The Nation\'s River

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Anglers vary widely in their tastes. Some like the pursuit of bass and
sunfish in reservoirs, and for them the upper estuary as well will be a
good place to go when it is suitably cleaned up. Some want wide salt
water and the lonely cry of gulls, and these the Basin can provide also.
Others prefer trout in highland streams, or smallmouth and catfish in
the big flowing rivers, and as the state of the waters grows better, so
too will all these kinds of fishing. On certain rivers and streams
particularly, the assured flow that is going to be needed to cope with
diffuse pollution will have a strong good effect on aquatic life and
sport fishing. The Monocacy and the South Fork of the Shenandoah are
examples. And in the Potomac falls and gorge below the metropolitan
water intakes, as was noted in Chapter III, assurance of a certain
minimum flow would be justifiable on esthetic and recreational grounds
alone, even aside from the need for it below in terms of water quality.

Hunters need more room outdoors than most people, because of their guns
and because they move about in search of game. Fortunately, the fall and
winter months when they function are times when relatively fewer other
people are out roaming. The public forests of the upper Basin are a main
resource for hunting now and in the future, and the kinds of public
access that are established on the estuary and the main rivers will have
to take hunters' interests into account. Even so, if they increase in
numbers as much as has been predicted, the added demand for places to go
will require more lease and day hunting on private land in the long run
than exists at present, and improvement of that land's wildlife
potential.

Certain other kinds of recreational facilities, constituting the bulk of
profitable enterprises associated with America's outdoor pleasure, will
have to depend mainly or solely on private development of them.
Amusement parks, marinas, and ski lifts are examples, and so are most of
the lodging places, restaurants, and other service facilities that
thrive wherever increased public recreational activity takes place.

Most Americans do some driving for pleasure, and some of them do a great
deal of it, using their four-wheeled bugs not just as a way of getting
to pleasant places but as an indispensable adjunct to being in them and
enjoying them. In certain respects, the Basin falls short of providing
for their needs. The explosive demand in the past few years for auto
campgrounds where people can stop with their cars, trailers, and pickup
units has caused a shortage of adequately equipped facilities of this
sort, especially within easy reach of Washington, which will have to be
supplied by both public and private effort. Roads specifically designed
for leisurely pleasure driving, in contrast to high-speed throughways,
are another need. The Basin has two such motorways now--the George
Washington Memorial Parkway at the metropolis, a much-used city road in
its present form though still a main amenity, and the Skyline Drive
along the Blue Ridge, with the Blue Ridge Parkway extending southward
through it and out of the Potomac country. This magnificent low-speed
mountain-top route looks out alternately over the Great Valley and the
Piedmont, and the heavy use it receives, increasing year by year, shows
what the right kind of scenic motor routes can mean to people.

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For a multitude of residents and visitors, nothing would contribute more
to appreciation of what the Basin has to offer than a system of
unobtrusive parkways and scenic wandering roads joining together the
region's attractions--history and scenery and sports, rivers and valleys
and mountains. A major element in such a system, being studied, would be
a great loop parkway tying together the existing parkways by an
extension along the river and turning southward into the country along
the historic James, then back to the Blue Ridge. Scenic roads tributary
to the system would utilize existing rural routes for the most part,
enhanced and protected by State and local action.

For the many other people who seek a more active and less mechanized
relationship with natural things, a connected regional network of trails
for walking or riding or cycling is a main need and a main opportunity.
Like the parkways or even more than them, it could be a framework for
open space preservation and an intimate means of using that open space.
Tied in with existing segments like the C. & O. towpath and the
Appalachian Trail, linking the towns and cities with ridges and
riversides and parks and historic places, it would provide the most
fitting kind of access to the whole Potomac realm of things for anyone
willing to take an afternoon's stroll or a week's hike.

