In 2005, Buddy Baker, one of the many outstanding biologists who staff the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (DNR), decided the time was right to initiate a new Focus Area in central South Carolina, one that was dear to his heart. Baker, a tall, lean, local boy with a disarming grin, had spent his formative years hunting and fishing in the COWASEE Basin and knew it better than anyone.

Baker had been mulling over for sometime the importance of protecting this jewel of a landscape in the heart of South Carolina. Taking his cue from the ACE Basin Focus Area playbook, Baker convened a group of private landowners, governmental conservation agencies, and private conservation organizations in September 2005 to kick off an effort that would protect the COWASEE Basin for generations to come.

The Focus Area concept got started some years ago by waterfowl conservationists and duck hunters in an effort to protect big pieces of landscape that included lots of wetlands. Large wetlands tracts not only benefit waterfowl, but many other wildlife species as well.

Buddy Baker Conservationists by then had come to the conclusion that it was not possible, nor desirable, for state and federal governments to own all of the critical and sensitive lands out there. Instead, they realized that landowners were the best stewards of their properties, and if given the right opportunity and circumstance, it might be possible for them to protect their land forever. That opportunity turned out to be

the conservation easement,

the tool of choice for permanently protecting thousands of acres of private land throughout South Carolina and the rest of the country with minimal cost to the taxpayer.

Focus Areas are typically large ecosystems consisting of thousands of acres, and it takes a lot of partners working towards a common goal - keeping an undeveloped landscape undeveloped - to make things happen; hence the creation of the Focus Area Task Force. The key members of any Task Force have always been private landowners that have the biggest stake in the future of their lands.

The COWASEE Basin Task Force, which meets at about six week intervals, is currently composed of private landowners and eight conservation organizations or agencies: the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, the Richland County Conservation Commission, the Sumter County Soil and Water Conservation District, Ducks Unlimited, The Conservation Fund, Friends of Congaree Swamp, the Congaree Land Trust, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The ACE Basin Task Force has enjoyed huge successes in protecting thousands of acres of critical and sensitive wildlife habitat between Charleston and Savannah. Since its inception in 1988, dedicated landowners and conservation visionaries have protected 175,000 acres in the ACE Basin from development, and it is used as a model throughout the country to illustrate how private conservation can work to save land.

Buddy Baker's goal is to make the COWASEE Basin the "ACE Basin of the Midlands."

(Next week: Conservation,

Preservation,Promotion)