2006
Martin Melaver, CEO

Q1 2006

Not too long ago, I took a day trip over to Blackbeard Island, one of Georgia’s 14 barrier islands, nine of which are still more or less wild and undeveloped. Blackbeard is one of those nine. The island is long and narrow, losing sand on its north point to the gain of the south end, maritime forest of live oaks and muscadine vines and saw-toothed palmettos filling the interior. The island is so narrow that at its southern point, you can stand in the middle of the dunes and see the Atlantic to the east and the marsh spartina reaching over to Sapelo Island westward. And yet even so, on the way back, some friends and I got lost for a while in this hint of a forest, gigantic old-growth trees occluding our view.

Not surprisingly then, some words from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac jumped at me recently when I came across them. He was writing of the river Flambeau in his native Wisconsin: 'When I was a small boy, my father used to describe all choice camps, fishing waters and woods as ‘nearly as good as the Flambeau.’ When I finally launched my own canoe in this legendary stream, I found it up to expectations as a river, but as a wilderness it was on its last legs. New cottages, resorts, and highway bridges were chopping up the wild stretches into shorter and shorter segments. To run down the Flambeau was to be mentally whipsawed between alternating impressions: no sooner had you built up the mental illusion of being in the wilds than you sighted a boat-landing, and soon you were coasting past some cottager’s peonies.'
 
They say – and I believe them – that a million permanent residents will be making their home along the south Georgia coast over the next 20 years. And that does not include the many visitors and second and third-homers who will also put down roots of a sort. Just a week ago, I heard a local developer speak before a luncheon of businessman, talking about this growth to come. If you fly in an airplane from Maine to Florida, he said, you will be struck all of a sudden by the absence of lights along the Georgia coast. That, he said, is about to change.
 
You could feel the dramatic, excited tension in that room, the sense of all that growth coming our way. We’re finally going to be lit up as well.
 
I’m wondering, now, what will buffer our coasts from future Katrina-like hurricanes, once this wealth of marsh, 40% of the entire stock of the east coast, makes way for this growth. I’m wondering how our upper Floridian acquifer, already compromised by salt-water intrusion, will supply this future need. I’m wondering about the 100 or so swallow-tail kites that make part of this area their home, as well as the other rarified plants and animals that make up the river basins from the Savannah River to the St. Mary’s. Mostly though, I’m wondering how we think that communities can be created overnight and whole cloth simply by calling them by quaint names like 'cove' and 'harbor'.
 
Or as Leopold Aldo wrote: 'It was only after we pondered on these things that we began to wonder who wrote the rules for progress.'