South Carolina Environmental Law Project, Inc.

SCELP’s overarching goal is to protect the health and vitality of our natural resources by ensuring sound, science-based decision-making. We strive to create, refine, and enforce state and federal environmental protections by providing legal expertise. We meet this goal by offering quality legal services to those in need and by giving them an effective voice and legal muscle in the administrative, legislative and judicial processes.

Our program objectives aim at meeting efficiently the increasing demand from groups and concerned citizens for quality environmental legal services and advocacy. Our work must empower citizens’ groups and environmental organizations by providing a steady source of expert advice and assistance. Complementary to this, we seek full and thorough implementation and enforcement of our environmental laws by spurring our decision-makers and regulators to account for the relationship between environmental regulation, environmental quality and quality of life.

In the face of the worsening climate crisis and escalating loss of wildlife, habitat, and healthy ecosystems, our Board approved a 5-year strategic plan that sharpens some of our existing priorities and approaches, while better articulating and giving renewed emphasis to SCELP’s overarching goal. In addition to committing to continued success in our organizational development, the new plan is premised on a new, but ancient, long-term vision: our land, water and communities are protected and SC laws and policies prioritize natural systems that sustain life.

We will advance this vision by pursuing 3 strategic goals described below.

In the current strategic cycle we have the following programmatic priorities:

1. Protect life-sustaining natural systems
• Acting as the last line of defence against harmful land uses.
• Using litigation and advocacy to establish new and better law for land, water and wildlife.
• Supporting nature-based laws and policies that promote resilience and adaptation.

2. Protect water from current and future threats
• Advocating for sustainable surface water and groundwater uses.
• Striving towards conservation and restoration of water quality and aquatic life.
• Advancing legal protections for state-of-the art stormwater and floodplain practices.

3. Advance environmental justice
• Countering environmental inequities in frontline communities.
• Carrying forward SCELP’s original motto “no case is too small” whenever a vulnerable
community seeks assistance in our areas of expertise.

The many strategies we are developing and executing on to achieved the above goals fall within the 4 focus areas described in our programs. In this regard, our coastal management and conservation work remains the dominant focus area: as the availability of developable high ground decreases, and the strong demographic and economic growth in our coastal regions continue unabated, developers have long turned to fragile landscapes. This is particularly unfortunate at a time of accelerating sea level rise and associated coastal hazards, when adaptation to increasingly frequent higher tides and storm surges would be challenging enough even without having to dedicate time and resources to fight and mitigate harmful and destructive projects and initiatives.

Our Road Maps since 2015 have provided detail-oriented strategic plans that helped further SCELP’s growth and impact. Our strengths have only increased over the last several years and are needed more than ever to achieve environmental protection and conservation in South Carolina: expertise, persistence, creativity, service and advocacy.

The recent emphasis on a more proactive approach, particularly within the policy and legislative spheres, is pushing SCELP beyond the mostly reactive response to old and new threats: adaptation (notably, in our coastal management and water & wetlands focus areas), mitigation and remediation (notably, in our wildlife & habitat conservation and waste management focus areas).

Our permit monitoring and related activities remains a key element in our strategy, as we strive to foster a regulatory system where fewer instances of environmental destruction or degradation need to be painstakingly challenged on a case-by-case, project-by-project basis. Overseeing individual projects and intervening as much as needed and possible remains an essential activity to achieve environmental protection in South Carolina. At the same time, for example with respect to the ecosystem services provided by wetlands, we are witnessing a spreading awareness among our communities that we must change direction. With our partners, and our increased focus on communications, we are working to translate such awareness into better policies and practices, while simultaneously continuing to protect vulnerable and increasingly encroached areas through our legal advocacy.

After operating as a solo practice for almost half of our existence, since 2016 we have significantly increased our capacity and we have now 6 attorney on staff, combining almost 90 years of legal expertise, 5 support staff and 3 office across the state. The 2022-2026 strategic plan calls for adding at least 6 more staff members.

In addition to steadily increasing our budget and funding sources over the last several years, we have developed comprehensive marketing and communications plans. We bolstered our press and media relations management. The recently established offices in Greenville and Mount Pleasant allowed us to become visible and available to many communities who were not aware of our services before and in the same vein our new board members recruitment has reinforced our presence in the Upstate, Midlands and Lowcountry.

It took 6 years to stop ThermalKEM from moving ahead with its incinerator expansion in Rock Hill and closed its operation in 1995. It took 15 years to shut down the Pinewood toxic landfill, at the headwaters of Lake Marion. Unfortunately these are just two of the many instances of the frontal war waged by the hazardous waste industry against South Carolina. Shortly after founding SCELP in 1987, Jimmy Chandler found himself fighting this war on multiple fronts. By the beginning of the new millennium, SCELP and its allies had won on all fronts, but the toxic legacy of decades of mismanagement and abuse of our natural resources will be with us for many more decades.

Others successes were achieved in the first 15 years of SCELP history, across our programmatic focus area, and many more since Amy Armstrong took over leading the organization in 2010: blocking seawalls, groins and other hardening of the shoreline, preventing dredging, filling and other disruption of marshlands and creeks habitats; winning several citizen rights rulings establishing important precedent for communities willing to challenge local government action.

Our challenge to the development of Captain Sams Spit, a 150-acre pristine inlet providing essential habitat to many shorebirds, began in 2009 and, after favorable rulings from the SC Supreme Court in 2014, 2018, and 2021 is hopefully about to be over. Other longstanding battles include unpermitted seawalls and coastal armoring for erosion control. More recent cases range from forcing the removal of uninhabitable houses from the active beach, to outlawing new development on artificially renourished beaches. Also, our challenge on behalf of sixteen coastal municipalities against seismic testing contributed to the defeat of offshore drilling plans in the Atlantic.

Rising sea levels are pushing the longstanding tension between coastal development and the preservation of our shorelines, tidal creeks and marshes to an inflection point. With 350,000 acres of saltmarsh, the most of any state on the East coast and one of the most critical biomes in the world, our coast is both wonderful and essential for the life cycles that support us all.

Every environmentalist needs to reckon with Gus Speth’s warning about the haunting specter of failure and we do so in a way that could be replicated in many regions of our country.

1. We acknowledge the extraordinary natural wealth still blessing our are of interest;
2. We leverage the area’s outstanding track-record in conservation/advocacy;
3. We zero in on the legal system and on a status quo that is enabling the ongoing destruction of our environment and life-sustaining natural systems.