The Nation\'s River
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United States Department of the Interior >> The Nation\'s River
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[Illustration]
Much could be done at the local level to erase roadside
ugliness--Loudoun County, Virginia, is again a shining and rare example
of a place where the right thing has been done. But more of the trouble
comes from higher up, for it involves the routing and design of the
super-roads, and stubborn considerations of strict engineering
efficiency have usually tended to prevail over esthetics and such
things, despite growing objections. Regardless of their beauty as roads,
the sheer quantity of strip concrete Americans require nowadays is a
basic problem. It has been said that an extraplanetary observer at first
glance might well conclude that this continent was populated primarily
by large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains. Certainly in many
places nowadays the earth is beginning to look as if it were arranged
for the bugs rather than for the brains, if that is what we humans are.
[Illustration]
When the bugs die they go to junkyards. These many-colored necropolises
occupy wide acres of land near every center of population in the region,
occurring quite commonly along the main entrance highways to neat and
historic towns. Their stark and extensive ugliness has made them the
subject of much high-level investigation, most of which has sought to
make their conversion into usable scrap metal a profitable process.
Undoubtedly this will be achieved sooner or later, but in the meantime
the old cars, together with a wealth of other discarded items in
roadside fields and along fencelines and stream channels throughout the
Basin, form a scabby legacy from the recent past, and a less esthetic
"scenery of association."
Major electric powerlines and other utilities routed arrogantly with
only straight-line distances in mind, up hill and down dale and with
their cleared rights-of-way kept brownly dead with herbicides, can
intrude starkly on the beauty and mood of historic or pleasantly natural
landscapes. In the name of public service, private utility companies in
all the Basin States have wide powers of condemnation as emerged to view
recently when the Potomac Edison Company proposed to hack out a strip
for a new line along a route that included country associated with the
campaigning around Antietam Battlefield in the Civil War, without an
adequate attempt to find alternative routes.
In this instance, public protest shaped up a fight against the line, in
which the Interior Department has become involved because of the
Federally owned battlefield and the nearby C. & O. Canal. But often
elsewhere, the great skeletal towers linked by thick transmission cables
march where they please, indifferent to local objections. What is
certain is that modern America needs the electricity transported thus,
and the gases and liquids that run through great pipelines. Hope for the
long run is offered by research that may open the possibility of putting
high-voltage transmission lines underground, but in the meantime what is
needed is an awareness on the part of utilities planners that scenic and
historic values have to be given full weight in their computations.
The kind of agriculture that has so much to do with the Basin's scenic
appeal is not entirely healthy these days. We have mentioned the
difficulty created near Washington--and around other Basin centers of
population and in many places where vacation colonies are burgeoning--by
skyrocketing speculation and a general absence of strongly based and
well-defended plans of preservation. As the development value of land
rises in such places, local systems of taxation based on that value
rather than on actual use may drive farmers out of business whether they
want to stay in or not. Since 1945 in Fairfax County, Virginia, for
instance, the number of commercial farms has dropped from 1788 to about
200, and it is still going down.
Even where the tax trouble has been recognized, as in Maryland, and
taxation adjusted to reality for people who want to go on farming, few
tillers of the soil are devoted enough to their acres to hold onto them
in the face of the kind of cash that is often dangled before their eyes,
for the flat and fertile tracts that make the best farms are also the
easiest to subdivide and build on in standard fashion. For that matter,
the usual form of tax relief on agricultural land can be used as a tax
loophole by speculators. Thus, whenever tract values rise and
development impends, good productive land, which the country may well
miss later as populations grow and food supplies for them thin out, goes
permanently under pavements and construction. Even though it is just in
such places that protected, scenic, connotative rural landscapes might
have the most meaning for the most people in the long run, their
preservation presents some tough questions. Patterns of growth that
would spare them could easily be worked out and would fit in well with
watershed protection and open space needs, but the economics of
compensating farm owners for the loss of the big money they might have
received for them is another thing.
