Jay Walea,
the director of the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy, cannot simply describe the idyllic 20,000 acres under his watch. He prefers to show it to visitors, taking them around its diverse habitats and landscapes, highlighting and naming every plant, tree, and animal he sees.“I’m out on the land as much as I can be,” Walea says. “As the director, I’m supposed to be sitting inside at meetings a good bit, but that’s not for me. I’d much rather be doing what I love. I’m the director of the Conservancy, but first and foremost I’m a wildlife manager. That’s never going to change.”
Palmetto Bluff lies in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, just north of Savannah, Ga. It’s home to the lavish Montage Palmetto Bluff resort, and a slowly growing community that’s been built up over the past two decades. There are currently 800 homes that have been developed to be unobtrusive to the land, while the Conservancy is in turn funded by a percentage of lot sales made by the developer.
Half of Palmetto Bluff’s 20,000 acres will remain development free, even as in the coming decades the community is built out to include a total of 4,000 “units,” which includes homes, hotel rooms, and shops. As a comparison, Palmetto Bluff is two-thirds the size of a prominent nearby resort community, but will include only one-tenth the development.
Walea, 49, spoke with Penta about his role as director of the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy, the organization’s many projects and the unique environment of the Lowcountry.
PENTA: Can you tell me a little bit about your personal history with Palmetto Bluff?
Jay Walea: I actually came to Palmetto Bluff as the baby, and now I’’ the old man out here. This is my 30th year on this property. My career has morphed over that time, but 30 years, never left the place. Coming to Palmetto Bluff started for me when I was about 10 years old, on father-son hunts, and so I got to start coming one day a year and it was just amazing—anybody in the Savannah area, and the Bluffton area, everybody knew about Palmetto Bluff. To be able to go out there, you were the big dog then, right? My degree and my background is wildlife management, with a minor in forestry, and I went to Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College down in Tifton, Ga. My first internship here was working in land resources, and they asked if I wanted to come and work at the Bluff and I’ve been here ever since.
And now you have 20,000 acres under your management, with half set aside as being kept development free?
That’s the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy’s goal, and that’s the goal of the developer, after build out, which is 4,000 units. It’s going to take some work, it’s going to take some feet on the ground, really mapping it out as we move with the development, but yes that’s our goal to make sure half of this place is in conservation. We are a conservation developer. We believe in conservation as opposed to preservation, that’s very important.
Can you describe that difference between conservation and preservation?
Preservation sounds sexy, but quite honestly, since our feet hit this continent, preservation went out the window. The definition is leaving it alone and letting mother nature take its course. Conservation is maximizing but utilizing your natural resources.
So, a good representative of that is our lagoon systems. All of these lagoons on Palmetto Bluff are first and foremost retention ponds, they are to catch runoff from these buildings and roadways to make sure they don’t go out into the rivers and creeks. For the protection for our waterways. Then with conservation, you take it to the next step. So from the time they dig a lagoon, the conservancy starts monitoring it, and once we see that it can hold an absolved oxygen content for a full summer and you can start seeing the native vegetation, the aquatic vegetation starting to grow, what we call naturalizing, then we take the next stop, we stock it with fish. We took the natural resource, which would be the water, and we made something out of it that people can go and enjoy, while still protecting the environment.
What makes the Palmetto Bluff and the Lowcountry overall so unique in terms of its ecosystem, environment, and wildlife?
Well, Palmetto Bluff is the most beautiful piece of property I’ve ever set my feet on, but it’s also the most diverse piece of property I’ve ever set my feet on. We have over 20 different habitat types here. Usually, even in the rainforest, you might have four or five, maybe up to eight or 10, but we have over 20 here. With that amazing diversity comes amazing biodiversity. We have over 400 bird species. If you can think of a mammal that’s found in the Lowcountry, we got it here at Palmetto Bluff in abundance.
You’re in an area I imagine would be at high risk in terms of the impact of climate change.I always tell people you don’t have to believe in global warming if you don’t want to. But something is happening for sure. And yeah, we’re seeing it. For instance, back when I was just 13 years old, I’m 49 now, I can remember going hunting in October, maybe 20 miles from here, going hunting in October and there would be frost and ice on the ground. Now, we get our first frost here at the very end of December or the first of January. We used to have all of our winter plantings done by this time (September), but we actually turned our planting around, splitting our fields in the middle by leaving the summer plantings in half, and we did the winter planting in the other half.
How do you walk that fine line between managing what seems like competing interests, in terms of the development side of things versus the conservation side?
Anybody can develop land. You get an outline of your land, you put an overlay of the wetlands you can’t go in, and then you draw in your roads and your plot lines. You and me could do that with a plot we ain’t never seen in 15 minutes. But when you get out there and start physically walking and start seeing all these natural features, and all of that, when it’s gone, it’s gone. So it’s up to us as good stewards of the land, and the Palmetto Bluff Company is one of the best developers in the country, to not only talk the talk but walk the walk.
The conservation development part of it is a big deal, keeping half of this property in conservation. But I look at it, if anything fails out here, I look at it as it’s going to be my fault. Because this is my place. I’ve been here just about my entire life. So, you can’t fail. I can’t fail.
