Eco-Stories: Alan Hancock – Coastal Conservation Leauge

Eco-Stories: Alan Hancock – Coastal Conservation Leauge

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Eco-Stories: Alan Hancock – Coastal Conservation Leauge

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. See the full interview below.

Alan Hancock joined the Coastal Conservation League in 2015 after working for Conservation Voters of South Carolina as their Campaigns Director. Alan has also worked at the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control enforcing and developing air pollution regulations. Alan is a North Carolina native and a graduate of the University of South Carolina, with a BA and an MA in Geography. He lives in Columbia with his husband Adam.

This interview was recorded on June 4, 2020.

Resources:

Fiona Martin (FM):

Okay, welcome. We have Alan Hancock with us today for The Eco-Interviews. How are you doing today Alan?

Alan Hancock (AH):

I'm doing well, doing well. How are you Fiona?

FM:

We're doing good. We're excited to have you. Alan works for the Coastal Conservation League, which is based out of Charleston, South Carolina. Is that correct?

AH:

It is, it is. We're headquartered in Charleston, but we have offices in Beaufort and Columbia, and I'm in Columbia. I'm working from home though, as many of us are in the last couple of months.

FM:

Exactly, the new normal. So Alan, how about you introduce yourself, your work in this area, and also tell us an overview of what the Coastal Conservation League does.

AH:

Yeah. I grew up in North Carolina, in Greensboro, and came down here to Columbia for college at USC and liked it a lot and ended up staying. So after college, I went to work for DHEC, the Department of Health and Environmental Control here, and then did a couple of things there. First job for a couple of years was enforcing our state's environmental regulations with respect to air quality, Clean Air Act. I was in the group that handled some of the civil enforcement cases with the Bureau of Air Quality at DHEC. So if a company violated a provision in their air permit, their state air permit, we kind of take them through the enforcement process. Did that for a few years, and then moved to the group that writes air pollution regulations, which was a lot of fun to see how that process works from recording various parts of the organization, working with various parts of the organization, but also stakeholders who really took an interest in regulatory matters.

So that was a lot of fun, and then I switched to the nonprofit world I think in 2013 with Conservation Voters of South Carolina, which is an environmental advocacy group based here in Columbia. Worked there for a few years, and I've been at Coastal Conservation League I think since 2015. It's an environmental organization founded in 1989 by Dana Beach down in Charleston, and he was really concerned about some of the sprawl, the growth, development happening in the coast, air pollution, water pollution, and started the Coastal Conservation League in 1989. It kind of stopped that process, and we've grown to an organization with 40 or so staffers. We also have our project Grow Food Carolina, which folks in Charleston might be more familiar with. It's a food hub, and that's a neat way to provide local food to the community in Charleston, and all across South Carolina.

So that's kind of a bit about Coastal Conservation League. My role within that is really to within our government relations and energy and climate teams kind of advance our agenda at the State House, at the Public Service Commission, and do that with our technical experts, our lobbyists, and our communications team. Kind of a fun job. It allows me to do a little bit of everything.

FM:

Yeah, sounds incredibly interesting. The Coastal Conservation League says on your website that you work to protect natural landscapes, abundant wildlife, clean water, and the quality of life here in South Carolina, and that's certainly very important on the coast, which we have spoken about in other podcasts, is seeing some of the worst effects or the most recent effects of climate change with rising sea levels and our coast gets battered with hurricanes that are increasingly more destructive and powerful due to climate change. So there's no wonder, it's not surprising that the coast of South Carolina has such a strong environmental organization working on its behalf. But you mentioned that your focus and interest within the Coastal Conservation League is to do with energy production.

This is something that for me hasn't made me super excited in the past, because you just turn on the lights and beyond that, it's kind of a little bit difficult for me to understand, but the more I speak to people, I'm learning that all over the world, there's completely different ways of managing the energy generation down to the distribution level, which is like you and me turning on the lights. South Carolina is in a, I don't know if it's unique across the world, but it seems to be a little bit unique that we have what we call a regulated monopoly. Can you tell us about this energy generation, transmission, and distribution system within South Carolina.