In some other parts of the Basin, the implications of a modern unified
economy are a threat to traditional farms and farming methods. Labor
costs, the need for expensive machinery, superior methods of storage of
foodstuffs and easy transport over long distances have put Potomac
farmers into competition with other regions, even other countries, where
the same products they supply can be raised on an industrial scale of
investment and profit. Thus the worth of a field of tomatoes in the
Northern Neck of Virginia is affected by massive irrigated production in
the Central Valley of California, and thus a Shenandoah farmer may
barely break even or suffer a loss on a rather good crop of wheat in the
old "bread basket of the Confederacy."
Such influences, even though dulled a bit by protective State and
Federal farm programs, are putting a premium on specialization, ever
larger farms, and an "agribusiness" approach, with high capital and
operating expenses. Their effect on many family farms in the Basin's
mountain regions, places with limited acreage of marginally productive
land, is severe. These may have supported the clans that own them
reasonably well for a century or more, but they cannot compete with
Ohio. Unless their owners are willing to keep on farming while holding
down a job in town for supplementary cash, they often move away and the
places go out of cultivation. Some are consolidated into grazing or
forestry units or bigger farms, some stand abandoned, some go on the
market as vacation retreats and "hobby farms" for wide-ranging
metropolitans.
Richer regions share the troubles. In the classic valley of the
Monocacy, some of whose dairy farmers have to import feed now from the
Midwest because they cannot raise it cheaply enough themselves, the size
of the optimum farm, one that can compete effectively in today's market,
has swelled in the past few years from about 150 acres to about 600,
according to a study by the State of Maryland. The problem is compounded
by rising land prices influenced not by productive value but by the
presence of Megalopolis just over toward the Bay. Sprawl throws a long
shadow.
Eyeing this array of difficulties, many farmers' sons are prone to seek
another livelihood, and the average age of the men who do the farming
grows higher all the time. Tiring, many sell out, and thus the family
farms that make up the greater part of the Potomac's much-loved rural
landscape dwindle in number and change in use. It is not necessary to be
mawkish to see this as a loss. In part it is inevitable, but in part too
it may be rooted in policies that can be altered and adjusted to keep
the farms productive.
Wildlife, along the Potomac as elsewhere, is dependent on whatever
habitat it occupies--that is to say on the state of the landscape. If
the rivers are cleaned up and kept flowing even during times of drought
and heavy use of water, they will support better populations of fish and
a greater variety of species. If the subtle interrelationships and the
immense value of the estuary's varied nooks and crannies are recognized,
studied out to full understanding, and protected--and in time--not only
fish and shellfish but ducks and eagles and herons and all the other
wild users of the shores and wetlands will benefit. Government refuges
and other devices are badly needed for these purposes in that region,
now that it is no longer remote and the kind of protection many private
owners have traditionally furnished wildlife is diminishing.
[Illustration]
Upland populations of deer, turkey, grouse, quail, raccoon, fox, and
other sporting and non-sporting species thrive in parts of the Basin
suited to their habits and still in good condition, and shrink
elsewhere. Many stretches of private forest land could support much
higher densities of game and other wildlife, if they were put in better
shape by practices that are available and feasible. Of the more than
three million acres of such land scattered throughout the Basin in small
holdings, much is in poor condition. It is therefore but spottily
productive of game or timber or anything else, and often causes high
runoff and erosion in critical watersheds.
[Illustration]
Recreation
Many of the things we have called amenities here are subject to
full-fledged economic uses necessary to the region's wellbeing and not
usually in great conflict with scenic and ecological values if they are
carried out right. Farming and commercial fishing and logging used to be
generally exploitative and hard on the natural scheme of things in this
country, for instance, but they no longer need to be and in most cases
are not. Using the Potomac's water for towns and factories and power and
navigation entails some interference with natural processes, but it does
not have to be widely destructive of them. Discharge of treated wastes
to streams is still necessary to a degree, and up to that degree not
badly harmful, though as we have seen, it is far too often excessive.
