The Nation\'s River

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[Illustration]

A growing body of knowledge as to what kind of terrain can stand dense
development, and what kind cannot, and how streams and woods and
wildlife and even farms can be physically retained among urban
populations, and why they ought to be, is becoming available. Its
principles are more or less ecological, which simply means that they
seek to maintain right uses of different elements of the landscape under
urban conditions, in order that these elements may function with a
reasonable degree of naturalness, remain compatible with one another and
with human purposes, and be available for people's enjoyment. Flood
plains make good hay fields or parks, for instance, but poor sites for
homes or shopping centers. Porous areas that recharge aquifers ought to
be kept as much as possible under vegetation rather than pavements or
buildings, if people are to have streams later and not capricious drains
that are better off covered over. Steep slopes, if carved severely,
usually exact a later revenge. House clusters and townhouses and
apartments rightly spaced and located can let the country function even
while settling on it numbers of people equivalent to those who would be
there if it were hacked into a solid expanse of tiny lots. And so on.

Much remains to be learned if the application of these principles is to
be ideal. For example, urban hydrology--precisely what happens to the
water cycle during various kinds of development, and how it might be
adjusted--is a relatively new branch of study and still needs much
research. But even with present knowledge, great improvement over
present patterns is possible. In the hands of a few emerging experts,
planning which pays attention to soils and topography and climate and
special landscape features and values can be a subtle art, prescribing
villages and farms and factories in the right places, making the most of
native vegetation and views and places where George Washington slept and
the breezes of July. Its form on a map tends toward curved lines rather
than the orderly straight ones abhorred by nature.

Yet in one simple form, this kind of land use planning has been
practiced for many years in rural America by millions of farmers, who
have cooperated with one another to their own mutual benefit in soil
conservation programs to reduce erosion and to slow down the wasteful
and destructive runoff of precipitation. We noted earlier a pilot urban
adaptation of such programs on Pohick Creek on the metropolitan fringe
in Virginia, where an effort is being made to develop a whole stream
basin in accord with soil conservation principles, not only to avoid
future flood damages and sedimentation and pollution but to retain
natural areas, living streams, and many of the other features the land
had before the city engulfed it. Even with the gaps in present knowledge
and the probability that developers and builders are not going to
cooperate as fully and eagerly as farmers, it offers much hope. For it
may well betide a time when urban planners in general will have the
vision and authority, together with the reinforced knowledge, to subject
all new development to its basic guiding precept--a respect for the way
the landscape works. It is getting to be far more possible now than it
was in the past to say, in relation to a given place: "This is how
development ought to proceed."

In the ring of counties nearest Washington, all of them much lacerated
by sprawl that has been gobbling up some 24,000 acres of peripheral
countryside each year, respect for the way the vanishing landscape works
has been growing by leaps and bounds. The authority to translate it into
good practices, however, is much hampered by the complexities of
metropolitan reality. Officially endorsed plans exist for these
counties, or for parts of them, which show quite a lot of regard for
soils and topography and their appropriate use. But frequently these
plans are of necessity a mass of compromises. They have had to be
adjusted drastically to fit in with existing development, road networks,
sewage lines, and such things, which seldom are located in accordance
with an ecological ideal. They are encrusted with concepts from older
plans not based in landscape principles. Differing views or interests on
opposite sides of municipal or county boundary lines may gut them. Money
to buy needed open space--the only way to ensure its protection--is
usually short. And legal institutions that ought to be on the side of
good planning sometimes get in its way.

Zoning, for example, is an indispensable tool for implementing planning,
but too weak for some metropolitan situations and often too inflexible
to meet certain needs. If essential open space has been protected only
by zoning, astronomical increases in its speculative value may generate
enough pressure on zoning boards to change the category, as happened
last year on upper Rock Creek. This is particularly true in view of
metropolitan plans' inevitably hodgepodge nature, which makes them
somewhat arbitrary and vulnerable to attack. Bribery and
personal-interest scandals often are rooted in zoning matters.
Furthermore, residential zoning of the standard minimum-lot-size sort,
not adapted to cluster housing and such sophistications, may actually
encourage sprawl and rectilinear violation of the landscape by
restricting the density of people in a place where the density of
buildings and pavements is what really matters.

