Kiawah’s Environment:
An Important and Unique Barrier Island
Article and photographs by Jack Kotz
Have you ever wondered why Kiawah Island has remained so incredibly beautiful despite extensive
development over the past 40 years? To find an answer, we need to begin about 240 years ago, just as this country was
being born. From 1775 until the middle of the 20th century the Island was in the hands of the Vanderhorst family.
C.C. Royal purchased it for timber rights in 1950, and in 1954 he built the first summer homes. In 1974 the heirs of
C.C. Royal sold Kiawah to the Kuwait Investment Corporation, and so began the evolution of the Island as we know it
today. The Kuwaitis commissioned the Environmental Research Center (ERC) to provide an extensive environmental
inventory as the basis for a master development plan. Published in 1975, the inventory contains a wealth of information
about the state of our Island in the latter part of the 20th century.
Because the ERC report is regarded as an important part of what sets us apart from other barrier island
communities, and because it contains so much information of interest and use to Island residents, the Environmental
Science Committee of the Kiawah Conservancy has spent the past 18 months reviewing the report with the following
objectives:
• To inform the Kiawah Conservancy and thereby the Kiawah community about the information in the report.
• To describe the state of the Island's environment in 1975 compared with today's environment.
The Committee identified several important questions to pursue:
• What aspects of the Island's habitat have improved or deteriorated?
• What aspects of our development and management practices have worked and where can improvements be made?
• What are the significant problems and challenges for our habitat health (such as climate change)?
• Are there important topics or areas that should be expanded or added versus the original report?
• Can we identify areas that would profit by research going forward?
• What information would be most worth communicating to Island residents through articles in Naturally Kiawah or
in the Conservation Matters forums?
• Is there value in consolidating information on Kiawah's natural environment with information from other relevant
sources?
In this article we have included a few highlights of the report together with some insight into the areas of our
environment that are particularly unique or that we believe merit further study.
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