by Scott Kauffman
When the Sea Pines Company started developing Amelia Island Plantation 25 years ago in northeast Florida, the ground-breaking company set an ambitious goal of creating and operating a residential resort community that was harmonious with nature to the highest order. Sea Pines Co., led by Charles E. Fraser, was no stranger to environmentally-conscious projects like Sea Pines Plantation on Hilton Head Island, SC.
The beautiful and fragile nature of Amelia Island, however, comprising some 2,000 acres of uplands and more than 1,000 acres of tidal marshes just 25 miles northeast of downtown Jacksonville, compelled Sea Pines to embark on a newly improved environmental plan—one that made “site sensitive development” paramount. So rather than just simply platting hundreds of lots in grid-like fashion with little regard to the natural environment and ecosystem, a common practice for most other developers, Fraser hired a firm to do a detailed ecological planning and land-use study prior to formulating its “development plan.”
The basic theme of the study, recalls Amelia Island executive vice-president Norman Bray, was that landscape and its natural process offer opportunities and constraints for appropriate land use. One result of the rare collaboration was a plan to protect tidal marshes, conserve oceanfront dunes and to leave all sea oats, grassland and Savannah undisturbed, while restricting foot traffic to boardwalks so vegetation wasn’t damaged.
It was innovative stuff to be sure. “We like to call it man and nature in harmony—with nature in control,” Bray says. However one describes it, it’s an environmental equation increasingly being adopted by developers as they face a generation of homebuyers that value “open space” and “sustainable communities” as much as anything these days.