On warm summer evenings, tourists stream down the boardwalk to the edge of Charleston's Waterfront Park, where they mingle with local residents who fish for their supper from the pier. This scene is mirrored in numerous South Carolina communities throughout the year.

Even during the crush of the tourist season, the park has an easy-going, festive atmosphere: everyone is welcome. You also can find a similar relaxed atmosphere - locals and tourists rubbing shoulders--in the historic downtowns of Georgetown, Beaufort, Abbeville, Aiken and Pendeleton. In each of these South Carolina cities, tourists and residents are drawn to the community's heart and together weave a new fabric of local culture.

Tourism has sparked a renaissance in the state, providing an incentive for South Carolina cities to build parks, to revitalize historic neighborhoods and downtowns, and to establish art and music festivals.

But unfortunately tourists and locals are often adversaries. Part of the problem is that most visitors see only the attractive side of a resort area. Tourists swoop into town, enjoy the sights for a few days, and then leave for home without noticing the problems associated with a resort economy.

Local residents, on the other hand, live with both the positive and negative aspects of tourism. Residents know that a resort industry provides local jobs. But they also realize that tourism often brings with it more car traffic, road construction, and pollution.

In addition, residents and tourists often have different cultures with different standards of dress and taste. And many tourists have higher incomes than residents or, at least, they temporarily have more money to spend.

Visitors and residents also often have different relationships with the environment. Most tourists visit a place for a short time, but some families in South Carolina have relied on coastal resources for a portion of their living for generations. With access to waterways, locals can set their tables with fish, oysters, or shrimp, selling what they don't eat. Consequently residents become upset when, for instance, a coastal resort restricts access to local docks and piers, keeping residents from reaching their traditional fishing grounds.

So it's easy to see how a resort town can divide into two hostile camps--a situation that can eventually harm tourism. After all, who wants to visit a place where the local people are angry?

How we manage tourism today will affect the state for a long time to come. Tourism is a powerful industry in South Carolina, bringing $6.5 billion into the state economy and making great changes in both its physical landscape and culture.

The retirement and tourism industries are two reasons why South Carolina and other Southeastern coastal states have been growing rapidly in population. This rapid growth is expected to continue in Southeastern coastal counties through the year 2010, particularly in eastern Florida, plus the Savannah and Charleston areas, according to a 1990 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In addition, people still working often travel to find a retirement spot that they'll use later. So in many respects, the retirement and tourism industries are one economic force.

The retirement and tourism industries are two reasons why the South Carolina shoreline had one of the highest coastal growth rates in the United States during the 1980s. According to a recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the South Carolina coast experienced more than a 25 percent increase in housing units in 1980-89.

Like any business that brings swift growth, the tourism and retirement industries inevitably alter the places they use. Consider first some of the positive legacies of tourism: jobs, for one. In addition to employing waiters, maids, and cooks, a tourism economy also employs printers, engineers, and computer programmers, among other white-collar workers. In 1988, the travel industry directly employed more than 176,000 people in South Carolina, according to Amy Duffy, assistant director of the tourism division of the S.C. Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department.

Tourism, of course, demands a transportation network: roads, bridges, airports, railroads, and ocean terminals. Creating this network benefits a local economy in two ways.

First, building roads and airports requires a sophisticated construction industry, a source of well-paying jobs. And, once built, this infrastructure can help sustain economic growth by drawing other industries to the region.

The resort industry also builds up government coffers. Hotels, restaurants, and other businesses pay taxes on income, property, utilities, and social security. Employees, of course, also pay a variety of taxes. These revenues can add up to a large part of a state's tax receipts.

But despite the wealth that tourism stimulates, visitors also bring problems, especially if local communities do not plan carefully for tourism.

Poorly planned tourism can be destructive to the environment, overwhelming natural resources. Many resort developments are built in inappropriate areas, according to Clare Cunn, Texas A&M professor emeritus who directed a 1990 study on South Carolina's Upstate tourism for Clemson University. "Poor location and design of developments are stealing beaches, ruining scenic views, and eroding fragile resources around the country," Gunn says.

Poorly planned resort development also can harm local cultures. A huge influx of visitors can dramatically alter the priorities of a community, with outsiders controlling a community's future instead of local citizens. In some instances, tourism creates such swift development that communities can't adjust, and local citizens surrender to a type of growth that they may not want.

In addition, rapid tourism development can pile tax burdens on local residents who help finance public services built to accommodate visitors. Some residents can't keep up financially with the swiftly rising cost of living brought by the resort economy. Escalating land values and higher taxes can push out large numbers of local residents - middle-income people as well as the poor.

To remain successful in drawing tourists, South Carolina must preserve the natural, cultural, and historical resources on which tourism depends. It must also preserve the quality of life for South Carolinians. South Carolina will not benefit from a tourism industry that harms a living culture. Yet each of us can benefit from a tourism industry that respects the resources that it uses.

If local citizens don't decide what kind of tourism development they want, then other people will decide what kind of tourism they get. In South Carolina, the people most likely to decide what is built where and when are developers.