[Illustration: THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE]

Tax systems can be troublesome in various ways--discouraging public
purchase of needed parks or conservation areas because officials don't
want the land to go off the tax rolls, preventing renewal of blighted
areas by penalizing improvements, running farms out of business by
taxing their fields as subdivision land, promoting leapfrogging and
sprawl (in the case of Federal capital gains taxation) by rewarding
speculative retention of tracts. And other government programs and
policies at various levels work against good planning or have done so in
the past, either by failing to encourage good types of land use or by
actively promoting bad types. Traditional Federal mortgage insurance and
home loan practices oriented toward standard suburban development are an
example, and so are many highways and roads subsidized and routed by
experts in higher realms of government.

With so much economic and legal muscle arrayed on the side of chaos and
a whole army of enterprising folk dedicated to its perpetuation--some
holding seats on planning and zoning bodies--the wonder is that the
metropolitan counties have been making any headway at all with improving
their planning process. And they have been, especially since they have
begun to work together in such organizations as the Metropolitan
Washington Council of Government. But, as elsewhere throughout America,
the progress is somewhat dwarfed by the population pressures and
untrammeled expansionism planning must deal with. Radical measures may
be needed; there has been sober talk of counties' issuing bonds,
condemning all vacant land within a wide radius of the city, and buying
it up for gradual resale and development in an orderly and sensible way,
thus eliminating at one stroke the speculative pressures and torsions
that are the root cause of much of the trouble.

For under metropolitan conditions fee ownership, either of land or of
its development rights, seems to give the only certainty of control over
land's use. Obviously its potential employment by government is limited
in a free economy, and such things as zoning and subdivision
controls--strengthened and made rational--are going to have to continue
as main tools, together with devices like scenic easements, which
usually, however, again involve a form of purchase.

Fee ownership is the kind of control that is being exercised--by private
interests rather than by government--in the promising "new towns," where
certain individuals and groups are attempting to use industrial-type,
long-term financing in the purchase and development of large tracts on
which strong and careful planning, involving everything from industry to
fish ponds, can be enforced from scratch. Perhaps the most famous single
example of this kind of thing is Reston, Virginia, which is being built
on over 7000 acres of pleasant Piedmont countryside in northwestern
Fairfax County. It has aroused hope across the nation in people
concerned with such things, for if private capital can go to work in
this enlightened fashion and still come out with a profit, the
implications for the future are enormous. Like any pioneering venture,
it has run into some troubles, and it lately suffered a shift in
management. But it is still being steered toward the same goal of
environmental grace and decency and seems likely to arrive there.

The attractiveness of such places to people disillusioned with standard
sprawl is attested by the fact that other developers, having
incorporated some of the Reston techniques--some recreational water,
some clustering of dwellings with communal open space between, some
amenities like underground wiring--are tending to call their latest
subdivisions "new towns" too. Many of them want to do things right, and
if it can be proved that doing things right will pay off as well as
doing them wrong, a certain amount of automatic improvement in the
quality of suburbanization can be expected. However, it must be noted
that the scale on which most developers can afford to operate, and the
market scarcity of suitable large tracts of land even when major capital
is available and the aims are noble ones, do not often give them control
of adequate natural units of territory in which whole planning can mean
what it should. Most such planning is going to have to continue to come
from governmental bodies, and the main hope must be that it will keep
improving, find stronger tools, and be reinforced and stimulated by laws
and programs from higher up.

Sprawl as a problem farther out

Throughout the Basin where centers of population and industry are on the
jump, sprawl is also gnawing away at the countryside. Given our present
pace of change, many Basin towns will soon become Basin cities, and
around each, if they are left to grow in the rudimentary traditional
patterns, the devastation that has taken place around Washington will
reproduce itself. In many places it already has a good start.