AH:

Yeah, absolutely. Electricity really in the United States is primarily governed at the state level, and state's public service commissions, and sometimes they're called public utility commissions, but those state bodies give the utilities kind of a natural monopoly to provide electricity to people within a defined service territory. In exchange for that, utilities are subject to regulation, things like rates, the decision to build power plants. And the Public Service Commission evaluates plans from utilities to build power plants or distribution weighing a few factors: things like cost, things like the environmental impact, things like reliability, so that we're guaranteed when we turn the light switch that the lights come on.

In South Carolina, just to kind of give a bigger picture on what our energy mix looks like, we have about three fifths nuclear, three fifths of the electricity generated in South Carolina is actually from nuclear energy, from plants up in the upstate and near Columbia in Jenkinsville. About the remaining electricity, one fifth is from natural gas and one fifth is from burning coal. I know that adds up to 100%, but let's assume it adds up to 95%. The remaining around the edges is from renewable sources, from hydroelectric power, from solar, a little bit of biomass, little bit of landfill gas from landfills in South Carolina, and that's changed over the last decade or two. The use of coal has dropped as the price of natural gas has fallen, and as the cost to operate coal plants has gone up. I think nuclear stayed pretty steady, but coal's dropped, gas has gone up, and solar has grown significantly, especially in the last few years in South Carolina.

FM:

Interesting. I didn't know we were so reliant on nuclear. That's certainly an interesting part. Some of the things I've been learning in regards to nuclear is that it's still very expensive to produce electricity via nuclear. My question is I think these plants we have in South Carolina are older, so maybe that has reduced the cost. Does it ever reduce the cost, or is nuclear always a very expensive way to produce electricity?

AH:

Yeah, it is expensive, and it's expensive in a couple of ways. On the front end, it's very expensive to build a new power plant, but it's also expensive to run the infrastructure around a nuclear plant, all of the protocols and procedures that assure the population and that protect the population around the nuclear plant, that we're not going to have a meltdown or accident or even a terrorist attack. So that security kind of adds the expense. Once you've built the plant and then paid off the debt or paid down the debt, kind of paying down the mortgage if you will, you're right, it's not as cheap because you don't really have to pay the fuel costs. Coal plants and gas plants have to bring in fuel to burn. You don't have to bring in as much uranium with nuclear plants. I think you're right to draw that distinction between the existing plants that have already paid their mortgages and new plants.

New plants, like we saw with V.C. Summer, the two proposed new units up in V.C. Summer north of Columbia, we've had a real lesson from that, that building a new plant is incredibly expensive. It was billions of dollars over budget, so much so that they pulled the plug on it in the summer of 2017, and we're still seeing that in Georgia just over the line southeast of Augusta at the Vogtle plant there. It's incredibly expensive to assemble new nuclear reactors, and the Vogtle plant has gone just billions of dollars over budget I think.

FM:

I can't imagine being billions of dollars over budget on anything. That's truly scary. So one thing about South Carolina that I'm also learning is we have some of the highest energy bills in the nation, and it came out in 2018 that South Carolina residents in 2017 paid an average of basically $1,700 for electricity, which was $400 more than the US average. So why are we paying so much for our electricity in South Carolina?

AH:

That's a good question. There's a couple of answers. First, because of the nuclear that we were just talking about, our power bills, especially Dominion, formerly SC&G customers at the time of that study were really paying a good bit of that. Santee Cooper also had some of the debt. They were a minority partner in VC Summer. But South Carolinians also have high power bills in part because of a lack of energy efficiency programs, the lack of the ability to quickly and easily finance weatherization programs at homes, making sure things are sealed up tight around your home, so it's part of our climate being so hot and humid in the summer and we have some cold winter days. I think that adds up to it, and the lack of energy efficiency programs to meet that problem has been a real issue. And third, we're just starting to see improvements in solar, but over the last few years, I think South Carolina has been slower than other states in meeting the moment with new solar programs.

