The Nation\'s River

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Worth noting also is the fact that many erstwhile "rural areas" are
getting less rural by the year. With population pressures and industry
and pollution and looming water deficits, they have more and more in
common with the Washington metropolis, and more need for "big
government" programs. In the long run, an overwhelming majority of the
Basin's future population will probably be city-dwellers, with a
consequent effect on general attitudes toward Basin planning and
projects--though exactly what effect is not at all certain.

Public attitudes toward environmental action

One reason it is not certain is that the average person's set of
attitudes toward the world around him is not totally determined by the
circumstances of his life--by whether he is a city-dweller or a farmer
or a small townsman, an engineer or a poet or a hardware salesman or a
factory worker. Southern or Northern, black or white, poor or rich or
pleasantly salaried. These things have great weight in coloring people's
attitudes, but so do individual tastes and individual ways of
interpreting the fact and ideas that flood in upon all of us these days.
And so also do the vast and shifting currents of emotional and
philosophical response that sway our society in one direction or another
from year to year, from decade to decade.

In relation to the environment, certain differing philosophical currents
of this kind have surfaced to view at various points in this report, if
only briefly. They have influenced the fate of past proposals for
dealing with the Potomac river system and landscape, and they are still
here to continue exerting influence. In individual citizens' minds, they
often mix and balance with one another in various ways, but they are
discernible as separate forces.

Stout among them is the traditional American--and human--view that the
natural world exists for the primary purpose of bettering the lot of
such human beings or groups of human beings as may have the ingenuity
and the vigor to extract its treasures or to adapt it to their use.
Quite often the activities for which this view provides justification
are exploitative--they use up natural resources or they bring about
other irreversible changes in the world roundabout. Some
conservationists think this makes them automatically evil, but things
are not quite that simple. Such exploitative activities have led our
species the full length of the road from the Stone Age to the
sophisticated and powerful technological civilization of present times.
The idea that we have a full right to engage in them is deeply
ingrained, particularly in this country whose memories of the
frontier--a hardy, exultant line of subjugation and exploitation moving
across the virgin continent--are not remote but fresh.

[Illustration]

Certainly in its crasser manifestations--this utilitarian philosophy has
widely destructive effects nowadays. Strip mines gouged out without
thought of restoration, wanton land speculation and development, the
casual dumping of raw wastes into streams by towns or industries and a
number of other harmful practices mentioned in this report are all
clearly based in a conviction that what one does to the world around him
is his own sweet business. That conviction has longstanding sanctity
among Americans and many who hold it are moral and upstanding folk. But
in a world as heavily populated as this one, possessed of such augmented
technological ability to assail and exploit the natural world, there is
clearly something wrong with it.

Other exploitative human activity based in utilitarianism is not crass
or all so obviously wrong, especially in today's context. Population
growth poses a moral question but also a logistical one: uncontrolled
growth may well be questionable, but it is a staggering reality. The
additional millions of people thus invited to present and future feasts
must be provided for. Many thinkers view the economic expansionism of
our time, together with the vigorous technology which it fosters and is
fostered by, as the only means toward this end. Some, indeed, view it as
a happy and healthy state of things, indefinitely extensible as
technology itself furnishes substitutes for exhausted natural
substances, natural forces, and natural experiences.

Allied to this view is a sturdy and widely held American belief that
"development" of natural resources is automatically a good thing
regardless of the need--toning up the economy of a region or a state or
a nation, keeping things moving. Most people give it some practical
support, even those who in theory suspect its validity. For we are a
moving people. We have known little stasis in the centuries of our
presence on this continent, and each generation of us is imbued anew in
childhood with certain axiomatic ideas; movement is forward, growth is
up, construction is better than vacancy, not to make economic use of
something is to waste it. These ideas linger in our reactions: "You
can't," the saying goes, "stand in the way of progress."

[Illustration]

Certain other philosophers, growing in numbers these days, say
emphatically that you can and should. These are the history-minded
people, the wilderness folk, the nature traditionalists, and the others
whose main concern is that man and the pleasant world around him have
lost all semblance of a balanced relationship with each other, and whose
view of the sturdy plunderlust of our ancestors is that our inheritance
of it, combined with the technology of bulldozers, is aiming us straight
toward a world in which our own structures and destructions may be all
there is to see, our own fumes and sewage all there is to smell, our own
voices and machines all there is to hear. Some people of this stamp are
quietly pessimistic; others actively commit themselves to fight. Some
who fight see present human growth and the growth of human demands on
resources as the stark unavoidable realities they are, and seek mainly
to guide them and mitigate their effects. Others stiffen their necks
against development to meet those demands, staunch enemies to all
reservoirs and other forms of compromise, stubborn if highminded
nay-sayers against the tide, consistent even when illogical.

Taken as a whole, however, these people with a sense of the imponderable
human value of natural ways and natural things may constitute the most
powerful support available for thoughtful planning and conservation. In
a precipitate and voracious society plunging on into its future, they
look back and seek to retain the best of what has always been, for
conservationism at least in this sense is conservatism too. Upon their
increase in numbers, in broad understanding and in political
forcefulness, upon the arrival of their basic values at a point of
publicly accepted respectability at least equal to that presently
enjoyed by time-hallowed exploitation and the profit motive, hope for a
decent future must heavily depend.

