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To protect and preserve
By Molly Parker
Staff Writer
A two-month honeymoon in Africa sharing nature with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda was enough to convince a young Dana Beach to pursue a career in conservation.
It was a trip suggested by his wife, Virginia. The two met in New York where she worked for a publishing house after her return from Kenya where she served in the Peace Corps.
Beach was working in a different kind of jungle, America’s most famous, as a financial analyst and Wall Street consultant.
“I didn’t know anything about conservation. I like to hike and I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors, but it was really my wife exposing me to bird watching and natural history stuff,” said Beach, the controversial figure who began the Coastal Conservation League nearly 19 years ago.
“The more I looked into it, the more I thought, well, one, I’m not really that excited about business and two, I am excited about conservation.”
Return to roots
Upon his return from Africa, Beach, a Columbia native, decided to return to his Southern roots. He and his wife moved to Charleston with a little savings but no job prospects.
After a few odd jobs, Beach landed in then-U.S. Congressman Arthur Ravenel’s office working on environmental policy issues.
“I was able to meet people and learn things I could never have learned (otherwise),” he said.
In that role, Beach was astonished by the rapid rate in which greenfields turned into development projects, and the lack of regional planning as dozens of autonomous bureaucracies — schools, cities, counties, water and sewer districts — seemed to be making decisions without regard to the regional footprint.
“It struck me that beneath it all we needed a systematic process promoting better land use,” Beach said.
The focus in the late ’70s and ’80s was on policies such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, but little attention was paid to land use, he said.
“The core underlying need was to get those land-use patterns right because so many of the rest of the environmental problems emerge from poor planning and development practices.”
Hence the league was born with a shoestring budget and just two full-time employees. Beach financed the operation’s first six months while awaiting the arrival of a half-dozen foundation grants.
“People are very willing to believe there are real threats, but you have to make a different kind of argument to convince people they can make a difference,” he said. “There was a certain amount of faith that went into that and the early adopters were the ones that thought,
‘Well, it’s worth a try.’ ”
Growing membership
Since 1989, league membership has grown from about 300 members to nearly 5,000. The organization’s budget in the first year was comprised of just a few grants totaling about $90,000. Last year, the league spent roughly $3.5 million. Thirty employees work at the league in four locations: Charleston, Columbia, Beaufort and Georgetown.
“We basically made the case that this place was worth saving,” Beach said. “The great thing about working in Charleston is not only do people from Charleston care about it, but people in New York care about it. We have members in the Netherlands.”
No doubt a controversial man for the positions he takes, Beach wields a powerful voice in the local economic debate.
His organization is largely credited with stopping a number of big projects ranging from the Global Gateway port development proposed for Daniel Island to the extension of Interstate 73 through the Francis Marion National Forest.
These days, the league is busy touting alternatives to growing the Mark Clark Expressway. Beach also is fighting Santee Cooper over a proposed coal-fired electric generating plant in Florence County, and is engaged in a legal battle with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over construction permits for a new cargo terminal at the former Charleston Naval Base.
While acknowledging that the league doesn’t have all the answers, Beach said he is disappointed that organizations such as the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce and the S.C. Department of Commerce act like a “cheerleading section” for any and all new development without regard to the larger economic and environmental picture.
The tail wagging the dog
“We’re kind of like the environmental tail wagging the economic dog,” Beach said.
Calling South Carolina “proudly pre-modern,” Beach said too many decisions are driven by relationships than good policy.
He criticized the state Department of Health and Environmental Control for issuing air quality permits in a vacuum.
“The elephant in the living room,” Beach said, is that the Charleston region is slowly inching toward federal nonattainment status because of the invisible particulate matter floating around.
If the air reaches a certain point of saturation, DHEC could not issue additional permits for new businesses or existing ones to expand, and federal transportation dollars could be suspended.
“It’s not so much that DHEC should not issue any more air permits, but that they should call to attention the implications of what they’re doing,” he said.
Because of his adversarial role, Beach is often considered a thorn in the side of business and industry, which often leads to preconceptions about his organization.
“The harder thing is to engage in a rigorous debate,” Beach said. “To be able to stay in this business, you have to like the financial side of running an organization, and you also have to like politics. And you have to like the environment, obviously, but in a way that’s the least important.”
As of 2005, Beach earned about $103,000 annually, according to Internal Revenue Service records. Beach said a businessman was recently griping to a friend of his about the league and asked, “ ‘If Dana’s so smart, with all this business background, well, why isn’t he rich?’
And my friend said, ‘He’s probably happy.’ ”
Molly Parker is a reporter for the Business Journal. E-mail her directly at mparker@setcommedia.com.
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