FM:

Logically you'd think that solar would be a slam dunk for South Carolina. If we get three days of rain in a row, we're asking what's wrong here? And I grew up Scotland, which was exactly the opposite. Why has South Carolina been so slow with solar, and are some of these road blocks moving out of the way? Do we have a solar future coming down the pipeline?

AH:

I think we were deliberate and cautious in our approach starting in maybe 2012, 2013, and we as a state passed a law in 2014 that opened the door to solar in South Carolina. And it included some caps on rooftop solar, and we started meeting and running up against those caps in 2017, 2018, and that lead to the passage in 2019 of the Energy Freedom Act, a law that eliminated the caps on rooftop solar and also allowed for a new way of evaluating what the true value of solar is. It kicked a lot of those questions to the Public Service Commission to evaluate. I think we're catching up. We've grown by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, not just in rooftop solar, but with large scale solar, the large solar farms that you'll see on the side of the road. In many cases, those provide cheaper electricity than a new natural gas power plant. I think we kind of had a slow start, but we're catching up through our neighbors.

FM:

There's a commercial on our local channel right now that's for solar, and unfortunately it really gives me the vibes of a sleazy used car salesman. It puts me off. I wish it was a little bit better. Tell me what these caps were. What were they, what was the intention behind them? Why were they in place?

AH:

Traditionally, electricity flows one way, from the power plant to your home, or to your business, to a factory. Rooftop solar changes that direction. If you got rooftop solar panels, the electricity is going to go from your home back on to the grid. That concept for some, and I think it was a realistic concern maybe 10 years ago. If you have a lot of demand going the other way, can the system handle it? I think that was part of the reason for those caps during the negotiations on that bill seven or eight years ago. That's part of just the cautious approach in South Carolina that I think has led to a smoother on ramp for more solar. Those caps were I believe 3% of a company's electricity generation, and those caps were I think projected to be met 2020, 2021. So this year we started hitting them in some service areas or getting close to them at least in 2018, 2019, that timeframe.

The business really moved faster than expected. That I think goes back to what we discussed with the high power bills. If you're in an area of really high power bills, you're going to get a real benefit from rooftop solar. The bill last year eliminated those caps, and kicked the value that you're going to have for that rooftop solar to the Public Service Commission.

FM:

Okay. One of our interviewees we had was Dr. Colin Nolden from Bristol, England, and he does energy policy, and he was explaining the generation, transmission, distribution network, and in the UK, they had real problems going the other direction due to their electricity infrastructure. 10 years ago, they were all gung ho for rooftop solar as a green energy source, but now they're actually dissuading people from using it because they can't handle the residential production going back into the network. It's just the infrastructure isn't working. The caps were put in place to be cautious about that here, and now they're being taken away. So did we not experience the same issues with the power coming from residents maybe going to the transmission network?

AH:

I think the transition period over the last five to 10 years has given utilities and the electric cooperatives of South Carolina the time to make those technical adjustments. Keep in mind, there's also benefits with that model, not just to consumers, but also to the whole grid. You're sort of distributing electricity generation across a variety of sources so if one goes out or you've got a failure in the transmission grid, other parts of the grid can pick up the slack when you've spread the generation around. So think there's some benefit there. There's also benefits from shaving off the demand from the central power stations. Here in Columbia, we've got a coal fired power plant on the Wateree River in lower Richland County near the town of Eastover.

FM:

Downriver from me.

AH:

Yeah, that coal plant for example, it's an old style centralized plant, and if it's 95 degrees on a July afternoon, plants like that need to operate super hard, just running, lots of coal into the boiler, burning lots of coal, everything's running wide open. So that could stress the grid or puts more electricity out on the grid. Rooftop solar helps to reduce that demand. So with solar panels, we've got less electricity needing to come from the grid and centralized power stations like that. They can come from the roof. That's one of the benefits that helps alleviate some of that stress on that grid.