More fundamentally still, it would be a powerful and continuing element
in conservation education of the best kind, the participating kind. For
generation after generation of the young people who would use it most,
it would shape a feeling for rocks and water, creatures and trees, sun
and wind and rain and hills and valleys, old houses and ruins and
bloody fighting grounds, together with a sense of man's natural origins.
And shaping the feeling, it would shape some comprehension.

The Potomac Basin is going to need that kind of comprehension; the whole
country is. Recreation means fun, and it probably ought not be
overweighed with solemnities. But outdoor fun is dependent on the
wellbeing of the outdoors, and increasingly the outdoors depends on the
understanding and sympathy of human beings who possess new great power
of destruction and have been using it widely. So that if any form of
outdoor recreation can furnish, however slightly, some comprehension of
what the natural world is like and how it works, it amounts to quite a
lot more than a bit of needed relaxation from the week's toil at one's
job or in the kitchen and nursery, though it may be that as well. With
the comprehension, it becomes an enlargement of one's grasp of things,
and it adds a little substance to the hope that people will keep on
caring about the integrity of the world around them and defending it as
best they can. And no safeguard this present mortal generation can set
up is more meaningful than that hope.

Avenues toward coping with landscape problems

Most of the known basic techniques of landscape protection have already
been discussed or touched on in this report: ways of cleaning up rivers
and assuring their flow, ways of halting erosion and siltation, ways of
planning land's use by concentrated human populations with as little
loss as possible of amenities, ways of patching up old damage. Many of
them are imperfect as yet and for some problems tools are still missing,
nor are the existing techniques being applied in a completely
coordinated manner anywhere on this continent except in a few
experimental places of restricted size. But they do exist; they are
available if human beings and human institutions can be persuaded to put
them to use. And it is not possible to repeat too often that the need
for their use is urgent.

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A great deal of legal machinery at various levels is available to
stimulate the use of such techniques and to enhance outdoor recreation.
Some of it has already been put to work in the Potomac Basin; some of it
needs reshaping for application to the conditions found there; and to
cope with certain of the problems, specific legislative action tailored
to the needs is going to be required.

Active Federal programs of public works, technical assistance, grants in
aid, cost sharing, taxation, home loans, mortgage insurance, and such
things--often with counterparts at state levels--penetrate every level
of the economy and have profound effects on the landscape. Some of them
have a direct concern with the landscape as such: among these are the
Department of Agriculture's soil conservation and forestry programs,
Interior activities ranging from water pollution control to trails,
parks, and wildlife refuges, and Housing and Urban Development programs
for the restoration, protection, and creation of urban amenities--all
being applied in the Basin, though some need legislative adjustment or
extension if they are to be fully effective there. Most also have
associated recreational purposes.

Others among the going high-level programs have only a tangential
interest in the landscape per se, though frequently much influence upon
it. In the past, as we have observed earlier, many of them have been
responsible for a good deal of landscape damage, encouraging sprawl and
other forms of bad land use, instituting great public projects without
enough thought to their effect on esthetics and ecology, and so on. Some
are still being conducted in this manner, though less and less as a
general awareness of the need to restore and to preserve, to think twice
before making massive environmental changes, soaks out through the
complex network of government and has its influence on attitudes.
Increasingly, not only Federal but State agencies are making decent land
use, recreation, and scenic preservation a partial condition and
sometimes a whole reason for aid programs and public works.

Many programs can be adapted to such purposes. One interesting example
in the Potomac Basin is a study being undertaken in the Georges Creek
valley of western Maryland by Frostburg State College. Under an
educational grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
members of the college's faculty have embarked on research aimed toward
a demonstration project of economic, social, and landscape restoration
in the whole Georges Creek watershed as a unit. Action resulting from
the study will involve a number of their State and Federal programs.

Often, of course, the benefits of such practices are "intangible" in
terms of the market values that have traditionally been used for
justifying government projects, and adequate ways of giving them their
true weight against other values that may be in conflict with them have
not yet really been worked out. Nevertheless, the fact that they have
strong and sometimes overriding benefits is being recognized.