[Illustration]
Urban expansion is necessary also with present population pressures. It
is an irreversible exploitation of the landscape, but if the type of
land-use principles mentioned in this chapter were to get wider
employment, urbanization would quite certainly not have to be as
destructive of natural and human values as its present usual form is.
The same thing is true of industry in its many manifestations, including
mining, and of the woven network of roads and utilities. The public
needs them, and the people responsible for them need to be aware of the
great value of the natural framework within which all men must exist.
Average people's direct use of the natural world is most often of the
kind summed up as "outdoor recreation," an umbrella phrase under which
are lumped a diversity of satisfactions found by widely differing
persons in many types of more or less natural places. Muscular hunters
and elderly birdwatchers, water-skiers and bank-fishermen, Sunday
drivers on crowded highways and lean backpackers on dim trails in the
South Branch highlands, baseball players and people who take naps on
the grass beside the C. & O. Canal, amateur archaeologists and stock-car
racing fans--all these and many other kinds of folk depend somehow on
the Potomac outdoors for their pleasure. They use it.
How much they use it and how much pleasure they get out of it are
governed by the time on their hands, the availability of their chosen
recreation, and whether it is good of its kind. A would-be hunter who
cannot escape from the District of Columbia is out of luck unless his
mobility improves. An Alexandria water-skier can divert himself on the
metropolitan estuary during the summer months, but under ordinary
conditions at present it is something less than what is known as a
"quality experience," as is fishing there or any other water sport. A
West Virginian has to have some time to spare if he wants to enjoy
beaches and ocean breezes; so do Tidewater residents with a penchant for
mountain trout fishing.
Nevertheless the Basin holds a great deal for almost all tastes, and
most of what it holds is of excellent quality. The main recreational
needs are fairly clear: to protect and restore the Potomac outdoors from
the deterioration noted in this and earlier chapters, to spread the
chance at different kinds of pleasure around as much as possible, to
guard against clashes between different kinds of use and against the
destruction of the quality of quiet and natural places that occurs when
too many people are jammed together in them, to make the Basin's
pleasant corners and shores and byways easier to get at, and--not least
important--to encourage uses that contribute to appreciation and
preservation, helping to make sure that in the long run outdoor
recreation in this region will be possible.
People's need for outdoor activity in their spare time varies a good
deal. An oysterman-crabber working out of the Yeocomico through the
progression of seasons and weathers, a Shenandoah plowman turning earth
his great-great-grandfather turned at the foot of the blue-green
mountains, a timber cruiser in the high forests--such individuals are
not as likely to need to go looking for added outdoor satisfactions as
most other kinds of people, for whom ordinary life tends to be more
separate from pleasure in the open air. Maybe if the cities can be
brought back to health and their growth shaped to fit in better with
human needs, this will change. But with more and more people coming on,
more and more leisurely and affluent as technology cuts down on work,
more and more urban, outdoor recreation as a specific goal is going to
be an ever more important consideration in planning. It is already
important--and already, as we are reminded with statistics, big
business.
City recreational needs
Recreation in and around the central city of Washington has to be a
primary aim. The most people are in this area, many of them through
poverty or habits of life not given to farflung pleasures but
constrained to seek them where they live, or near at hand. The worst
environmental threats are here as well, despite the foresight and pride
that have saved much more open space and pleasant park land than most
other American cities can show.
The metropolitan river has to be cleaned up and made attractive. It used
to be the city's most supremely valuable amenity and potentially it
still is. Measures within reach can realize much of the potential inside
of a reasonably short time, so that productive and varied fishing and
good boating and a beautiful wide body of water will be within strolling
distance for people in the central parts of the metropolis on both sides
of the Potomac, and the recreational value of the lands already
preserved along its shores will be incalculably multiplied. Safe
swimming and other water contact sports in the open metropolitan
estuary, often mentioned as an aiming point for clean-up programs, may
be a somewhat more distant future prospect. Our studies in the past
three years have made it clear that pollution here is more complex and
diffuse in origins than had ever been supposed, and that sources of
dangerous bacteria are probably going to continue to exist for a good
while despite all efforts against them. The goal of swimming is a worthy
one and will probably be reached, but not quickly. In the meantime, more
public pools in the City and easy transportation to public areas farther
down the estuary may be required.
