conservation

At a Seattle conference in September of 1969, US Senator Gaylord Nelson announced a nationwide grassroots demonstration for the following April. It would be a day of protest to put the environment on the national political agenda.

There are no natural lakes in the South Carolina piedmont. Any body of water we'd call a pond or a lake or a reservoir is the result of engineering and political process. In the region where we live, nature makes rivers, but it takes money and government permits to make a lake.

I grew up in the 1960s, and back then the popular myths defining the American West were pretty clear-it was the land of opportunity, a region of dreams, the place those poor Southern mountaineers in "The Beverly Hillbillies" headed after they struck oil.

Summer will soon be here. The first tropical storm of the season just crawled through the upcountry over the weekend.  That first day in the high 90s is right around the corner. Local strawberries are ripe, and soon the watermelons at the Publix will not cost nine dollars.

When I was a kid growing up on the north side of Spartanburg one of the AM radio stations I listened to claimed to broadcast "from the banks of the mighty Chinquapin." It made Chinquapin Creek, the largest of Lawson's Fork's tributaries, sound like the Mississippi River.