcountry is incredible, and any time out-of-town chefs see what we work with here, they’re blown away.”

On the days he’s not in the open kitchen at his restaurant Chubby Fish on the Charleston peninsula, he’s out on the creeks catching redfish, sea trout, sheepshead, and flounder. 

“We have such a rich ecosystem throughout our marsh, and a day fishing is enough to recharge my batteries for a while,” says London, who these days has a Scouts 177 Winyah Bay flats boat but remembers fishing close to the Cainhoy by kayak, exploring and landing redfish as he went.

James London, chef and owner of Chubby Fish, stands inside the kitchen of his restaurant in Charleston, S.C. as chefs prepare to open.

London doesn’t serve the few fish he catches in his restaurant but relies on local commercial fishermen, and Charleston’s culinary story is in part fed by their expert work. The Land Grant Press of Clemson Extension reports that South Carolina’s commercial fisheries industry generates $42 million annually for the state economy, directly supported by the wild expanses of salt marsh. A variety of shrimp and finfish harvested off the coast will spend their early life developing in the nursery habitat of the tidal creeks and marshes, including those surrounding Cainhoy. 

Within the creeks themselves, beyond the fish, blue crab and oysters are regularly harvested. In the Charleston metro region, acres of shellfish beds have vanished or closed due to development, which not only affects food but water quality. In the area of the Cainhoy tract alone, the shellfish grounds south of bed S238 on the Wando River, those all along the southern portion of the Cooper River, and those in the urban areas surrounding Charleston Harbor are already closed for harvest because of water quality concerns. 

“If the Cainhoy Peninsula were to be developed as currently proposed with wide-scale deforestation and massive increases in polluted stormwater runoff from roads, rooftops, and lawns, it would undoubtedly have huge negative impacts on the water quality of this area and could certainly lead to the closure of shellfishing grounds, as has happened nearby along urbanized areas like Daniel Island,” says Robby Maynor, Program Director for Communities & Transportation at the Coastal Conservation League. 

Daniel Island, only minutes away and sold and developed by the same owners as Cainhoy, is dominated by docks reaching from green lawns into the creeks, lined up like dominoes on a table. Here, floating near the Cainhoy tract, I spy weathered tree trunks reaching out of a dense underbrush of small live oaks, marsh grasses, and palmettos festooned with strands of Spanish moss. Farther from the water’s edge, loblolly pines reach to the sky. A hawk swoops from one branch to another down the creek, and a kingfisher demonstrates his amazing ability to turn 360 degrees midflight, surveying us and the creek from a healthy distance.

For many in the Lowcountry, fishing and crabbing aren’t about work or play. They are part of a daily practice. “We didn't go fishing for relaxation, as you do today,” Fred Lincoln says. “Fishing was a supplement to our life.” 

Lincoln was born and currently lives in the Jack Primus community, which wraps around the land of the former Venning Plantation. While the origin of the name Jack Primus is not known for sure, according to the African American Settlement Historic Commission, in 1712, a “free Black man” named Jack Primus purchased 100 acres in the area. 

Lincoln can trace his father’s lineage four generations back to the immediate post-Civil War era, when many freed Black people purchased land close to the plantations on which they had worked in enslavement. The family lineage, heritage, and lands of Jack Primus still exist today, with about 200 residents in 80 homes. Residents of this community, like those of the nearby Phillips community, and so many others dotting the Gullah Geechee coast, lived with the rhythm of nature, deep in the pines and the snaking brackish creeks. Lincoln recalls swimming in accordance with the tides, hunting with dogs, farming, crabbing, and shrimping. 

“This property was designed for family to live on and not to sell, but to live on. Our ancestors have always taught us that, you know,” Lincoln says. “That's why we have heirs property. All the family can live on it.”

According to the National Agriculture Library of the USDA, heirs property is defined as property passed to family members by inheritance, usually without a will or estate planning strategy. Lincoln moved away with the military, but returned to Jack Primus and his family property in part because he missed that communal feel, punctuated by nature’s rhythms, a seasonal cadence that interwove those moving to it into a community. 

“The thing about this community that you don't want to lose is that human connection that we have in here, where everybody in here was basically family,” Lincoln says. “Everyone in here, we have the same culture. Everybody was on the same economic level. We did things. We were in survival mode. So we did not depend on the government for anything.”

The community’s self-sufficiency included sharing with one another, keeping in constant communication, and building a school for themselves when the government did not. That resilience, built on community and the rhythms of nature, is part of the story of Black people in the Lowcountry.

“Nature, in the history of the Lowcountry, showcases a more complete picture of Black humanity. And it animates Black culture and Black history in a way that we're seldom allowed,” says Tamika “Mika” Gadsden, a member of Charleston Mayor William Cogswell’s staff and a prominent Gullah Geechee voice for environmental and cultural preservation in Charleston. 

“We're not afforded that we're conservationists, too; that we're environmentalists, too. You'll go to these rural areas to this day: Wadmalaw, Johns Island, Berkeley County, you name it, Colleton County. And there are a lot of things that folks are still doing that are vestiges of caring for the land and knowing how to live with it,” Gadsden says. “And so when we continue to develop the land with little regard for those stories, I think we do ourselves a disservice.”

