The Enduring Magic of the Angel Oak

As a student at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Samantha Siegel drove almost every day to Johns Island to sit beneath the Angel Oak—a giant, ancient live oak whose impossibly arching branches are a testament to many hundreds of years of care and growth. “It was my sanctuary,” she remembers. “I could touch the tree and feel the negative energy drain from my body.” Then in 2008, she saw a small paragraph in Charleston’s Post and Courier: A developer had purchased the land surrounding the tree, and the City Council had approved plans for a complex called the Angel Oak Village. “The notice was buried in the back of the newspaper, and I just couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘Why doesn’t everyone know about this?’”

Outraged, she told anyone who would listen: The development would clear thirty-five acres of maritime forest around the tree and construct more than six hundred townhomes and apartments, plus 40,000 square feet of retail space. Siegel gathered other community members and groups who feared for the tree’s health amid such development, founded a nonprofit called Save the Angel Oak, and waded into a years-long battle. “We showed up at every opportunity there was for public input. We hired our own experts and hydrologists and arborists to counter the developers,” she says. “Losing was not an option. We were prepared to fight until the tree was safe.” The nonprofit teamed up with the Coastal Conservation League and the South Carolina Environmental Law Project and took the developer to court over a wetland permit. The developer eventually went bankrupt in the process, the bank foreclosed on the property, and the Lowcountry Land Trust—where Siegel now works—raised millions of dollars in record time to buy the surrounding thirty-five acres in 2014. “Knowing that we had protected the Angel Oak forever…it was the best day of my life,” she says.

Today, the tree and its small gift shop remain open to the public and receive some 400,000 visitors a year. And Siegel and the Lowcountry Land Trust, assisted by the acclaimed landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, are in the process of designing the Angel Oak Preserve, a forty-four-acre park with paths, boardwalks, and a visitor’s center. The renovation—set to be completed over the course of 2025—is intended to spread people out on the site, keep the surrounding ecosystem healthy, and educate visitors on the tree’s long history.

Via Fix the News

Sudan’s civil war has left at least 62,000 dead by our estimate − but the true figure could be far higher

The ongoing war in Sudan has often been overlooked amid higher-profile conflicts raging across multiple continents. Yet the lack of media and geopolitical attention to this 18-month-long conflict has not made its devastation in terms of human lives any less stark.

Since fighting broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, both of which had been part of a power-sharing military government, the country has seen the displacement of more than 14 million people and the carving up of the country by geography and ideology.

And while we may never know the exact death toll, the conflict in Sudan is certainly among the deadliest in the world today.

As scholars of public health, conflict and human rights and Sudanese-American health workers, we are keenly aware of how fraught it can be to estimate mortality in war for a slew of practical and political reasons. But such estimates are of critical importance: They allow us to understand and compare conflicts, target humanitarian aid for those still at risk, trigger investigations of war crimes, bear witness to conflict and compel states and armed groups to intervene or change.