Some recreation areas within the city, like Rock Creek Park, presently
get too much use for their own good and for people's full pleasure in
them because they are superior to anything else accessible to many of
the city's people. This is a local manifestation of a national problem,
for even sections of the great national parks, like the one at Yosemite,
are presently being battered by overuse by a generation of city-dwellers
anxious to come in touch with natural and basic things. In such places,
people's very numbers shut them off from those basic things and coarsen
the quality of their experience. The only really satisfactory answer
will be to put additional, equally attractive places within reach of the
same people. In Washington this means developing other pleasant areas
within the city and making it easier for the city's people to get to the
other parks and natural places farther out. Improvement of the river,
development of extensive new parklands along the Anacostia including the
Kenilworth Dump site, more neighborhood playgrounds and swimming pools,
and other such action will all help to relieve the situation, which is
getting much official attention and is a specific subject in the report
recently published by the Potomac Planning Task Force, the group formed
under auspices of the American Institute of Architects.
The array of Federal, State, regional and county parks and other public
areas ringing the metropolis will be more accessible as public transit
improves. Another means to this end, and an especially organic and
appropriate one, will be the urban stretches of the Basinwide network of
hiking, bicycling, and horseback trails which will be discussed a little
farther along.
If, as prophets reiterate, ever-increasing percentages of the American
public in the future will be living in the great cities, a great deal
of nature and conservation education is going to be needed if the mass
of people are not to lose all understanding of natural things and all
sympathy with their working and their preservation. It cannot be
entirely a classroom sort of thing, no matter how many films and
preserved or caged wildlife specimens may be provided. There is need
now, and there will be more need hereafter, for rich nature preserves
and study centers within reach of Washington and specifically dedicated
to such use.
In general, suburbanites have more freedom of choice regarding the
places they play in and the ways in which they play there than do people
at the urban center. Many of them live fairly close to outlying parks
and open areas, and if good planning gains in strength and effectiveness
as the metropolis spreads, this neighborhood availability of outdoor
pleasures will increase, with more Rock Creeks and Pohick Creeks to put
stream-valley parks and pleasant small lakes and streams and such things
within reach of everyone, and more green open space just outside
people's doors. They are going to be needed, for public pressure on the
available recreation areas around the metropolis is already heavy.
Suburbanites also, however, are more mobile than almost any non-nomadic
civilian population in history. A great variety of things to do are
within driving distance of their homes on an afternoon off, or a
weekend, or a vacation. Therefore, the question of providing and
improving outdoor recreation for them, as well as for more mobile
residents of the central city, merges with the wider question of outdoor
recreation on a Basinwide scale, for residents and visitors alike.
Basin recreational needs
If the things are done that need to be done to reverse the environmental
deterioration that has been the subject of so much of this report, the
public's chance to enjoy widespread, high quality outdoor recreation in
the Potomac Basin will be tremendously increased. Recreation and
preservation are not separable subjects. If a river is cleaned up and
its shoreline protected against clutter and ugliness, its use by
fishermen and boatmen and others will be enhanced. If a park is
established to protect a unique natural asset, people's enjoyment of
that asset will be assured. Most preservation leads to more recreational
opportunity; many things that are done to provide outdoor recreation
afford some measure of protection for the environment as well, but the
emphases are sometimes different.
Among specific recreational problems, access is a major one. For those
who can afford cars, getting around the Basin grows easier all the time
as roads proliferate, but getting at the agreeable things to do is hard
in many places. Here and there important parts of the public lands in
the National or State forests, for instance, are cut off from easy use
by private inholdings. But the main amenity that is usually hard to
reach is water, which happens also to be the major magnet for outdoor
recreation of many kinds.