Developers in South Carolina make many decisions about what gets built, partly because local government bodies fail to coordinate their planning, according to a 1989 report by the S. C. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.

Within a single urbanized area, there may be two or more county and several municipal governments, plus special purpose districts that provide water or sewer service. With little coordination between these government bodies, decisions about development can fall between local jurisdictional cracks.

In other words, local governments in South Carolina frequently fail to manage economic growth and new developments. So developers in South Carolina too often have a free rein to build where they wish.

Now add a fast-moving tourism economy to the problem of inadequate management by local governments. "By its nature, tourism is an explosive force," says James C. Haug, a Mississippi State University historian who has studied the impacts of leisure activities on urban development. "Land can change hands several times over a relatively short period, making land values rise rapidly."

As a tourism economy heats up, local leaders take a hands-off approach to development, Haug says, because they don't want to be accused of slowing prosperity. Thus local officials often surrender control of development to private developers and builders who begin making many of the decisions concerning the use of land. Developers soon make the local decisions on the amount of open space, the style of constructions, the relationship of buildings to streets, and the delivery of new sewer and water services.

Haug believes developers should not be responsible for the overall look or design of a town, city, or region. Government should keep that responsibility₁ with input from citizens, developers, and other interested parties.

When developers are primarily responsible for planning the future of a community, "disorder and confusion follow," Haug says. Most developers want to build attractive structures that fit into the environment, but they usually work in a piece-meal fashion. "A developer might think that he was being orderly in how he develops land, but he can't plan how or where the city will grow in the next 20 years. He can't do that on his own," says Haug.

Patrick Mason, executive director of the S. C. Retirement Communities Association, believes that many developers support fair and reasonable planning which would protect long-term real estate values. Developers, like the rest of us, don't want South Carolina to turn into another Florida, he says. "Many people are worried about the proliferation of strip malls and other ill-designed development in South Carolina."

It's important to keep communities healthy and attractive for both tourists and residents. Experts say that the best way for a community to maintain its health is to plan ahead when working with developers. Even small towns which generally don't have the resources to hire planners, can negotiate with developers to create projects that will bring long-term local benefits.

But planners in South Carolina often need more information to plan for growth, says Thomas Potts, a tourism expert at Clemson University. "Planners in South Carolina generally don't have enough research data about the services that support tourism--transportation and health services, for instance to address how their areas should grow. They need more information to do the job."

Andres Duany, a Miami-based planner and architect, believes that urban planning must take a different direction in the future. "Today's urban planning is at the very heart of the ecological problem," says Duany. "The entire design of the modern town assumes that everyone will drive for every trip." The modern urban pattern promotes sprawl, he says, which eats up rural areas and contributes to water and air pollution.

Retirees are flocking to the countryside, changing the face of rural America. These days, retirees want to live in beautiful places near a beach, a marsh, or a lake. So in the past two decades, huge numbers of retirees have left the big cities to move to quieter rural areas.

Calvin Beale, demographer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, notes that 20 percent of the nation's rural counties had become "retirement-destination counties" during the 1970s, and 8 percent had become such counties in the 1980s A retirement-destination county is one that gains at least 15 percent of its population growth in a decade from people 60 and over moving in.

Some retirees settle in isolated rural corners of the country, but most want access to airports and hospitals - the infrastructure of cities - because they want convenient travel and health care. So retirees often pick rural areas near larger urban centers. When these farmlands and mountainsides are developed for retirees, they often become popular vacation spots for tourists and homes for long-distance commuters to the nearby cities.

With this influx of new residents and tourists, rural areas near larger cities around the country have exploded in population in the past two decades.

These former rural areas have enjoyed sudden prosperity. But they have also suffered the environmental damage of sprawling development, which spreads houses, offices, roads, and shopping malls across the landscape, chewing up open space. Many rural areas near South Carolina cities have also followed this pattern of swift, sprawling development.

Rapidly developing rural areas face environmental problems because both retirees and tourists usually demand the highest degree of modern comforts. They expect public services (water, sewer, fire and police protection) in resorts and suburbs to be equal in quality to those they enjoyed back home.

In short, tourists and retirees demand a home-away-from-home near something wild: a hotel on the beach; a restaurant on the marsh; or a lodge in the mountains. In the language of the tourism and retirement industries, such structures are called amenities--additions to an area that enhance its ability to attract travelers. Amenities include hotels, golf courses, theaters, shopping centers--anything built or designed that can attract people.

Building retirement homes, amenities, and a complex infrastructure in a rural area can destroy farmland - unless the development is clustered to avoid paving over productive land. The United States loses about 4,000 to 5,500 acres of agricultural land each day, according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture National Resource Inventory.

Sprawling development in rural areas also can destroy wildlife habitat. Traditional rural areas in South Carolina, with their mixture of pasture, forest, farms, and hedgerows, provide crucial habitat for a variety of wildlife species. The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board noted in a 1990 report that the destruction of wildlife habitat is one of most serious ecological problems facing the Earth.