Insofar as such programs encourage Basinwide landscape improvement and
protection and major recreational opportunities, they are instruments
for accomplishing overall Basin aims, usable as such now by Federal and
State agencies and at the future disposal of any Basinwide coordinative
organization that may evolve. Insofar as they permit and stimulate
counties and municipalities to do better environmental planning and give
them money and morale to implement and enforce planning, they are
available at this indispensable level of action where--as we have
seen--the obstacles to doing things right are often huge. The programs
put within reach of local officials the principles of good planning and
management, and help them to achieve its details, from wildlife refuges
to neighborhood parks, from the maintenance of riverside beauty and the
restoration of historic shrines to the construction of small reservoirs.
As knowledge of their existence and their advantages gets around, they
are beginning to have much effect, especially at larger centers of
population.

Nevertheless, it is impossible at present to be sure that any given
locality is going to take meaningful steps toward staving off blight and
landscape destruction, and a great many of them in the Potomac Basin
have not done so. Partly this is because the imperative need for
planning is only now beginning to dawn upon many smaller communities.
But even where it has dawned and planning has been undertaken by men of
good will, the great obstacles still exist and often block their
efforts--the lack of money to match Federal or State program funds, the
inability to convince fellow citizens who have to approve actions, the
fat profits in real estate, the pervasive influence of personal
relationships.

Ideally, for a number of attractive reasons, it would be preferable to
let local people solve local landscape and recreation problems in every
case, with outside higher levels of government furnishing only advice
and money on request. In regard to many types of problems, this is what
is being done and will be done on into the future, for people living in
a place are the ones who determine whether the place is going to be
ugly or pretty, pleasant or grim. The trouble is, however, that as
understanding of the interrelationships between land and water and the
other elements of the landscape, even on a Basinwide scale, has grown,
it has become more and more obvious that there are only a few strictly
local landscape problems. Most local jurisdictions have within their
boundaries critical watersheds, unique scenic assets, flood plains whose
unwise use will require elaborate and costly structural protection later
on, and other such features. This being so, the effects of mismanagement
are certain to reverberate elsewhere, and it becomes the concern of
people other than those who live in that neighborhood. It becomes other
people's business, distasteful though this idea may be to communities
with a tradition of self-sufficiency.

Regional planning organizations that can pool counties' and towns'
resources, take a broad view, and pay for professional help can overcome
some of the obstacles, if local governments can be persuaded to join
them. Certain of the State and Federal programs mentioned above are
being applied mainly through such bodies. But it seems to be an
unavoidable conclusion that if local government continues to be the
weakest link in the chain of planning, preservation of the environment
is going to require not only stouter incentives to elicit cooperation
from communities, but also more authority at higher levels of government
to guard against at least the worst types of landscape abuse. In terms
of water, this kind of authority will shortly be operative with the
enforcement of the new State water quality standards. In terms of the
other elements of the landscape, it is equally justifiable.

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And, just as in water management in all its phases, central and
continuing Basinwide coordination of practices to restore the landscape,
to protect it, and to make possible its pleasant use by the public is
going to be needed. If landscape problems could be divorced from water
problems it might be a good deal easier, at this point in time, to
identify a fairly full range of "right" measures that could be taken to
achieve such restoration and protection for a long, long period into the
future than it would be to do the same thing for water problems.
Restoration and protection are not irreversible actions in the sense
that some of the technological measures associated with water management
are, and the main danger of rigid landscape planning would not be that
it might go too far, but that it might not go far enough to save all
that ought to be saved.

But, as we have observed time and again in these pages, no divorce is
possible between land and water. They are interdependent, and whoever
concerns himself with one must perforce concern himself with the other.
Much of the action in regard to both is going to have to be long-term,
continuing into the future. New threats are going to arise, some of them
quite possibly based in a divergence of aims among various government
programs with environmental effects. Thus, if a Basin-oriented agency is
required--as we strongly believe--to oversee continuing action to clean
up the Potomac river system and keep it clean, and to develop it for
man's use in a wisely flexible and coordinated manner, that organization
is going to have to take on a degree of responsibility for landscape
matters as well, and is going to need some authority over them.

