13 minute read
Go for bottles or cans
It is Saturday, early, and I’m sitting on my deck waiting for daybreak. Last night we got rain, and our unpainted wooden deck chairs are transferring some of that rain into my aging buttocks.
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Although we are still gripped with our virus, our local economy is coming back to life, restaurants and bars filling-up with people who are saying, “To hell with it.”
Although the virus lurks, there is a built-in bias for returning to work and, importantly, to the building of retirement homes, condominiums and, these days, destinations for those seeking assisted living.
This was not always the case in Beaufort County.
When Susan and I arrived in Beaufort County in 1971, it was, well, quiet around here. Yes, there were Marines, and you could hear their A-1 Intruder jets as they descendfossils of life on earth are about 3.5 billion years old, a time period during which spaceship Earth has seen fundamental variations and changes in weather, land masses, frozen glaciers and ice-packs, the hell-fire of volcanoes, the oceans, lakes, mountains and air.
Once verdant rainforests have become massive deserts, such as the Sahara of north Africa, the Gobi of eastern Asia, and the An Nafud of the Arabian peninsula. Historically, these massive deserts hardly supported any human life, just a few nomads here and there.
The Sahara Desert alone covers 3.55 million square miles, about the size of the continental United State (3.79 million square miles).
The early domestication of plants (the Neolithic Revolution) began with eight so-called “founder plants.”
Of the 200,000 or so wild plants today, only a few thousand are consumed by us omnivore humans, and only a few hundred of these are are! Your Friends and family members will post their stunning pictures on Facebook of gorgeous sunsets in their cities or on their vacations, and you post your obligatory “Like” on their page, only to be thinking, “Your sunsets will never compare to the sunsets we have here in Beaufort.”
Yes, we are sunset snobs, because no matter where we go, there is nothing like watching the sun set in our area, especially on those nights when it looks like the sky has meeting, Beaufort County Council gave final approval to an ordinance that charges a uniform service fee to Hilton Head Island property owners for the services Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office provides to the Town annually.
In May 1983, Secretary of State John T. Campbell issued a certificate of incorporation to the newly formed Town of Hilton Head Island. On Oct. 3, 1983, the newly formed Town of Hilton Head Island passed three specific ordinances related to public safety:
SCOTT GRABER
ed into the Air Station. If the wind was coming out of the south you could hear the recruits qualifying on the rifle range at Parris Island.
Beyond these sounds, there was silence.
In 1971, there was a bridge to Hilton Head Island but next to nothing in the way of traffic. If you were young and ambitious, you usually left for Atlanta, Charlotte or someplace like Greenville, where there was some traffic, decent jobs and urban noise.
At the same time (1971), a few intrepid retirees decided they could live among the
DAVID TAUB
domesticated. A mere dozen or so plant species account for more than 80 percent of the modern world’s annual crop tonnage.
And all these crops require water to grow; some of them, such as rice, require lots of water. Rice is No. 1 on the list of world-wide consumables.
If the 20th Century was the Century of Petroleum (it was), then most certainly the 21st Century will be the Century of Water. Already much of the world’s 7.3 billion humans do not have access to clean, potable water.
Water scarcity is the No. 1 climate-change challenge facing today’s world. Seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface is water, most of which is salty, and undrinkable, much like Coleridge’s
LEE SCOTT
Now what?
highlighting daily life observations been set on fire.
There is something magical as you watch the reflection on the water. It doubles the size of the sky and makes the sunset even more beautiful.
My husband and I have
JOE PASSIMENT
ment: This ordinance states that the town shall enter into an intergovernmental service contract with the county’s sheriff’s department to provide police protection. services: This states the town council through appropriate negotiations may acquire additional mosquitos and recumbent rattlesnakes on Hilton Head. It was not an easy sell, but Charles Fraser and Fred Hack did have an empty beach and a couple of underused golf courses. And so we heard, for the first time, the sounds of bulldozers, nail guns and circular saws.
In those early days, environmental activism was emerging in parts of the United States — in places like Cleveland, where Love Canal caught on fire from time to time. We did have an early skirmish at St. Phillips Island (near Bay Point) where the cancellation of that project gave environmentalists reason to hope.
But by the mid 1980s, development was under way throughout Beaufort County, and this growth was perceived to be God-ordained. And we were not about to miss out on these construction jobs and the restaurant-filling, ancient mariner, who cried, “water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.”
