Op-Ed

(published in The State, Columbia, SC 12/3/2006)

Is there any such thing as a Southern writer? Is there even a South to write about?

There are those who think the South is a place no longer apart, a region absorbed finally, like the fluid in a blister, back into the body politic we call America.

(Published in The State, Columbia, SC 11/3/1997)

I believe there is nothing more important than the preservation of wild land. The aquisition of Sandy Island was a moment of great celebration for me. I felt that somehow the overwhelming human greed so common in South Carolina coastal development had been stopped in its tracks.

(Published in The State, Columbia, SC 7/4/97)

Peter Applebome's recent book Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics and Culture leads with an important question. Who is Southern, and who's not in an America that is increasingly Southern and a South that is increasingly American?Applebome suggests that the values that are becoming "America's values" are conservative, Christian, and economic.

(Published in The State, Columbia, SC 12/8/97)

Today I turned onto the street alongside First Presbyterian church in Spartanburg and found myself, I kid you not, in a line of eight Suburbans, what a friend calls "suburban assault vehicles."

(Published in The State, Columbia, SC 4/1/98)

Welcome to the 90s: Smart bombs. Rapid deployment. Cruise missiles. 72 hour wars. Just when it looked like the decade's military/political hype had finally drifted deep enough to make the world feel safe and small, two incidents recently brought me back to reality.

(Published in The State, Columbia, SC 1/1/98)

I make a pilgrimage to Charleston at least twice a year. I go down to park my car and slip on my walking shoes, to eat a praline from the market, to stand in front of historic buildings and reflect on my relationship to my own complex past.

(Appeared in Blue Ridge Press Syndicate, 5/20/2002)

As elsewhere in the South, the growth beast recently has pointed its flinty claw at Spartanburg County, S.C. A year from now, on the city's west side, a new Super Wal-Mart will splay its massive parking-lot feet over ground occupied for 30 years by Dorman High School.

(Appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer 2/11/2002)

The Balsam Mountain Preserve, a 4,400-acre private residential community in the rural mountains of Jackson County, N.C, is now taking orders for homes. On paper, the Preserve sounds like an environmentalist's dream, but I won't be looking for my own little piece of the Smokies there.

For 10 years I've owned a cabin in Jackson County-a ramshackle affair, lying deep in an isolated hollow a few creases down from the Blue Ridge Parkway. It sits on four acres surrounded by large timbered parcels owned by a holding company in Florida.

(Appeared in Blue Ridge Press Syndicate, 10/8/2001)

Before Sept. 11, I would have defined myself as an environmentalist and writer first, with "American" obscured somewhere down the list between "college professor" and "Methodist."

(Appeared in Blue Ridge Syndicate, 7/2/2001)

I've been walking Spartanburg, South Carolina's Cottonwood Trail a few times a week for the past 10 years. There's nothing epic about my three-and-a-half mile ramble out and back along Lawson's Fork Creek. It's not Yellowstone or the Appalachian Trail. It's an ordinary Southern suburban trail twisting through a flood plain and under a wide power line right-of-way. It's also my local sanctuary: a great place to walk, my nearby nature, safely protected by a conservation easement. It's not the kind of place-or so I thought-where an environmental activist would put up much of a fight.