Some rural counties and small towns have developed a satellitic
relationship to the larger centers of population, and even around others
that are distant from urban uproar, sprawl is beginning to find a
congenial form for itself in vacation colonies of "second homes" in
scenic places whose remoteness, together with a smaller and more settled
population of Americans, used to be their staunch protection. Under the
stimulus of State and Federal encouragement, mainly quite recent and to
some extent tied in with this Potomac effort, most counties in the Basin
have arrived at some awareness of the need for land-use planning. In
many farming communities, the seeds of this awareness were planted long
since by the Soil Conservation Service. But rural folk often lack a
sense of the urgency of the need, an understanding of dangers and aims
under urban or semi-urban conditions, money with which to operate, and
the detachment that is requisite for making right decisions.

Planning in most such places ought to be relatively simple and
acceptable, for in the long run most people would be better off for it,
economically and in terms of the surroundings. But it is still hard to
sell to average rural and small-town populations, who have always been
able to take trees, views, clean water, and elbow room for granted, and
hence can maintain the staunchly individualistic view that anyone ought
to be able to do whatever he likes with his land, that growth is good,
and that anything that interferes with any manifestation of it is bad.
Therefore, too often the planning, if any, that goes into effect before
the bulldozers move in like hungry behemoths from another planet is
likely to be meager and heavily weighted in favor of the easy, standard,
massive sort of development that local governments close to the centers
of trouble are beginning to comprehend and, in the face of immensely
greater odds, to take measure against.

Though the ugliness and dreary crowded sameness with which standard
sprawl replaces decent landscapes are reason enough for opposing it,
other good reasons exist as well, perhaps especially in rural counties.
It has been customary for local promoters of such development to
celebrate the additional tax revenues that new inhabitants are going to
pour into the community's coffers. But community services in such
areas--things like sewage collection and disposal, water supply, trash
collection, roads and streets, schools, libraries--are seldom extensive
or elaborate, because they do not need to be in a rural stage of things.
If a subdivider erects, however, some 1500 new homes on a patch of
countryside, providing them with an inadequate supply of well water and
with individual septic tanks, and then shoves along to other fields
before things start breaking down and the protests start rising from the
1500 families who came there for lyrical but convenient country living,
the ensuing results for the county's finances can be catastrophic.

In some parts of America already, around $17,000 worth of community
services are said to be needed for every new family that moves in, a sum
which from one viewpoint amounts to a subsidy furnished by taxpayers to
land speculators and developers. Even assuming that those services
provided by the developer are adequate, and that some aid in providing
the rest can be obtained by the community through State and Federal
programs--thereby passing on a part of the cost to other taxpayers--a
rural county proud of its traditionally low tax valuations and of the
Jeffersonian simplicity of its local government, as most are, flatly
cannot dig up the remainder without a big revision of its old way of
being.

In bad cases, the alternatives to digging it up may be water pollution,
health hazards, siltation and perhaps floods, sour public discontent
among new elements unsympathetic to Jeffersonian simplicity, and the
rapid deterioration of the new suburbs into rural slums--a combination
of factors that in itself may bring about drastic change in the
community. Thus in one way or another contemporary rural individualism
tends to bury itself, but often too late for the salvation of the woods
and pastures and clear waters and human dignity it took for granted and
placed so little value on.

Vacation colonies are a rather distinct consideration, for they are
independent of ordinary and predictable population growth and they tend
to spring up in places of special natural beauty and value. There is no
reason why they should not be pleasant additions to a community or to a
landscape, and a good many are--well planned in terms of both practical
details and esthetic values, unobtrusive, and pretty. Unfortunately,
though, this kind is not the rule, for in many spots in the Basin such
colonies are a sort of haphazard mushroom growth with miserable side
effects.

