Can Wilmington balance economic growth with a healthy environment?
In Brunswick County, developments that promise to bring hundreds of new homes and apartments to the fast-growing county seem to be springing up faster than ever.
Near the South Carolina state line, Sunset Beach officials are looking to add hundreds of new homes to an existing thousand-unit development. Close by in Ash, a sprawling project includes plans for 1,700 single-family homes and hundreds of apartments and townhomes.
Roughly 25 miles east, the county planning board recently approved a 3,700-unit project near Midway Road. And Brunswick Forest in Leland, already home to nearly 3,500 homes, has plans for thousands more residences.
Sprinkled between these large projects are plenty of smaller ones. But areas west of Wilmington aren’t the only parts of the Cape Fear region seeing rapid growth. Pender County’s coastal corridor, especially in and around Scotts Hill, and Rocky Point along Interstate 40 are bristling with plans for new homes. And not to be forgotten, much of northern New Hanover County − the last large undeveloped part of Southeastern North Carolina’s most populous county − is being prepared for new neighborhoods.
As people, homes and more vehicles flood the Wilmington area, the amount of green space in and around the Port City is shrinking. That, in turn, is increasing pressures on the natural areas that remain − especially in Wilmington’s urban areas and around the city’s fast-growing suburbs.
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While human disturbance might be one of the most visible impacts to Southeastern North Carolina’s forests, marshes and wetlands, it is just one of many. Other pressures include climate change, invasive species, logging, pollution, changing market conditions for wood products, and looser federal and state regulations.
An analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), published by Science, found that 3.6 million acres of N.C. wetlands − including more than 500,000 acres in the Cape Fear River watershed − have lost federal protections in the wake of a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion that drastically narrowed the scope of wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act. State protections also have been watered down to mirror the federal rules.
Along the oceanfront and the region’s tidal waters, climate change is producing stronger storms, more unpredictable weather events like the unnamed storm earlier this month that swamped much of the Wilmington area, and sea-level rise that leaves beachfront properties and vital coastal wetlands struggling to adapt.
Dr. Marcelo Ardon, an aquatic ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at N.C. State University, said for many of the coast’s natural areas, a decision time is looming.
“A lot of these coastal ecosystems are going to have an uphill battle in the coming years, and it’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “And soon we’re gong to have to decide what areas we’re going to protect and what we’re going to just let go.”
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Too much development, too quickly?
While the loss of open space and natural areas might be unpopular with some, it also represents economic opportunities and is one of the most visible signs that the Cape Fear region is a growing, thriving area.
Brunswick County’s median household income, for example, was just over $76,000 in 2023. It was half that in 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. New Hanover County’s population jumped from 120,000 in 1990 to an estimated 240,000 this year. But it isn’t just full-time residents who are showing up in Wilmington. Tourist spending in New Hanover County doubled last decade, according to a study done by the N.C. Department of Commerce.
As development and populations increase, the region’s natural resources are feeling the pressure. Areas that long-time residents were used to be seeing as forests and open areas are now sprouting homes, apartments and shopping centers.
That, in turn, is driving some people to push back and ask their local elected leaders to consider slowing down the pace of change. Visible signs of this are the increasing number of Cape Fear-area communities adopting tree-protection ordinances and the widespread criticism proposals to develop the west bank of the Cape Fear River across from downtown Wilmington generated.
Concerns over whether local governing boards are stacked with pro-development members who are too lenient with approving new projects also are growing.
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Challenges of maintaining a healthy longleaf forest
As trees and open spaces increasingly turn into roofs and asphalt, natural area resource managers in the Wilmington area are working to balance the habitat needs of the region’s native flora and fauna with its growing human population.
While the Cape Fear region is blessed to have many large natural areas under permanent protection, including barrier islands like Masonboro Island and large forested tracts including the Holly Shelter Game Land in Pender County and the Green Swamp Preserve in Brunswick County, that balancing act can be especially challenging for urban natural areas like Wilmington’s Halyburton Park.
The 60-acre park, which draws nearly 125,000 visitors a year, represents a sliver of the longleaf forest habitat that used to cover millions of acres in the U.S. Southeast when the Europeans first arrived in the New World. But today that natural forest habitat has shrunk to about 5% of what it once was, replaced by pine plantations dominated by loblolly pines, lost to development in fast-growing Sun Belt states like North Carolina, and, in previous centuries, cleared to support the naval stores industry.
