The award itself is interesting. McMaster is a Republican governor in a state where economic development is often one of the first languages of public life, and the organization honoring him is an environmental advocacy group active in South Carolina politics. Their agreement isn’t complete. Conservation groups have criticized parts of McMaster’s record, including energy policy. But the recognition points toward something worth noticing in its own right.
At the awards luncheon, McMaster described jobs, education, and the environment as mutually dependent parts of South Carolina’s prosperity.
I keep thinking about that formulation.
Not because it resolves the arguments South Carolina is having about growth. It doesn’t. But because it gives us a better place to begin them.
What if prosperity is not one thing?
Three Things That Are Already Related
Public debates often arrange economic development and environmental protection as opposing goods.
A company proposes a large investment. Jobs and tax revenue go on one side of the ledger. Land, water, habitat, emissions, traffic, or quality of life go on the other. Then politics becomes the work of deciding how much of one we are willing to exchange for the other.
Education usually occupies another conversation altogether.
McMaster’s formulation interrupts that arrangement. Jobs, education, and environment are not three independent goods competing for attention. They are conditions of one another.
That seems especially important in South Carolina right now.
The state is growing rapidly. New houses are needed. New infrastructure is being built. Industrial projects promise enormous capital investment. Electricity demand is rising. Forests and farmland sit beside expanding metropolitan areas. Communities are trying to preserve places they love while also making room for people who need homes, schools, work, roads, and opportunity.
If we treat those things separately, we will keep solving one problem by quietly creating another. An affordable house at the end of an ever-lengthening commute isn’t just a housing outcome. A school surrounded by dangerous roads, poor air, little shade, and inaccessible public space isn’t simply an education outcome. A new employer whose infrastructure reorganizes a watershed, electrical system, or neighborhood is more than an economic-development outcome.
These are relationships. And relationships are where ecology begins.
What is Ecology?
My PhD work at CIIS is in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion (and my dissertation is on what I call the Ecology of the Cross).
The Ecology of Childhood
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a wonderful person about ecology and public policy. I wrote down this question in my notebook as we talked over the phone:
How do we make it possible for ordinary families to afford good places to live without treating land as infinitely disposable?
I have started thinking about this as affordability without disposability.
Housing policy usually speaks in units, prices, zoning, financing, supply, and demand. Those are necessary languages. But a child does not experience a housing unit as a unit.
A child experiences a bedroom and a yard, a sidewalk or the absence of one, the trip to school and the air outside. There is the creek behind the neighborhood and the tree that shades the bus stop, the church down the street and the grocery store that can or cannot be reached by foot. There is the time a parent spends commuting, the sound outside the window at night, and the people who stay in the neighborhood long enough to become neighbors.
Children don’t experience housing, environment, schools, infrastructure, transportation, and neighborhood life as separate policy categories. They inherit one lived ecology whether we intend it that way with policy decisions or not.
That is why McMaster’s three-part account of prosperity seems to me worth expanding rather than merely applauding or disputing.
Jobs matter, education matters, and environment matters. But each becomes real in a place where somebody has to live.
What Does Growth Ask of a Place?
South Carolina has made substantial investments in conservation. Conservation Voters of South Carolina says McMaster’s administration has helped secure more than $318 million for conservation over the past three years and helped protect, or move toward protection, more than 229,000 acres. The 2026 state budget also included more than $65 million for land conservation.
Those are significant commitments.
At the same time, conservation in a rapidly developing state cannot mean only protecting selected landscapes from development while treating everywhere else as available for consumption.
The more difficult question is what happens in the ordinary places between protected lands: the former industrial site and the subdivision, the school corridor and the patch of woods behind a shopping center, the creek crossing beneath a road, the farm at the edge of a growing town, the neighborhood beside a new industrial project. That is where much of South Carolina’s future is actually being negotiated.
Here in Spartanburg, the recent debates around data centers have made this particularly visible. Project Spero brought questions about power, water, land, tax policy, and public participation into the same room. The Valara dispute has brought another set of questions about construction, permitting, neighbors, noise, dust, light, and what kinds of effects institutions recognize as harm.
Housing presents another version of the same problem.
We need places for people to live. Restricting housing supply can make communities unaffordable and push families farther from jobs and schools. But endless outward expansion consumes forests and farmland, extends roads and utilities, fragments habitat, increases driving, and changes watersheds.
So “growth” is too imprecise a word.
The better question may be:
What does this form of growth ask of this place?
And then:
Who inherits the answer?
Conservation After the Fence
South Carolina’s conservation tradition has often been very good at recognizing special places. Ancient forests, salt marshes, working farms, mountain views, and “wildlife” habitat all matter here.
But ecology also asks us to notice that the line around a protected parcel does not mark the end of relationship. Water, wildlife, air, and people cross it. Economic pressures cross it too, and development elsewhere can determine what happens inside it.
The same is true of a home.
A property line doesn’t contain the ecological conditions of childhood. Air quality, traffic, school access, flooding, heat, noise, water, public space, employment, and community stability all arrive from beyond the lot. This is why I am increasingly interested in a conservation ethic that does not begin only with the question, What land should we save?
It also asks:
How should we inhabit the land we do not set aside?
That question connects conservation to housing, housing to education, education to transportation, transportation to energy, and energy to industrial development. Eventually we discover that the categories were never as separate as our agencies, committees, budgets, and headlines made them appear.
Prosperity as a Relationship
Perhaps prosperity is not best measured by how much a state possesses. Maybe it’s partly a description of the quality of relationships a place is able to sustain.
Can families afford to remain, and can children grow up somewhere healthy enough to become home? Can businesses succeed without transferring invisible costs to neighbors or future generations? Can farms remain farms and rivers continue functioning as rivers rather than merely as inputs? Can communities welcome new people without requiring the landscape to become endlessly disposable? Can economic development deepen a place rather than simply occupy it?
These aren’t anti-growth questions but are are questions about what kind of growth deserves to be called prosperity. And these questions resist an easy political sorting.
South Carolina’s recent conservation record itself makes that clear. Land protection has attracted support across party lines. Economic development remains a central priority. Housing affordability is becoming increasingly urgent. Energy demand is reshaping infrastructure decisions. Children will live longest with whatever choices emerge from all of them.
The work is to become better at seeing the ecology they already form.
What We Hand Down
Environmental writing has a temptation to imagine the task as saving nature from human beings. I don’t think that is enough, though.
The Carolina landscape I know is already full of human history: farms, mill towns, highways, churchyards, schoolyards, dams, neighborhoods, rail lines, industrial sites, forests cut and regrown, rivers that have carried both life and waste.
There’s no “pristine” South Carolina waiting outside history for us to protect it. There’s only this place, inherited and altered, damaged and beautiful, still alive.
And there are children inheriting it from us now. That makes prosperity an intergenerational word. The question isn’t just whether South Carolina can attract another company, build another subdivision, preserve another tract of land, improve another school, or widen another road (albeit important ones in their own context).
The more pertinent question is whether those decisions can begin to belong to the same story. Jobs, education, environment, housing, water, land, neighborhood, and childhood: none of them exist alone. Perhaps the measure of prosperity is whether we can finally learn to govern as though we know that.