Local forms of this phenomenon have always been around, but have seldom
been extensive enough to seem anything but picturesque. A farmer sells
off a few riverside lots, for example, because he can't plow that part
of his land anyhow, and is happy enough to make a little money and at
the same time oblige some county-seat acquaintances who want a place to
loaf and fish on weekends. So a few tarpaper shacks go up with privies
for sanitation, and perhaps someone hauls in an old school bus and props
it on concrete blocks for his own vacation home. Here a jolly time is
had by all with full knowledge--since they are locals, aware of how
things around them work--that sooner or later the river is going on a
rampage and will carry away the whole little community, with small loss
to anyone.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Exploitation changes the picture, however, as exploitation is wont to
do. If a whole neighborhood of farmers seeks such profits, or if real
estate men get into the act, or big development corporations that may be
operating from almost anywhere in the country, the scale enlarges and
purple prose may appear in the metropolitan newspapers to lure nostalgic
suburbans out to examine an assortment of lots sliced fine for maximum
yield and priced most often according to their proximity to water. Water
is usually involved, for it is the fundamental outdoor attraction,
whether it is a mountain creek or a river or a made pond or a deep bay
off the lower estuary. Its ultimate pollution is often involved as well,
for sanitary arrangements tend to be rudimentary and inadequate for
concentrations of people, especially when the "second homes" start
turning into permanent homes with the retirement of their owners or
their sale to younger locals. This latter process, too, sometimes leads
to a future demand for schools and other services whose need was not
foreseen by local governments when they permitted the development.

In some places along the estuary and the Potomac main stem and the
Shenandoah, the creation of such communities has already led to
wholesale, ugly, unsanitary clutter along considerable stretches of once
beautiful shoreline. It is beginning to shape up even on remoter
waterways like the Cacapon and the South Branch, and in some parts of
the mountains. As new interstate highways and other avenue of access are
opened from Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and many other
cities, the process may be expected to blight most shorelines throughout
the Basin unless something is done to control it. And not only the
county councils and boards of supervisors but the rest of us as well are
going to inherit the problems associated with it, for these waters and
shores are of more than local concern, in terms of the loss of amenity,
in terms of pollution, and in terms of the quite frequent certainty of
future flood damages, a demand for protection at general public expense,
and possibly the loss of further amenities and resources at the site of
a protective reservoir upstream.

From an abstract point far outside the boundaries of these rural
counties, it is easy enough to condemn the frame of mind that lets such
things take place. But the fact is that people in rural local
governments and those who elect them often have even more respect and
love for the landscape around them than the most esthetic of
metropolitans. They may take it too much for granted, but they have
grown up close to it and they can feel the loss acutely when it
deteriorates. Some of the usual obstacles to their doing anything to
prevent the deterioration were mentioned earlier--money is short, and so
is planning know-how. Probably the greatest obstacle, however, is the
matter of personal relationships. Not in terms of outright corruption,
which is far more likely in the anonymous atmosphere of great cities,
but in terms of the need of people in small communities to get along
with one another, combined with traditional profit motives.

Suppose a local planning or zoning board is taking action to determine
whether or not a big corporation from elsewhere can buy and subdivide
some flood-plain land belonging to a well-liked fellow townsman, a
hardware dealer whom all of them have known from childhood and with whom
they will be doing business the rest of their lives. Despite the
inappropriateness of the land for human occupation and the mess that is
going to be established along their pretty river, is it to be reasonably
expected that a voting majority of them are going to decree that a
friend be deprived of a half-million dollars' profit? The dilemma is a
serious one, perhaps the weakest point in the land-use control at this
local level, and it may mean that higher levels of government will have
to take over some of the responsibility and get local governments off
the hook.