As part of the natural fabric of the Southeastern environment, resource managers are working hard to restore and enhance the longleaf pine forests that remain that provide vital habits for a myriad of species as diverse as the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker and the world-famous Venus’ flytrap.
Part of that effort includes regularly burning longleaf forest habitat, and that’s where conflicts between the environment’s needs and human concerns often spark up.
Without periodic burnings, shrubs and non-native species can overwhelm much of the native flora that makes Southeastern North Carolina ecologically unique and special. The areas these fire-adapted and dependent species need can become choked with other vegetation, damaging native environments and knocking local ecosystems out of whack.
Generally, prescribed burns are easier outside of suburban areas. But even there, problems can crop up.
In summer 2023, a controlled burn in the Green Swamp Preserve jumped its lines. Eventually, the Pulp Road Wildfire torched nearly 16,000 acres and sent smoke and ash wafting over much of the Cape Fear region, raising public anger and a slew of health concerns.
While a potent reminder that Eastern North Carolina is prime fire country, it also showed the challenges even a controlled burn can sometimes pose.
But wildfires in the state’s coastal plain will occur regularly, whether residents like it or not. And that brings us back to Halyburton Park.
PHOTOS:Smoke from Brunswick County wildfire
To burn or not to burn
For more than a decade city officials, with the help of partners like the N.C. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy, has been conducting controlled burns at Halyburton.
Andy Fairbanks, a supervisor with Wilmington Parks and Recreation, said the purpose of the burns is to enhance the longleaf pine ecosystem and reduce the risk of a catastrophic wildfire at the South 17th Street park, which is surrounded by subdivisions and apartments.
“It also allows for less smoke when we do burn a forested area and it gives us more control over the fire, since previous burns will have helped us reduce the fuel load that’s on the forest floor,” he said as he pointed out an area where crews had already started removing some of the scrub turkey oaks from the understory.
Thanks to a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Longleaf Landscape Stewardship Fund, officials also are in the midst of removing some of the turkey oaks and other trees from the forest floor and planting additional wiregrass. The controlled burning will likely take place next spring.
Thinning out the vegetation, through fire and removing some of the non-longleaf trees, allows more sunlight to reach the forest floor. That, in turn, makes it easier for longleaf pine seeds and wiregrass to grow and develop.
“We want to be the best stewards of Halyburton Park and the south Wilmington sandhills for today and tomorrow,” Fairbanks said, “and this is an important part of doing that.”
Deb Maurer, N.C. Southeast program director for The Nature Conservancy, said periodic burns create a stronger natural longleaf forest, better able to resists droughts, pests and damage from the tropical storms that lash the Cape Fear coast. It also enhances the habitat for native species. Among the hundreds of plant and animal species that call Halyburton Park home are deer, otters, Bachman’s sparrows, fox squirrels, bobwhite quails, and rattlesnakes.
But she said the urban park also plays a vital educational role, allowing people to see a healthy longleaf pine ecosystem that you can’t easily access in many other parts of the Cape Fear region.
“Accessibility is a very important part of this project,” Maurer said as she stood by a demonstration burn that had taken place a week earlier near the park’s gazebo as shoots of fresh wire grass and other vegetation were already visible emerging from the blackened soil.
How much is that wetland worth?
While a controlled burn in an urban setting can prove difficult to coordinate and unpopular with some residents, researchers say what might be lost could be more than just vital habitat if we don’t try to keep our coastal natural areas healthy and sustainable − especially as they shrink in size and pressures on them grow.
Ardon, the N.C. State scientist, said the value of saving and protecting coastal habitats and the natural benefits they provide, such as flood protection and the carbon-sequestration role wetlands and maritime forests play, can sometimes be hard to quantify.
But he said the cost of what could be lost when we disturb or transform a natural area, including potentially its historical and cultural significance, needs to be taken into consideration as much as the economic benefits of developing those areas.
“In many cases what happens does come down to those dollar values,” Ardon said. “But those dollar values almost never capture the full picture.”
Reporter Gareth McGrath can be reached at [email protected] or @GarethMcGrathSN on X/Twitter. This story was produced with financial support from the Green South Foundation and the Prentice Foundation. The USA TODAY Network maintains full editorial control of the work.
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