Many things can be identified that need doing now if irreplaceable
assets in the Potomac environment are not to be lost, and if people are
to be given a full chance to enjoy what is there. Some of these things
that need doing have been named in this chapter or previously, and
others are implicit in the report's discussions. We have worked out
recommendations for action that can get them done, and the
recommendations are presented with this report. They include some
specific recreational proposals, and they urge prompt and authoritative
protection of certain assets that are going to be destroyed if
protection does not come soon, long-term programs to bring about
detailed and overall restoration and protection and continued study and
research into means of coping with threats not yet fully understood,
like some of those along the estuary and the North Branch.

The main recommendation with a specific objective of preserving the
landscape and providing recreation proposes the designation of the main
river from Washington to Cumberland as the Potomac National River.
Though it is to remain accessible for appropriate use by towns and
industries, its banks and islands will be protected and public access
assured by means of a sheath of park land, in Federal, State, and local
ownership and with associated areas preserved by easements and similar
devices, for the entire 195 miles. The proposal, refined since its
initial mention in the Interim Report, is a major one--but so, as we
have seen, is the need it is designed to meet. This main reach of the
flowing river, the Basin's hydrologic and scenic lifeline, is greatly
menaced by rapid and inappropriate development along its banks, and
through most of its length it is hard for people to reach. It has unique
majesty and beauty and both historic and symbolic associations that
warrant a special degree of protection for it, and warrant also the
assurance of the kind of public appreciation and enjoyment the park
sheath would permit.

* * * * *

The recreation and landscape recommendations as a body are attuned to
reality as well as to needs. They represent things that can be done, at
prices that can be paid--minimum initial steps toward ultimate
achievements that would be inferior to none that our changeful age might
produce. This is an insistently momentous time, with boom, frenetic
pleasure, sophisticated communications, space exploration, racial
crisis, young rebellion, and all the other contemporary phenomena
demanding attention and stirring up a dust that makes clear vision hard.
There is nothing minor about any of them. But one thing seems clear
enough. When the dust settles down and those who walk here afterward
look around them for the eternal wholeness of earthly things, they are
going to have a hard time finding it if matters keep going as they have
been going lately. If we who are here now fail to hand over to them a
physical world that relates them to old reality and serves them well and
helps to make them glad to be alive, then whatever other things we hand
over to them may seem very small potatoes.

The Potomac Basin is only a piece of what needs to be done. But it could
be a beginning.

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V COMPLEXITIES AND PRIORITIES

A river basin is a good functional unit of topography, admirably suited
for study and for certain types of resource planning. Because of this,
there is a temptation for those who undertake such study and planning to
assume that river basins have, or ought to have, human unity as
well--unity in politics, economics, and culture--with a consequent
"basin public" inclined to think in basin terms. Basin identity of this
sort would facilitate conservation, development, and management. It
would "make sense," and clearly enough a a great deal of sense needs to
be made, and soon, if people are going to have any hope of balancing
their use of resources against the inevitable continuing requirements of
the long future.

Small watersheds often do have unity of this human sort, but very few
major river basins. And usually the question of whether they ought
ideally to have it or not becomes irrelevant in the face of the
rock-hard reality of the forces working against it. In the Potomac
Basin, the boundaries that ramble among the various political
subdivisions--the District of Columbia and portions of four separate
States, with all or part of some 39 counties and a number of independent
cities--only accidentally and occasionally follow watershed ridges. More
often they reflect the caprice of Stuart kings and Fairfax lords, the
accidents of history, the fortunes of war, and the trampings of young
George Washington and the Messrs. Mason and Dixon and hundreds of less
renowned linemakers. These boundaries, some of them sanctified by
centuries of existence, are one of the Basin's most fundamental sets of
facts, creating genuine differences in the interests, activities,
viewpoints, and even accents of the people. And they emphasize a healthy
political diversity and complexity that in many ways is simply not
amenable to change.