FM:

That's interesting. It's good to hear that we don't have the infrastructure issues yet that the UK is experiencing, because I think that it's pretty wild to think that they went all in on solar in a place that's not very sunny, but they basically stressed out the grid in the process and now they're trying to figure out what to do and they've put it on the back burner. But we want to talk about offshore drilling in South Carolina. This was certainly big in the news when Trump came into office because my understanding is that he opened up waters to offshore drilling that previously had not been opened to that. So tell us about offshore drilling in South Carolina. Does it exist already? I think the public was pretty against it. At least in news channels, it seemed to have quite a bad backlash. So tell us about offshore drilling in South Carolina, what you're doing, what the Conservation League is doing.

AH:

Offshore drilling has been such a big issue in the last five years or so. To kind of go back to 2013, 2014, President Obama and his administration issued a proposal, opening of the South Atlantic to offshore drilling. That's when a lot of the groundswell in South Carolina, really inspiring grassroots action, started with local governments, local city councils, county governments starting up and saying, "Hey, we're not cool with this." And that local opposition, those local resolutions passed by municipalities basically said to the Obama administration that we've got to back off of this. So they took the South Atlantic, the Atlantic Ocean out of the federal government's drilling plans. And to back up just a second, the reason it's really a federal government question, these offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf and really anywhere would happen in federal waters.

So the government leases those waters to oil and gas companies. So that's why the federal government's really involved in this at all. So that was the Obama administration's ultimate decision taking the South Atlantic out of drilling plans, and then in 2017, during Trump's first few months in office, I think in May he issued an executive order that reopened that leasing process, the proposal to open up the South Atlantic. In I believe January 2018, he took the next step, kind of a more formal proposal that started a public comment period, we had a big rally at the statehouse in February 2018, and that brought just a bipartisan group of legislators together to say, "Hey, we oppose offshore drilling." And we haven't seen a final rule from the Trump administration allowing offshore drilling. I think part of this is opposition from people like governor Henry McMaster here in South Carolina. He's opposed, and he's made that opposition very clear.

Right now we don't have any offshore drilling off the coast of South Carolina, which is great. We don't have any off the east coast at all, and that's something I think we're proud of, but we've got to stay vigilant. It's bad for marine environments, it's bad for fisheries that so many people depend for their livelihoods, it's bad for tourism. People want to go to the beach in the summer. You don't want to do that if there's oil on the beach, and it's fundamentally bad for our climate. We need to transition to cleaner energy sources, not doubling down on fossil fuels.

FM:

Maybe you know the answer to this because I don't. Where does state waters end and federals waters begin?

AH:

I think it's three miles, but I'm completely blanking on that.

FM:

It's really close?

AH:

It's something I should know, but I think it's three miles.

FM:

It's interesting, because yeah, that's part of the thought of like if South Carolina says no, then it's no, but then you have to think about international and federal waters, and then I was like I don't even know if the state has jurisdiction over a large part of their water because just the logistics of having a state border go out into the water I'm sure just makes no sense.

AH:

The state does have jurisdiction over what happens in that zone, right along the coast. So onshore is something that also falls within state jurisdiction, which is why state senator Chip Campsen and many other have pushed for state policy that would ban that onshore infrastructure needed to support offshore drilling. That was a bipartisan effort that led to a budget proviso in 2019 that made it into the state budget that said the state can't issue air quality or water quality permits on the coast to support offshore drilling. There was a bill to do that as well, to make it into permanent law. That didn't happen this year. I think the coronavirus and associated break from legislating interrupted that effort, but it's still in the budget as a proviso, so it's still in place and it sends a strong signal that South Carolina doesn't want offshore drilling.

FM:

What is an example of that onshore infrastructure that would be needed to support an offshore drilling endeavor?

AH:

A lot of it is the sort of stuff we see on the Gulf Coast in places like Port Fourchon, Louisiana, Port Arthur, Texas. It can go from just a small repair facility to a refinery, a terminal. The sorts of very heavy, heavy industry that's both incompatible with our tourism economy, but it's also incompatible with just healthy communities. The places where those locate are often disproportionately, as we've seen in the Gulf and Louisiana and Texas, in black and brown communities. Those communities are faced with the air pollution, the water pollution, the noise, the risk of explosions from those facilities, and it's not something that we want on the coast of South Carolina. I don't think we want it anywhere in the United States, which is why I think a larger transition to a clean energy economy that's not as reliant on fossil fuels is I think part of the overall goal.

