20-04-2025
A reminder this Earth Day: The fight to save the Lowcountry is up to us
Ahead of America's first Earth Day in 1970, an oil spill famously stained a California beach and a polluted river was on fire in Ohio. But in the South Carolina Lowcountry, a great environmental battle was being waged that's also worthy of the history books.
Here, a small but diverse band of natives and newcomers, shrimpers and developers, children and retirees successfully fought off the powers that be to stop a BASF chemical plant from locating on the pristine Colleton River near Bluffton and Hilton Head Island.
The humble Capt. Dave shrimp trawler gave the fight its lasting image when it chugged to Washington, D.C., to deliver to Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel more than 40,000 petition signatures in opposition to the chemical plant.
The Capt. Dave was part of a new Hilton Head Fishing Cooperative that enabled Black shrimpers to get a bigger piece of the economic pie. And in the spring of 1971, the Capt. Dave and all aboard cruised into Harbour Town to celebrate the first anniversary of their historic trip to Washington.
This is where we can see the ingredients to success as we mark the 55th Earth Day on Tuesday.
We can see it through the eyes of the Rev. Boyd Cook. He attended the second annual Capt. Dave celebration after just arriving on the island to bring Christ Lutheran Church to life after six years in Memphis when it was being torn apart by racial violence.
'There were all these yachts tied up,' he told The Island Packet newspaper in the spring of 1972. 'Then into the harbor streamed the shrimp boats draped with banners and pennants, horns blowing, people waving and yelling. Everybody got off the boats and had a party. There was shrimp boiling in 50-gallon drums, a band playing and a beer truck.
'Here was a community getting together as one. I was overwhelmed. 'Can this really be South Carolina?' I thought.'
A lesson: They banded together as one. They remembered the fight. They celebrated.
The next spring it was even bigger.
'An estimated 800 people showed up on Sunday to dance to the rock 'n roll of the 'Chariots,' drink beer, eat hamburgers and frankfurters and recall the historic 1970 voyage,' The Island Packet reported.
It had the feel of the Fourth of July, New Year's Eve and Bastille Day rolled into one.
Amid all the fanfare, a petition was circulated. This time it was in opposition to a planned Chicago Bridge and Iron plant at the same Victoria Bluff site BASF had eyed.
That lesson: The fight to protect the Earth never ends.
The community also celebrated on the day Walter Hickel, the Interior Secretary, came to see the land and water he had helped protect by writing a pointed letter to BASF saying the government would not allow environmental degradation.
'If I live to be very old, I will never forget the day the Capt. Dave came up the Potomac River with the petition of a list of names protesting the plant,' Hickel said. 'The powers on Capitol Hill backed off.'
In a speech at the Port Royal Inn, Hickel said that 'caring' was more important than money in getting things done. He said laws already on the books offered environmental protection — but only if they were enforced.
'Someone has to care,' he said. 'Someone has to make it happen. Laws alone won't do it.'
He said the threat to Port Royal Sound would never have come to his attention without the concern of individuals.
'Wars will always be won by the concern of one human being for another — not by billions of dollars.'
The Rev. Cook had a similar message.
When he left for another charge after a decade on the island he said the concern and caring that he had so admired in the past was needed more than ever.
'The big fear is not the growth of the island,' he said, 'but the attrition of concern. Apathy and frustration should be fought more than windmills. When people no longer get involved, when they no longer care, then everything we don't want to happen will happen by default.
'It is a matter of caring so intently that you keep trying. You refuse to quit.'
The same is true today. The fight to save the Lowcountry is up to us.
David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@