None of the capitals of the four Basin States lies within the Basin's
limits. This means that some of the strongest political loyalties and
energies of the region are directed outward toward Richmond and
Annapolis and Charleston and Harrisburg, and that much action relating
to the Potomac must be sought in those cities, or is decided on
incidentally there by legislators, many of whose strongest interests may
lie along the James or the Susquehanna or the Ohio or other streams.

The fact that the capital of the United States, together with its
attendant metropolis, is located solidly within the Basin at the Fall
Line is of immense if problematic significance. For one thing, it
fosters a concentrated Federal interest in the Potomac and the Potomac
region, in both esthetic and utilitarian terms and at both legislative
and administrative levels, which have led to some special amenities in
the way of parks and such things and to some Federal efforts to treat
the river in "model" terms, however these terms may have been defined at
various points. On the other hand, it has also led to a special concern
with the river on the part of the almost innumerable interest groups
that possess leverage in Washington, from wilderness conservationists to
industrial lobbyists, who exercise pulls in a number of different
directions.

And the presence of the capital has set up other special currents of
influence and sympathy that bypass normal political channels. Many Basin
towns and counties look more toward Washington for certain kinds of
action than toward their State agencies and legislatures. Federal
programs have long been active here close to the main-office sources of
expertise and cash, building up respect and trust through local agents,
and Basin Congressmen who hardly have to leave home to exercise their
legislative function have further strengthened these ties.

The metropolitan jurisdictions, especially, in many ways find more
common cause with one another and the Federal Government than with
communities and governing bodies elsewhere in their own States.
Politically, this sense of collective identity gets official expression
in the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional body
which, like its counterparts in other urban conglomerations throughout
the country, is geared to work directly with the Federal Government in
dealing with its own regional problems rather than having to come at
Federal programs and agencies along the more lengthy traditional route
through the States. The implications of this new kind of alignment are
still a matter for debate and conjecture.

Other forces at work along the Potomac similarly have less to do with
boundary lines, drainage limits, or Basin thinking than with human ways
of being. There are a number of kinds of country here, as we have seen,
in various stages of development and with various sorts of people
inhabiting them. Yeoman tillers of the Shenandoah's limestone soils may
find scant occasion to identify their interests with those of the
Washington slums, or even with those of the fox-hunting Piedmont gentry
just across the Blue Ridge. Coalmining Potomac Appalachia has more
common economic and cultural outlook with eastern Kentucky than with the
Potomac Tidewater; southern Maryland and the Northern Neck and the
Monocacy's dairy farmers all have their own ways of interpreting human
existence and defending themselves against its pitfalls. Within the
county governments and the Congressional and State-legislative
districts, these local and regional viewpoints choose political leaders
who joust for them in higher arenas, often aligning there with forces
from outside the Basin. Hence a metropolitan Maryland Congressman may
vote in the House with kindred souls from Long Island and Pasadena, and
his Basin colleagues with agricultural constituencies may oppose him on
some issues in alliance with representatives from Wyoming or Arkansas.

Despite the Basin's special ties to the Federal Government, many rural
Basinites are suspicious of Washington and the metropolis, often out of
a traditional distrust of "big government" and sometimes because they
see the accumulation of city folk at the head of the estuary as a menace
to rural modes of existence. Thus they may oppose water projects
designed to help the metropolis, or recreational development that
threatens to bring down on them large numbers of pleasure-bound
outsiders, though local businessmen's hope for a boom sometimes offsets
such opposition. The reapportionment of legislative districts now in
progress, plus the growing political muscle of metropolitan areas, is
probably going to cut down on the power of rural areas and rural
viewpoints--though just how much and in what way no one is yet sure.
Some prophets claim that these influences are going to erode rural
influence utterly; others that they will merely shape an alliance
between middle-class suburbs and rural areas against the beleaguered
central cities with their slums and other huge specific problems.

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