We're a state level organization. We really focus on what we can do at the Statehouse and in local governments, so in our day to day work at Coastal Conservation League, that's where we're focused, but I think we support larger efforts to move our economy in a cleaner direction.

FM:

And something you brought up is very poignant for this time right now. You mentioned that people of color are disproportionately disadvantaged by the building of say dirty plants, let's just call it dirty plants. I don't know how many people have been near or at a oil refinery. I lived in Venezuela about 10 years ago and lived near the biggest oil refinery in the world in Punto Fijo outside of Coro. It's dirty. That's all it is. These communities are disadvantaged because they can be taken advantage of because people with the means would never allow something like that in their backyard, and they would move away if it showed up in their backyard. Do you want to speak at all about how environmental justice affects racial justice as well?

AH:

Absolutely. The Coastal Conservation League firmly believes that racial justice and environmental justice, climate justice, they're interrelated. In many ways, they're inseparable. We're not going to be able to address things like air pollution, water pollution, without addressing larger social problems, systemic racism, that lead to those disproportionate impacts on communities, especially here in South Carolina. We see that in places like Charleston, in the Neck area of Charleston with heavy industry located just right there. We had a trash incinerator, Montenay, located there. We see that in a lot of parts of our state.

With that said, our organization, environmental organizations, conservation organizations have a history of being predominantly white spaces, and I think that's something that we're working to fix. I think we need to work harder, and I think that's something that a lot of our organizations, a lot of the conservation organizations here in South Carolina are making it a point to work on, to do better. Often those conversations are difficult, but I think the current moment we're in is really just crystallizing for so many of us that this needs to be a priority. There's so many things going on within the day to day work of environmental advocacy groups. Some new permits for a resort hotel on a barrier island, there's a public hearing coming up on something else.

There's a lot of incoming, but I think over the last week with the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, we saw with Christian Cooper in Central Park, which I think he had the police called on him because he didn't want someone to have an unleashed dog. All of this, these unnecessary deaths, I think put into real perspective for all of us, that this is something we need to focus on and we need to work on, and we need to have concrete actions and not just a week or two of statements and emails and supportive Facebook posts. That stuff's important to send a strong signal. We got to follow up with action, and hopefully we'll be doing that.

FM:

Yeah. I certainly don't know the answer, and I agree with what you're saying in terms of conservation organizations. It is a white space, and I do wonder how we bring in a more diverse coalition. At the same time, if you're talking about economically disadvantaged communities, environmental justice might not be the first thing on their mind because they're just focused on survival. That's a big question just to keep asking and trying to figure out, and I don't know the answer. It's a very interesting time right now, but conversations are being had. I feel like COVID-19, it was almost like a reset, like things really shut down for a month and they're starting to come back. One thing, I've been on my own advocacy journey for a year now, and while these conversations are tough, there seems to be a huge groundswell in people being interested in advocacy.

You've been in this longer than me. There's people out there who don't want to rock the boat. They hear advocacy and they kind of just say, "You know what, I'm fine. I don't want to get in trouble, I don't want to ruffle feathers. I'm cool." And that attitude is dissipating in this moment right now. Doesn't mean it won't go back to that. I hope it doesn't. But hopefully we can use this momentum to advocate for the world that we're all hoping for.

AH:

I think that's right. And I think we have a lot of listening to do, but at the same time, we're hearing calls for people to vote, and that's incredibly important. We're also hearing calls for people to organize. Even though I'm not a criminal justice expert, I don't know exactly which policies at the state and local level with the police departments and local governments to push on. I think that's something we're learning about and we're happy to help with our resources and our time. Hopefully over the next few weeks, some of that organizing strategy helps to make some real changes. Organizing is hard work. The work we described earlier about the fight against offshore drilling and having oil and gas companies potentially building more dirty infrastructure on our coast. I think that taught me a lesson just about the difficulties of that kind of organizing.

