Safeguarding a Vanishing Landscape
Confronting headwinds, together
New River Watershed
Our community lies in the heart of the Port Royal Sound watershed, between more than 200,000 acres of protected property along the Savannah River and over 300,000 acres of protected property in the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto (ACE) Basin.
Amid and arguably because of these incredibly protected landscapes, our region remains one of the fastest growing in the state and east coast. We seem to be confronted with the tension between growth and land loss daily.
Land protection is a solution to growth challenges and through your support, our Open Land Trust team protected over 10,000 acres in our region, just in the last four years.
“It’s a great start, but we know we have no time to waste, ” explains Ann Horry, a native of Jasper County, who has been working to balance development with protection of critical lands.
If we rest on our laurels and fail to protect additional landscapes, we lose control of incoming growth, lose access to water and theability to fish, swim and recreate, and lose a connection to a place defined by sweeping marshes and healthy rivers.
People throughout the Lowcountry are recognizing the need to balance development with conserved land. It’s increasingly important to help offset extreme flooding, preserve local culture, and ensure livable communities. The Open Land Trust is here to help.
We have a unique but time-limited opportunity
Today we are armed with a strong foundation and new partners. The Open Land Trust continues to be the local conservation leader; landowners continue to lead with their love for the land; local farms steward their land and support a thriving rural economy. In 2022, Beaufort County citizens voted to tax themselves for land conservation funding, and just this November, Jasper County voters chose to do the same with their first ever land conservation funding program. The military, a long-time steward of their own property, now invests outside their borders stretching resources from MCAS Beaufort to the Savannah River as part of the new “Sentinel Landscape”.
With help from you and our community leaders, we’re building a coastal greenbelt to connect landscapes of protected properties, working forests, and thriving agricultural fields. This includes landscapes on the edges of our community in places like St. Helena, where family lands and productive farmlands abound, and places like the Broad River corridor, renowned for its unspoiled shoreline.
It is up to all of us to harness this passion and these resources to achieve the next level of land conservation success.