The mostly failed states of the Middle East and North Africa are among the most water-scarce areas in the world, home to just one percent of the world's freshwater resources. Scarcity of drinkable water increases security risks such as socio-economic instability and forced migration.
Limited water supplies wreak havoc across social, political and economic boundaries. One striking example is the devastating Syrian (un)civil war, which continues to rage.
Climate change brings hotter climes that exaggerates water scarcity, creating a metaphorical Damocles’ sword hanging over all our heads. Water scarcity is a major driver of migration, which generates irreversible changes to neighboring countries.
Currently one percent of the earth’s land mass is uninhabitable; in 50 years that uninhabitability is predicted to rise to 19 percetnt, forcing literally billions of people to migrate traveled all over the United States in our RV. We have seen sensational sunsets in Sedona where the red rocks glimmer as the sun goes down. We watched the sun set out in the desert of New Mexico and on Lake Champlain in Vermont. Yes, they are all very spectacular.
But Beaufort sunsets are so unique. There is something special about sitting on the swings at Waterfront Park and waiting for the sun to go down. You can see people in their boats, with music playing, in anticipation of the show. services.
• 7-1-30 Other law
enforcement agencies:
This states the other state law enforcement agencies and federal agencies may be used to assist in maintaining law and order.
For the past 37 years, the Town compensated the County for these basic and additional services, but abruptly ended the arrangement this year.
Council engaged TischlerBise Inc., a fiscal, economic and planning consulting firm, to determine the true cost of providing basic County law enforcement services to the Town of Hilton Head Island. early-bird retirees who bought the fried flounder and cole slaw.
About this time, I did a stint on the Planning Commission and what little, negligible opposition we voiced was reliably overturned by the City or the County. It was overturned because there was a rock-solid belief that jobs and job creation were sacraments in the Reformed Church of Latter Day Capitalism and the taxes generated was the Eucharist dropped onto our upturned, outstretched palms.
These days, job creation in the United States is more complicated than security cameras, solar panels and swimming pool maintenance. In today’s Wall Street Journal, I see kids working in artificial intelligence, softwear design and the creation of algorithms.
I don’t actually know what these young people do in their minimalist cubicles, but the to places where they are not welcome. These over-dense locales will be a petri dish of profound social and political instability, diseases and global death of Biblical proportions.
Areas experiencing an increase of two degrees Celsius (a danger zone indicator) over the past century, are referred to as “2C hot spots.”
World-wide 2C hot spots are weakening winter’s ravage with Siberia experiencing record-breaking heat and melting permafrost; from Japan to Angola to Uruguay and Australia, warming ocean water has decimated fisheries and underwater kelp forests. Baghdad, Iraq hit 125.2 degrees Farenheit on July 28, topping 120 degrees for four consecutive days. Temperatures above 120 degrees are life threatening.
The U.S. is not immune to such temperature increases. A cluster of counties on Colorado's western slope, which also impacts Wyoming and Utah, has warmed more than 2 degrees Celsius, double the global average.
This area spans more than
There are visitors sitting at the Anchorage Inn or walking along the Woods Memorial Bridge waiting for the right photo opportunity. I love seeing the photos that Bob Sofaly of The Island News captures at those moments. Certainly, better than any of the shots on our phones.
I once had a business trip to Hawaii and did a catamaran dinner cruise. We watched the sunset over Molokai, and I was blown away with the colors and the silhouette of the island. It was spectacular.
I have been on cruise ships where you watch the sun drop
TischlerBise found that the Town is receiving basic law enforcement services valued at approximately $4.4 million.
The other municipalities in Beaufort County are smaller in population and receive far fewer tourists than Hilton Head Island each year, but each has its own police department. In addition to paying their share for Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office for secondary services, the Town of Bluffton pays $6.6 million annually for its own police agency; and the City of Beaufort pays $4.5 million for its department.
As the Town of Hilton Head's population and daily demand for this talent will survive our Coronavirus and its efforts to thin out the ranks of the aging, retiring Boomers.
And so I sit in the early morning dampness, believing a vaccine will arrive sooner rather than later — although some will refuse the vaccine believing that it’s ineffective or part of a conspiracy to secrete microscopic computer chips into our vascular systems.
Enough people will decline the vaccine to insure that Covid continues to replicate itself and never really departs our febrile landscape. But while it remains, it will mutate, and many virologists believe it will lose its lethality. Eventually Covid will become the “common cold” and will not send people to the ICU.