We had grassroots groups popping up across the state and talking to local governments and trying to stay coordinated and stay organized as a coalition. It's difficult, but usually it comes down to relationships, talking to people, listening to people, finding out what the levers are and how to push on them. I think it taught me a lot about just the focus that's needed to make a real change. But hopefully in a couple months we're looking back on this moment, we're seeing some real changes and not just statements of support.

FM:

Certainly. One of the other programs that the Coastal Conservation League is doing that you brought up is to do with localizing food I believe. Can you tell us about that initiative?

AH:

Sure. GrowFood Carolina is just a fantastic program down in Charleston. It's a local food hub, started about a decade ago. One of the reasons we started that effort is because so much of the sprawl in Charleston along the coast was from the economic pressures of local farmers who no longer had markets for fruits and vegetables being economically pressured to sell their property for development. I think this goes back to the conversation we were just having, that land conservation and economic justice go hand in hand. Sometimes the black farmers on say, John's Island, didn't have a market for their crops because of a monopoly or a large food distribution company was coming in. When that happened, sometimes they were forced to sell. Not just because of economic forces, also legal issues with property that forced a sale.

So we realized that if we wanted to act on local land conservation and protect rural food ways and food culture, we needed to step in, and the food hub does a couple of things. First it directs guidance, assistance for farmers on what the market looks like, and the second thing they do is they connect them physically really to restaurants and other customers. So we have a warehouse on Morrison Avenue in Charleston, and that warehouse, we take deliveries from farmers, we hold the produce there in refrigerated buildings, and then we deliver out to restaurants. So it's a direct connection for small producers that normally wouldn't have access to a large distribution channel. Some of the big food distributors have minimums for delivery that are higher than what a small food can produce. And now GrowFood is delivering to farms, delivering to consumers all across the state.

It's a neat effort. It's not exactly like the advocacy work that we do out of our Columbia office. It's much more hands on. And through the coronavirus pandemic, they've done just a fantastic job of quickly pivoting from serving restaurants, which of course closed for months to serving both the Lowcountry Food Bank and consumers directly. So they've done a nice job taking private capital, philanthropy dollars, converting that quickly and putting money in the hands of farmers and food in the hands of families in the Lowcountry that need it.

FM:

That's awesome. I think our food system is another thing that has broken down during COVID-19, and the smaller distribution networks like the ones you guys have created were able to pivot away from restaurants to direct to consumer, whereas these larger ones were not, and as our grocery shelves get barer and barer, we see the uptick in the demand for farmer's markets and CSAs, and I've spoken to a few farmers that have huge waiting lists for their CSA, and our local farmer's market has gone from once a week to twice a week. It's very encouraging, and it also helps with our food desert problem, which is a very big problem around here. Just miles and miles without any access to fresh food at all.

AH:

It's analogous to our discussion on solar energy and distributed energy. Often distributed systems are more resilient. With supply chains, with electricity distribution, with food distribution, if we're building a system for maximum profit and maximum efficiency, we're sacrificing some resiliency. I think with solar, with food distribution, we're adding resilience to the economy and to our communities. You mentioned food deserts. GrowFood does some retail sales, but there are other groups in Charleston like Fresh Future Farm that are working directly in those communities on the Neck in Charleston, so southern north Charleston, north Charleston, that are in food deserts. Folks should definitely check out Fresh Future Farm on Instagram and Facebook. I think they're doing great work, and I'm happy to support them in a small way.

One thing I think we can do is just directly donate to these grassroots organizations like Fresh Future Farm that are doing just fantastic work, that don't have the broad foundation and philanthropic support that organizations like mine have, so I think we want to draw attention to those groups and encourage folks that directly support them, because I think they're doing wonderful work. Folks like Fresh Future Farm, as well as people like the Penn Center down in Beaufort county that are doing so much to preserve the civil rights legacy in Beaufort county.

