By Laura Lance
September 7, 2025
For anyone who might have traveled within a mile of USCA in late August on either Trolley Line Road or the Robert M. Bell Parkway and was hit with an unbearable, foul odor of something rotten, that was the smell of a pond and wetland habitat behind the Convocation Center. The pond and nearby vegetation had recently been plowed under and covered over by massive earth-moving equipment. The myriad frogs, toads, turtles, snakes and wetland plants that called the pond home were smothered into an anaerobic stew of death, creating a stench so powerful that it could be smelled a mile away.
So what kind of pond was this? Why was it there? How long had it been there?
Long enough to draw a diverse community of flora and fauna. My granddaughter spent many hours this summer visiting the pond and the nearby longleaf forest, whose paths she’s been exploring since she was eight.
ABOVE: A familiar path through the nearby longleaf forest in 2017.
BELOW: A patch of woods destroyed above the pond earlier this summer.
Over the summer, she watched as the cattails emerged from the boggy margin on the north end of the pond. She watched as the tadpoles grew into toads and into the large frogs who poked their heads above the water and watched her as she explored along the shore. She observed the day-to-day economies of the numerous birds, reptiles, amphibians, wetland plants, spiders and insects that relied on this serendipitous little ecosystem — an incidental pond formed, perhaps, during an earlier phase of development on this landscape.
My granddaughter’s primary interest was in studying the harvester ants who have likely always occupied this land, and have occupied her interest since the age of four. She already understood their days were numbered. She’d already witnessed acre after acre of longleaf forest and its native inhabitants destroyed along the Trolleyline corridor in recent years. All the more urgency to study them and appreciate these native communities before the developer’s maw rolled in to consume them.
ABOVE: The harvester ants carrying a few of the seeds (millet, sunflower and staghorn sumac) that were brought to them to learn more about their preferences.
From a legal standpoint, there were probably no laws broken — or, at least, no laws that anyone would be inclined to enforce. It is illegal, for instance, to kill snakes on public property in South Carolina without a permit. Perhaps the killing was permitted, but even if it weren’t, it’d take a team of lawyers and activists to produce the evidence and enforce the $200 fine for breaking that law.
It would have been likewise illegal for the driver of the earth-moving machinery to hop into a car and transport one of those frogs across the state line for sale in Augusta — but not against the law to plow under and bury alive an entire community of snakes, turtles, frogs, toads, lizards, ants, catails and numerous other wetland plants.
A sampling of the daily animal tracks left in the sandy path near the pond.
My point here is not about laws, but about the ethics. My granddaughter well understands the pragmatics of land use; she understands how most of Aiken County’s “undeveloped” lands are but a breath away from becoming “developed” lands, their trees and sometimes extraordinary understory habitats destroyed by one fell swoop after another. She was well aware that the clock was ticking for this pond and its inhabitants. What she wasn’t prepared for was the violent end they’d meet.
From an ethical standpoint, this was wrong. It was just as wrong as it would be to toss gunny sacks full of puppies or box turtles into a pond. I am not here to say how the situation at the pond off Trolleyline should have been handled; only to state that it was grossly wrong and to hope that —- since there are apparently no laws against displacing and sometimes killing wildlife in the course of development — by putting these words to paper, it might foster a greater consciousness toward the ethics of our relationships with the natural world.
The pond, before and after.
Correction: The last paragraph has been edited to say “displacing and sometimes killing wildlife in the course of development.”
Laura Lance this was so very well written. It made me so very sad as I was just like your granddaughter. I have always had a love for all of God magnificent creation.
This just makes me cry for all the lost habitats and animals that will never come back. Is development like this really necessary? It is so sad.
This is another heat breaking example of how greed, in the form of thoughtless, hurried development gives no thought at all to preserving our natural world.. that pond could have been saved. It would have added so much to the development in question. Any development, for that matter. The brutal and stupid short sightedness of massive, rushed, “do-it-as-cheaply-as-possible” development does not serve us in the long run. If the natural world is lost, so are we..
Thank you for reading. Our human responsibility for the animals who are displaced and killed in the course of human development should merit at least some thought. It’s not anti-development to think outside the box for ways to coexist with the native habitat whose homes we are overtaking. As-is, the beautiful, rich diversity of life in the Trolleyline corridor, like so much of Aiken, is literally disappearing without a trace.
Thanks, Laura, for this disturbing example of man’s inhumanity to every living thing. Regrettably, it is proving to be the case that there is a large segment of the American population which puts zero value on protecting and preserving the natural world; and is abjectly unconcerned with its destruction.
Thank you for reading. Living on property where deer, raccoons, foxes and other wildlife have fled from the clearcutting and “improvements” made to their homelands in recent years, this is a topic to which I’ve given a lot of thought.
Living on a wetland, web of life ecosystem with a 3 acre pond and creek that is home to fish, snakes, tree frogs, toads, turtles, aquatic birds, kingfishers, otter, beaver, opossum, racoon, red shoulder hawk, pileated woodpecker, red headed woodpecker, red brested woodpecker, downey woodpecker, barred owl, bats, and deer — this article makes my animist blood boil.
We, too, are animals, and therefore understanding nonhuman animal Others is crucial to understanding ourselves and how to pursue more empathetic, caring relationships with animals.
“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” – Immanuel Kant
The reality is this happens every day, quietly with no witnesses. I have watched as the natural landscape of Aiken, the lush green wilderness that made this area so beautiful, disappears parcel by parcel. But I do so from afar, and can only imagine the extent of life that is mown over in the process.
The thing that sets this story apart is this personal record of events. It is one small space, frequently visited and documented, appreciated and loved. Here, nature’s small triumphs and its attempts to regenerate made an indelible impression on a young mind, as did how quickly it can all be extinguished in one fell swoop. These modern machines, the feller bunchers and earth movers can disappear all of life in little more than an instant. But so rarely do we get insight into what that looks like when you zoom in. This is that record.
At its heart it asks a question that I don’t believe should be ignored.
You introduce a point I wish I had better emphasized. This was not an old established, wetland habitat, but a pond created in recent years, likely incidental to an earlier phase of development. Unfortunately, the flora and fauna that moved in and made this pond into their home did not get the memo that this was only a temporary arrangement.
Thank you for this piece. I used to take my kids and dogs back through those woods too. It’s a shame we have to “develop” so much space because we’ve lost the ability to live amongst one another.
Thanks much for reading and commenting.
All I can say is “oh, my God.” I am shreiking in my head though.
Thanks much for reading, Anne.