The Greenbelt Education Project

The Greenbelt Education Project includes the three coastal counties that make up the Charleston metropolitan area of South Carolina, namely, Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester Counties. The Project seeks to deepen the Tricounty community’s appreciation of, and attachment to, the region’s rural landscape. As currently conceived, the work will last two years, culminating with a major conference.

At the edge of virtually every metropolitan region in the nation, suburban development is consuming rural lands at an alarming rate. This fact was brought home about two years ago, when the Charleston Post & Courier ran side-by-side 1973 and 1994 satellite images of the region emphasizing the urbanized area. The pictures told the story: The population of the metro area had grown a respectable 41 percent, but the urbanized area exploded by 255 percent during the 20-year period.

Such leapfrog sprawl threatens many of the things that make the Lowcountry special:

• rural community life,
• farm and forest land,
• historic areas,
• clean and productive waterways,
• wildlife habitat and open spaces.

Experts also have shown that the cost of providing public services to sprawl development exceeds the new tax revenue generated by such development, which places an upward pressure on taxes. Many governmental bodies, private institutions and individuals make thousands of decisions that, taken together, erode the area’s rural assets. With each choice, we trade a piece of the traditional landscape, but the transformation is so gradual that we rarely even notice. The Greenbelt Education Project will help us, as a community, to notice these changes, and to remind us to use our rural places with frugality and intelligence.

Maps provide one important way to convey the necessary information. The Tricounty’s 2030 Urban Footprint map is the first in a forthcoming series. Future maps will highlight specific resources, like fishery grounds or industrial timberlands, to address the interests of specific constituencies.

The Greenbelt Education Project will rely on the communication channels that the supporting organizations use normally: newsletters, meetings, word-of-mouth. Special presentations to groups and opinion leaders will be important, and the greenbelt information will reach a wider audience through the media and an interactive web site.

The Greenbelt Education Project functions as a loose network that exists solely to share and distribute information. Each supporting organization will choose its own level of involvement. Sponsorship of specific activities, like the release of the 2030 Urban Footprint map, is made on a case-by-case basis.

For more information, contact the Greenbelt Education Project at (843) 722-7228 or greenbelt@charleston.net, or visit the web site at www.charleston.net/org/greenbelt.