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If you feel cramped or overwhelmed, you should visit the Congaree National Park right outside of Columbia. Of its 26,000 acres, the core protected area is fifteen thousand acres.

Mike Switzer interviews John Warner, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Innoventure in Greenville, S.C. who tells us about Jasmine Kitchen, a social enterprise lunch cafe designed to provide employment to abused women. Also: Jasmine Road.

If you haven’t heard, there could be some changes coming soon to Roth IRAs as a result of tax changes being proposed in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Mike Switzer interviews Thomas Manly, a certified financial planner with Hobbs Group Advisors in Columbia, SC.

Factories of old are certainly not the factories of today. And factories of the future may not even be recognizable. Which is why our next guest’s institution of higher learning recently received $5 million in funding to study future factories. Their research will look at how factories of the future “think” and how humans and non-humans can interact to anticipate consumer needs and avoid supply chain issues like the ones we’re seeing now. Mike Switzer interviews Dr. Ramy Harik, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the McNAIR Center at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC.

You may have noticed that there are not a lot of women in the construction business. Our next guest is trying to change that as co-founder of the Palmetto Chapter of the National Association of Women in Construction. She was recently honored for her work in this area by the YWCA Greater Charleston. Mike Switzer interviews Janet Bates, client solutions manager at JE Dunn Construction Company in North Charleston, SC.

Inflation has been in the news a lot over the past several months. Some analysts say don’t worry, it’s only temporary. But lately, inflation seems to be causing jitters in the financial markets. Should investors be concerned? Mike Switzer interviews Wes Johnson, a certified financial planner with ACT Advisors in Charleston, SC.

On this episode of the South Carolina Lede for January 4, 2022: reaction to the recently proposed congressional district maps by SC House lawmakers; understanding new COVID-19 testing and quarantine guidelines; South Carolina surpasses 1 million total COVID-19 cases; and more.

You can easily see large majestic bald cypress trees if you walk the boardwalk at the Congaree National Park. But retired DNR wildlife biologist John Cely who has explored the Park extensively, you might enjoy his blogs (at Friends of the Congaree Swamp) had found large cypress inaccessible except by boat and took Professor Dave Stahle, the world’s expert on bald cypress, to that area. Professor Stahle took tree cores from the largest of those trees to get information on their age and the climate they had grown in for probably over a thousand years. The oldest cypress trees Dr. Stahle has found are in the Black River preserve in North Carolina and are over 2,000 years old. The size of bald cypress doesn’t necessarily indicate their age; ones that grow in nutrient poor wet soils grow slowly.

You can easily see large majestic bald cypress trees if you walk the boardwalk at the Congaree National Park. But retired DNR wildlife biologist John Cely who has explored the Park extensively, you might enjoy his blogs (at Friends of the Congaree Swamp) had found large cypress inaccessible except by boat and took Professor Dave Stahle, the world’s expert on bald cypress, to that area. Professor Stahle took tree cores from the largest of those trees to get information on their age and the climate they had grown in for probably over a thousand years. The oldest cypress trees Dr. Stahle has found are in the Black River preserve in North Carolina and are over 2,000 years old. The size of bald cypress doesn’t necessarily indicate their age; ones that grow in nutrient poor wet soils grow slowly.

Dendrochronology is the study of information obtained from tree ring growth. It is used in several different fields – archaeologists can date wooden artifacts, dendrologist – tree scientists – can use tree rings to determine the local climate. But perhaps the most interesting is climate science. Professor Dave Stahle of the University of Arkansas told us at his talk at the Congaree National Park that the Lost Colony, called that because none of the original settlers survived, was ill-fated due to several factors but one fact that scientists have established is that those people who were trying to grow crops to feed themselves had no chance of a good harvest as they sadly were dealing with the drought of fifteen eighty-seven through sixteen hundred. Tree ring analysis shows that fifteen eighty-seven was the driest year in eight hundred years.