Industry in the landscape

Another matter about which small communities can seldom feel impartial
is the prospect of attracting industry. With the growth of the great
cities here and there, perhaps a majority of small towns are faced now
with flagging agricultural prosperity, a lack of jobs, and the resultant
departure--often reluctant--of most of their energetic young people for
the new centers of action. The mere rumor that an industry is
considering setting up a plant in such a place is likely to set off
shock waves of delight and establish a general mood in which almost any
concession will be offered to tempt the corporation--to the point that
authorities, in some places, have issued bonds and built the requisite
factory themselves.

In a good many cases, this particular cure for the community's ills has
proved to be worse than the sickness, leading to total community
dependence on a fallible and perhaps capricious enterprise, pollution of
air and water, noise and flood-plain clutter, and frequently the
destruction of the local riverside where industries tend to locate
unless directed elsewhere. Little of this is necessary now, as a number
of examples of responsible industry in the Basin demonstrate. But it
continues, and will continue as long as communities keep looking on
industry as a source of payrolls only, free of sin: "It smells like
money," some residents of one Shenandoah town say of their factory's
miasmal odor, though other natives phrase their description
differently....

The full legacy of an older time when industry neither knew how to avoid
pollution and other troubles nor saw any reason to try, and no community
leaders saw any reason to bring the subject up, is found in prime
fettle along the North Branch, whose pollution is a sympathetic
reflection of the general state of that region's environment. Though
certain industries there--most notably the huge but aging pulp and paper
mill at Luke, Maryland--have managed at considerable expense to cut down
on the wastes they discharge to the river, the prevalent philosophy
elsewhere in the neighborhood would seem to be that both land and water
are already so afflicted that no single community's or industrial
plant's attempt at betterment could do much good.

This impression is illusory; people along the North Branch, as
elsewhere, are aware of what has been lost. But restoration is going to
be hard. In some of the deep valleys layered, stinging smog prevails
through most of the year. Most of the waters are acid from far up toward
their source, as we have seen, and downriver this acid is enriched with
other things, a situation that has existed for so long that hardly
anyone recalls when the streams were much different. Most of the
villages along them have a gray and weary look, with a good deal of
unemployment among the hardy people, and empty stores and houses that
remember a less ramshackles time when the area's coal mines needed many
workers and the air was alive with action, including old-fashioned
vigorous labor strife.

High up above the towns and the dark streams, the strip-mine bulldozers
and power shovels that have replaced most of the workers chew away at
the green flanks of mountains named for Indian chiefs and pioneers and
things that happened long ago. Where they have scraped out all they
economically can and have moved on, huge gray scars and spoil heaps
remain behind and ooze more acid to the streams below, as do hundreds of
the old deep mines. It is a pitted and hard-used landscape, where
occasional more or less ordinary farming valleys, and mountains and
streams that have escaped change, stand out as strikingly beautiful in
contrast.

Concentratedly typical of this landscape in general, perhaps, is the
Georges Creek valley, a hundred square miles of drainage extending
between two long scarred ridges from the neighborhood of Frostburg down
to Westernport. Here coal has a venerable and even romantic history, for
it has been mined in the valley since 1808, and the laid-out Scottish
orderliness of depopulated old "Company towns"--Lonaconing is said to
have been the first such in the nation--clashes with the grimy reality
of what has happened in modern times.

This natal section of the river system cannot be walled away from the
rest of the Basin, written off to coal and industry, and disregarded. It
is integral with the rest; its troubles are Basin troubles. And if the
ingrained landscape sickness compounded there by the old consumptive way
of doing things, blight begetting blight, cannot be healed, scant hope
glimmers through of healing the same sickness in other parts of the
nation where it is even worse.

Other Basin landscape problems

New roads and highways, regardless of what traffic they carry and where
they carry it, are too often planned and constructed as gashes of
destruction across the landscape and across the "scenery of
association," and frequently fertilize subsidiary ugliness in the form
of billboards and commercial clutter. Attempts to mitigate the worst
aspects of this have had some effect, but have not been widespread or
strong enough to keep up with the growing numbers of cars and the
growing demand for facilities on which to operate them.

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