The estuary's 200,000 acres of superb recreational potential are a case
in point. It has a few drawbacks that can and ought to be dealt with,
like the thousands of old sunken pilings and stakes that make boating
dangerous in many places, and some others that may be tougher to
eliminate, like the great annual summertime incursions of stinging
jellyfish in its lowest reaches, the milfoil weed that sometimes clogs
its tributaries, and the erosion of its shores by winter storms. But
even as it stands, it offers fishing and boating and hunting of the
finest sort in its lower part, with excellent swimming higher up where
salinity drops and the jellyfish cannot come--a zone whose useful length
will increase upstream as metropolitan pollution diminishes. Yet along
the estuary's shores, except at certain historic sites like Wakefield
where types of use have to be limited, there are only two major public
parks at present and very few other public areas of any size where
people can launch boats, fish, camp, or merely get at the open water.
Some of the great military bases there are closed to the public, while
others permit limited use.
The main stem of the flowing Potomac is parallelled on the Maryland
shore by the C. & O. Canal in Federal ownership, a unique resource. But
the bulk of the land between the canal and the river--7200 acres out of
10,000--is privately owned. Along most of the 120 miles where the canal
property touches the Potomac it is much too narrow to permit heavy use,
so that public enjoyment of the river except at occasional spots is
limited to hikers, cyclists, and boatmen. Maryland's Fort Frederick
State Park, which joins the canal property and forms a much-frequented
node of public use, is the only such park on any of the main rivers of
the upper Basin.
Federal and state forests, extensive though they are, are mainly
confined to the ridges, as is the Shenandoah National Park. On the two
forks of the Shenandoah and its main stem below their junction, very
little public land exists despite the big segment of National Forest in
the Massanutten range between the forks, and on the Cacapon there is
hardly any. Authorized additions to the Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks
National Recreation Area will bring parts of the fine, clean mountain
forks of the South Branch into public ownership and use, but the main
stem of that river farther down is shut off.
Fee-entrance places and State or local fishing access points are sparse,
so that for the most part the Basin's main flowing streams remain a
closed book for people who lack the time, youth, equipment, or
inclination to come at them by canoeing or some other more or less
arduous means. And, as was noted earlier, the shores of most of them
urgently need some sort of reasonable protection against vacation
clutter, so that a certain amount of public ownership or control would
help save the rivers as well as provide recreation.
Imbalances in the kinds of recreation available in various parts of the
Basin are another problem, sometimes rooted in the nature of things,
sometimes remediable. The outstanding one is the shortage in the upper
Basin of what is called "flat water"--lakes and reservoirs suited for
mass recreation of kinds for which a really major demand exists and is
growing: swimming and motorboating and water-skiing, besides fishing of
the type possible only in such water.
It has been said that recreation is potentially Appalachia's most
profitable industry. If so, Potomac Appalachia badly needs more such
water to fill out the resource and to attract the many people who are
interested mainly in flat-water activities. Middle sections of the Basin
want and can use it as well. A clear indication of the demand, as well
as an additional good reason for trying to meet it, is seen on weekends
along the occasional narrow stretches of slack water found in the
Potomac and the Shenandoah and even the slim South Branch, where ski
boats roar up and down among apprehensive swimmers and unhappy anglers,
a classic instance of the kind of destruction of pleasure that occurs
when incompatible recreational pursuits are forced together by a want of
room for both.
The obvious answer is to locate and design the reservoirs needed to meet
Basin water demands in such a way that they can not only fulfill that
purpose but can provide needed recreation too. The major reservoirs
called for to achieve near-future supply purposes are few, but they can
be planned in places where they will get a maximum of these types of use
and where drawdown and other unesthetic effects will be minimal. And the
smaller headwater structures needed for water supply, flood control, and
other purposes throughout the Basin can quite often be designed to
function as first-rate recreational attractions too.
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