Finding Tourism Solutions

How can we improve tourism? How can we continue to benefit from tourism, minimize the damage it causes, and draw it into areas that have not benefited from it before? How can we create an environment today that will continue to attract tourists into the 21st century?

First, we can conserve the resources that draw tourists. One way to protect resources is to use them wisely. By enjoying our art festivals, local crafts, and architecture, as well as our beaches, mountains, estuaries, and rivers, and by treating these resources with respect, we can provide incentives for government to preserve them. They should be treated as capital, and we should draw upon the interest, conserving the capital for future growth and development.

South Carolina has already found success in linking tourism to our cultural and historical legacies. But we also must create tomorrow's past today - that is, create a culture that our children and grandchildren will want to protect.

We can help maintain a healthy culture by getting involved in our local communities to determine what kind of tourism development we want, or whether we want more tourism at all. Government on each level, from local to federal, makes decisions that affect tourism. But researchers say that government needs more information about how to coordinate and improve its planning for a continuing healthy tourism economy. The state, for instance, could encourage counties to make inventories of their valuable resources.

These inventories could help counties create comprehensive plans, which would encourage development in areas where infrastructure already exists. In addition, planning would help rapidly growing areas protect their prime farmland and their environmentally sensitive areas.

Tourism is a very large and significant industry in our state, and growing yearly. But tourism must not be allowed to devour itself Tourism that destroys or lowers the quality of the very areas being visited is impossible to sustain. For tourism to benefit South Carolina in the near term--and more importantly in the long term--we must assure that it does not significantly alter the natural beauty and historical and cultural diversity that are the true attractions of our state.

Behind a "fantasy vacation" is usually a hard reality. Many of the people who make our vacations enjoyable--the cooks, maids, and waiters work long hours for poor pay and endure layoffs lasting for months each year during the tourism off-season. In addition, most resort-service jobs don't provide important benefits such as health insurance. "Any worker who gets sick and who lacks health insurance will likely become a burden on the government and on taxpayers," says Robert Becker of Clemson University's Strom Thurmond Institute.

Thus it is important for governments to help workers receive adequate health insurance. Becker suggests taxes on hotels and motels be used for resort-labor health insurance and for unemployment insurance during the off-season.

A similar approach has worked in Majorca, a resort island in the Mediterranean Sea, where a tax on hotels aids unemployed workers during the tourism economy's slow months. "Developing nations can show us how to address some of the social problems associated with basing an economy on tourism," says Becker. "Some developing nations became dependent on tourism years ago, and coastal South Carolina is rapidly reaching that stage."

But government benefits won't solve the employment problems of resort workers. Workers must also invest in the tourism industry and in education to get ahead. Experts agree that local people must become trained in all levels of the tourism industry, including managerial and technical positions. Formal academic training in tourism management is available at Clemson University and the Department of Hotel Restaurant and Tourism at the University of South Carolina.

To help residents benefit more from tourism, government can promote local ownership, management, and operation of small businesses like bed-and-breakfast places. B&Bs, which are usually owned and operated by residents, are good sources of jobs for local people. B&Bs have a higher ratio of employees per tourist than other hotels. And because the owners of B&Bs and their employees are usually local people, their profits and wages circulate within the community.

The S.C. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism's Community Development Division, created in 1989, is helping to extend the benefits of tourism to all of the state, especially to rural areas and small towns. This division has created a range of programs and services. For example, the division worked with Thomas Potts, a Clemson Extension Tourism Specialist, to publish a manual on how to develop bed-and-breakfasts, according to Martha Beckman, director of the division. The division complemented the manual with a series of workshops, and now it is helping bed-and-breakfast operators create a state-wide B&B association.

S. C. Sea Grant Marine Extension Program (MEP) has been helping to build a nature-based tourism network in the state through three initiatives in cooperation with Clemson University's Recreation, Travel and Tourism Institute and others.

First, an Ad Hoc Committee on Nature-based Tourism was formed to promote the sustainable use of natural resources, according to Bob Bacon, MEP coordinator. The committee, made up of representatives from universities, government and non-profit organizations, is working on planning guidelines for nature-based tourism, including methods of assessing natural resources, determining maximum visitation for a particular area, and assisting nature-based businesses.

Second, a Nature-based Tourism Conference was held in 1994 at Litchfield By-the-Sea. The conference provided an opportunity for business operators to learn about markets, potential customers and the concepts of planning for sustainable use.

Third, MEP is working on a continuing project to tie existing businesses, from bed-and-breakfasts to large hotels with nature-based tourism. Funded by a grant by the National Coastal Resources Research and Development Institute the project will create marketing programs that connect established tourism businesses on the coast with entrepreneurial nature-based tourism.

John Tibbetts is a writer and editor for the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium in Charleston, South Carolina. This article is adapted from Coastal Heritage, published by the SC Sea Grant Consortium.

Tibbetts, John. "Preparing for Tourism’s Next Wave," The South Carolina Policy Forum Magazine, Vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 25-35. Additional material is provided in the Forum article and in the PDF "Tourism" file.