And contrary to the predictions of apocalypse — repeated by those who fill-up our 24 hour-a-day news feed — I 30,000 square miles, making it the largest “2C hot spot” in all of the continental U.S. The Colorado River flow has declined nearly 20 percent over the past century, mostly due to warming temperatures. This region’s snowpack is shrinking and melting earlier, amounting to an annual loss of 1.5 billion tons of water — a loss of as much water as 14 million Americans use in a year.
As the ground absorbs more heat, more of the precious water evaporates. Dry areas warm faster for lack of moisture to cool things down; heat produces drying, and then drying begets more heating, creating a vicious cycle.
Rising temperature is forcing a reckoning in our western states, since the Colorado River supplies water to 40 million people. It nurtures everything from vineyards to cattle to peach and almond trees, and flows into Los Angeles’s water faucets and Arizona’s agricultural fields.
But the Colorado River’s annual flow in the past two decades is 2.3 million acrebelow the horizon and witness the infamous green flash. It is fascinating. But how can that compare with the artist drawing on our sky.
There are some evenings when the Beaufort sky glows with oranges, reds, purples, and a range of other colors that change before your eyes. The humidity, storms, and building clouds add dimensions to the event.
Add the live oaks reflected in the water with their moss draping, and you become mesmerized. Then there are the marshes that appear to change colors as the sun number of visitors increased, so too did the Town’s law enforcement needs. In FY20, the Town was paying $3.4 million for policing, which is $1 million less than what TischlerBise has determined to be the actual cost of services.
Beaufort County Council based its decision to charge a uniform law enforcement fee to Hilton Head property owners on TischlerBise’s analysis.
The Sheriff’s Office, a nationally accredited law enforcement agency, has not changed its level of service to Hilton Head Island, despite the Town’s change in philosophy. don’t think there will be any profound, societal change of direction here in Beaufort County.
Notwithstanding the beer-drinking crowds on the sandbar and the spike in Covid infections we saw in July, we now see an uptick in local construction. Apparently there is a movement out of New York and Philadelphia and the congested Northeast.
In spite of our history hurricanes, of increased tidal flooding and the recent shaming of Myrtle Beach, migration and new construction continue.
It appears we will continue to develop every centimeter of real estate as a new wave of pandemic refugees decide to leave New York and look for less urban places to live.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at
Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink
The earliest known
cscottgraber@gmail.com. feet below its 20th-century average.
Climate change is the defining issue of our time. It is the single most prominent existential threat to our future — not COVID-19.
Obviously, without water, life is not sustainable.
Yet, even today, too many of our political power centers refuse to accept the science that validates this reality, claiming instead that “climate change” is a hoax perpetrated by the radical left-wing of American politics.
I can guarantee which of these two viewpoints is the “faux” news. We better wake up quickly, or it will be too late to address this life-threatening problem. Remember this fundamental and unchanging fact: Mother Nature is an unforgiving mistress. We ignore her at our own grave risk.
“Well, all I know is what I read in the newspapers.” – Will Rogers. David M. Taub was Mayor of Beaufort from 1990 through 1999 and served as a Beaufort County Magistrate from 2010 to 2015. You can reach him at
The Beaufort sunset snobs know better – ours are best
Oh, you know who you
david.m.taub42@gmail.com. gets lower and the creeks and ponds between the grasses glow.
Oh, I am sure there are people who might disagree with me. They will continue to post their sunsets and brag about the setting sun.
But we Beaufort sunset snobs know better.
We have the best sunsets.
Lee Scott, award winning humor writer takes her “Walter Mitty” like persona and spins tales around everyday life. She enjoys boating, reading, and meeting people. Scott lives in Beaufort with her husband, JD, along with their dog Brandy. You can
Why County Council is charging Hilton Head a fee
At its Aug. 24, 2020,
• 7-1-10 Recognition of county sheriff’s depart
7-1-20 Additional
reach her at Lasshood@aol.com.
County Council believes it is important that Hilton Head property owners pay their fair share of what it costs the County to provide a reliably safe community for residents, business owners and visitors.
As chairman of County Council, I am willing to meet again with Hilton Head Town Council to resolve this matter before we implement this fee. I have already sent a message to the Town Manager Steve Riley to establish such a meeting and await their response.