Lincoln and other Jack Primus residents have been in communication with the Cainhoy owners, requesting consideration of zoning specifics that will help keep the properties developed closest to Jack Primus similar in taxes, thus helping those who have lived on heirs property for generations remain on it. It’s but the next chapter in the community’s long story.

“For me — and I think a lot of other African American folks probably had this similar experience — you’re sometimes inundated with historical trauma, right?” Gadsden says. “Even if people are just trying to be educational. But you never get to talk about the resilience, you never get to talk about the engineering expertise, the brilliance, you know, the math and science that these communities use to live and thrive. See the land, the environment, and the story is right there.”

Full, rounded narratives, both of pain and persecution, as well as resilience and heritage, are part of the earned legacy of Charleston’s historic Black communities. Impacting the wild places in which these communities existed mutes part of their histories of resilience by removing the setting that can illustrate it, and the narrative of pain and persecution can get louder without a vital counterbalance. Wildness and the ability to thrive within it is culturally important to communities such as Jack Primus. 

Gadsden also stresses that preserving wild places preserves the stories of the land and animals, stories of a diverse ecosystem whose depth and breadth is far from completely documented, despite the presence of people on the land here for thousands of years. The Cainhoy tract shares a two-mile border with the 250,000-acre Francis Marion National Forest, home to nine endangered or threatened animal species and 43 sensitive plant species. According to the Coastal Conservation League, a broad plateau of old-growth longleaf pine forest stretches from the FMNF across the northern portion of the Cainhoy property, providing habitat for 16 endangered red-cockaded woodpecker colonies along with populations of gopher frogs and northern long-eared bat.

Preservation of wildness leads directly to protecting the next chapter of Charleston’s story. Coastal wetlands, forests, salt marshes, and other wild spaces feed preservation with every sunrise, since salt marshes and coastal wetlands sequester and store carbon at a rate 10 times that of mature tropical forests, according to the PEW Trusts.

According to NOAA, those living adjacent to salt marshes experience up to 20 percent less property damage during storms. That’s because of the immense power of marsh and coastal wetlands to absorb water, up to 1.5 million gallons per acre, which they then filter before it's cycled back into the environment.  

These functions of the wild spaces among us are essential for Charleston, a place that now routinely experiences flooding on surface roads, sometimes even on sunny days. It’s a topic of conversation as the climate shifts, and flooded roads are now a part of media traffic reports.

The Cainhoy Peninsula does not have traffic now, but it nevertheless pulses with sound. Waves lap against the grasses as oysters snap shut against a falling tide. The sounds of those kingfishers and hawks are carried long distances across the water, and storks fly into the wind as they make their way toward the open harbor. 

According to The Post and Courier, on April 17, 2023, “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service requested that the clearing of undeveloped land on the Cainhoy peninsula cease until the agency and the Army Corps of Engineers can learn more about the presence of the endangered northern long-eared bat.”

This pause is but one debate over the worth of wildness playing out all across the South, from  Georgia’s House Bill 370, tabled for this legislative session, which would make it easier to claim private ownership of the 400,000 acres of salt marsh currently protected by the state, to Virginia’s HB 1100, which passed the House and Senate and expands current provisions requiring conservation of trees during the land development process.

Wildness feeds our own imaginations, our own possibilities, and the stories of our communities.  As the boat pulls back into the public landing, I am shifted by my encounter with wildness in the creeks of the Cainhoy Peninsula. I recall my very suburban childhood and wonder at the depth of possibility and imagination the vacant wooded lot on the other side of our fence afforded me. I was that kid flipping bricks at the back of the flower bed to see what was under them, and here I am on a boat in search of that delicious imagination beyond the tree line. 

We praise order and lines on a map that wall in a moving marsh line, fill in a wetland that might easily return to its soggy state with time and the right conditions, or tidy up scraggly forests and dense underbrush with lush grass and landscaping that is costly to maintain and often poisons our water in the process. 

In divorcing ourselves from the wildness, perhaps we divorce ourselves from our own imaginative estuaries, full of possibilities and promise. Charleston’s story is not just about how we reconcile with our past, but how we deal with the possibilities of the future as creatures of this place, the salty air filling our lungs with the love of it. 

That love, misdirected, can spur mindless development, reducing access and irrevocably shifting the place we love and our stories within it. But all around the edges, wild spaces invite us to imagine again. The wild will show us the way if we let it.

This story was made in partnership with the Southern Environmental Law Center

Stephanie Burt is the host of “The Southern Fork” podcast and a writer based in South Carolina. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Saveur, The Washington Post, CNN's Parts Unknown, Conde Nast Traveler, and The Bitter Southerner. She shares the magic hiding just around the corner through stories of makers and growers, and when she's off the road, she works on perfecting her roast chicken recipe.

Gavin McIntyre is a photographer in Charleston, South Carolina, who documents the everyday life of people in his community. You can find more of his work at gavinmcintyre.squarespace.com.