FM:

We'll definitely link all those up in the show notes. That's something I've been trying to do during these times with all the protests and riots going on, is trying to find those people of color and black people who are doing this work and trying to support them directly. There's some amazing things going out there, and unfortunately we haven't heard about them, and that's part of the problem. So we can do our part to learn and listen and do more. What else can we do as individuals to support your efforts at the Coastal Conservation League and just to be better stewards of the environment that we live in?

AH:

Yeah, that's a big question. There's all the talk about individual action versus policy action, and I think we need both. I think when you compost your food scraps, when you drive less, when you turn the thermostat up a little bit, when you change your light bulbs, in the grand scheme of things, those individual actions may not add up to much if it's just one person, but if lots of folks do it like we saw in March when everyone stopped driving for a few weeks, the air was cleaner, that's an example of just lots of individual actions of not driving to work, of power plants lowering their output. That's an example to me that individual action makes sense. But it's absolutely not enough like with so much of the policy debates we're talking about. You need to know not just who you're going to vote for for president or even for US Senator, US House, but your state level officials, your state representative, state senator, and knowing who those people are I think is incredibly important.

And not just when you need something. If you see that your state senator or your state representative, you follow them on Facebook and if you see if they're hosting a Zoom, or when we get back to in person events if they're having a meetup at a brewery or something in your neighborhood, go just say hey and say "Hi, I'm a constituent. These are the things I'm interested in." Legislators usually, if they're good, will want to hear from their constituents. They'll let you know the best way to contact them. They'll give you their email address or say tag me on Twitter or something. Build that relationship before you need something is one thing you can do, especially with state level folks. And I think it's true for city and county council representatives as well.

They're in your communities. You're going to see them at the grocery store, you'll see them at neighborhood association meetings. I think getting to know those folks before you need something, before there's a bill that you'd like them to vote a certain way on, I think that's what we always encourage people to do. First absolutely just get to know them, because so much of what we do in the environmental advocacy space is at the local and state level. That's kind of the biggest thing for me, is individual actions are important, composting and trying to buy a fuel efficient car when it comes time to get a new car, but also join the fight. Work within our democracy to find ways that you can advocate with your local, your state, and of course your federal elected officials.

FM:

That's great advice. I agree with what you're saying. I think the whole idea of climate change can be overwhelming. It either spurs people to action or it shuts them down. I feel like I've been on both sides. I think doing individual action can be empowering, but you're right that there needs to be larger change, policy change, systematic change, and that comes with engaging with our democracy, and I can only speak for myself, but getting a bit complacent and lazy when it comes to our democracy. So it does take educating yourself. I'm looking at my sample ballots now and I'm educating myself, like "Who are these guys? I don't know who they are." Before, and I think a lot of people do this, they just go and either vote party or vote for the name that they recognize, and as someone who's in digital marketing, I could make you recognize a name more than others just by pumping a whole bunch of money at some ads that just have the name on it and that would be brand recognition right there.

It's a good call to action for us to do our part individually, but then use our democracy the best we can. How would you like people to connect to you and the Coastal Conservation League?

AH:

Personally, I'm on Twitter at @AlanMHancock, and the Coastal Conservation League is on Twitter at @SCCCL, so South Carolina Coastal Conservation League. Folks can also get on our email list. We only send good emails, I promise. And we're at coastalconservationleague.org. So when the legislature is in session, we'll let you know if there's a vote to weigh in on. We'll also give you some updates on what's happening in DC. We talked about local and state level work, but sometimes a big vote's happening in DC. We've got some good conservation leaders in our delegation, so finding out what they're doing and supporting them is something we try to do as well, in terms of supporting good bills that they're proposing. That's how to connect with me and the Coastal Conservation League.

FM:

All right. Well Alan, I really appreciate your time with us. It's been a very interesting conversation. The work that you're doing at Coastal Conservation League sounds tremendous, and I look forward to following you and the League and keeping up with what you're doing and doing what I can to help the cause. So thank you.

AH:

Awesome. Thank you Fiona, I really appreciate the time and the chance to talk about these issues.

FM:

Yeah. Have a great rest of your afternoon, and a fantastic weekend.

AH:

Thank you, you too.