All of these ways of looking at man's problematical relationship with
the crust of the planet he inhabits, plus a number of others, are at
work within the minds of conscious people in this region and in the
great cauldron of its politics. Here they mingle with State and regional
and local loyalties and private self-interests into a fine American soup
of eagerness and reluctance, faith and apprehension, awareness and
befuddlement, chicanery and square dealing, altruism and frank greed,
rage and reasonableness, that is as real as any mountain in the Basin
and as inevitable a consideration for realistic planning as the river's
own characteristics of flow. For any proposal or set of proposals for
action in the Basin that does not take into account what the Basin's
people are like, and how their idiosyncrasies and preferences and
sympathies find political expression, is foredoomed to failure, be it
ever so ideal in anyone's abstract terms.

Pecuniary matters

Then there is money. Restoration and protection of the scheme of things
and its adjustment to needful human use, on the scale we are considering
in the Potomac Basin, is expensive, often involving many millions of
dollars for action against only one phase of deterioration or threat or
shortage. In accordance with the breadth of overall aims, much of this
money must be Federal. Where benefits or responsibilities are clear, as
in relation to sewage treatment plants and sources of water supply,
states or communities or institutions usually pay a share. If Federal
policies regarding flood protection and river flow augmentation for
pollution control are made more logical in the ways sketched earlier in
this report--as seems likely--such sharing will increase. Private
investment or philanthropy may often play a part, as in the purchase of
municipal bonds, the donation of scenic property for public use, or--a
hopeful trend of recent date--a private organization's use of its money
to facilitate high public purposes. The main example of this last
service on the Potomac is the recent purchase and interim retention of
important wildlife and park lands on Mason Neck by the Nature
Conservancy, for later resale without profit to public agencies when
needed authorizations and funds have been obtained.

[Illustration]

Nevertheless, most such projects do have a public purpose with diffuse
benefits, and sooner or later most of their cost has to be paid out of
public dollars deriving from collected local, State and Federal taxes.
Sometimes it is dispensed through Federal grant programs created by
Congress to meet pressing needs, or from other special sources fitting
the occasion. More often it must be sought in the standard established
manner: concrete proposals for action shaped and presented, with a
computation of the cost and the value of expected benefits, to Congress,
State legislatures, or local governments for examination and
authorization, and funds or bond issues later voted for carrying them
out.

The cash available for both regular programs and special proposals from
year-to-year will vary according to the state of the economy, the number
and severity of other demands on government budgets, and their relative
apparent urgency. This imposes on planners not only an obligation to
make sure that what they propose has public value that fully justifies
its price, but also a need to gear immediate priorities and projects
realistically to the amount of money there is some hope of getting for
them. It is an unhappy fact that there is often less than no point in
presenting even fine proposals for legislative consideration at a
financially inappropriate point in history. Once defeated, whatever the
reason, they may forever languish in limbo.

At this particular point in history, this country has been for some time
involved in a tough, costly conflict in Southeast Asia which inexorably
absorbs much of the available Federal money. Americans are a rich
people, riding a wave of prosperity, and much is left over for other
things. But in this turbulent and questing era, they also have a good
many other urgent and expensive problems and projects on their hands
besides those dealing directly with natural resources and conservation.
The problems are familiar words on the front pages of newspapers and in
evening conversations: poverty, urban crisis, transportation, national
defense, public health, world hunger and unrest, space exploration,
schools, and the rest. All cost hugely. And, though individual
conservation proposals of clearly critical importance most often receive
fair and full consideration, one or two or more of these other realms
for action usually loom larger to the eye of the public and the Congress
than do environmental programs in general. Therefore they get first shot
at the funds available for spending year by year.

Most people have a bias in favor of their own chosen field of interest.
To some, the right use of the natural earthly framework of things
matters supremely. They tend toward a conviction that sooner or later it
will stand very high on any list of priorities for spending, as the
magnitude of what is being lost and diminished is borne in on the
consciousness of the general public. Yet, as of now, it faces heavy
competition for limited funds, and this is another reality for
consideration, as solid for the moment as the Basin's physical problems,
as solid as the politics of which it is a facet.

The implications of complexity

These are not the only uncertainties and complexities that confront
anyone who would act toward restoring and preserving the waters and
landscapes of the Potomac and making them serve man, but some of the
more specific and potent ones not dealt with earlier in this report.
Others have been discussed in former chapters or at least have received
cursory mention. Among them are water technology's state of flux that
offers a strong if hazily defined hope of being able to do things better
and better as time passes; the need for more and better data; the
problems for which workable solutions simply do not yet exist; the
inequities or inconsistencies created by certain present Federal water
policies; the dubiousness inherent in forecasts of future human
pressures and problems; the frequently crossed purposes of high agencies
regarding environmental action; the difficulty of feeding true esthetic
and recreational values into cost-benefit computations; and the
paralytic tangle of motives and loyalties in regard to planning at the
local level. And a great many others could be found.

Taken all together and linked to the assumption--fundamental in this
report--that the Potomac and its landscape deserve rescue and
coordinated right use, these areas of doubt, changefulness, and
difficulty add up to a strong body of argument for flexible continuing
planning on a Basinwide scale and for a specific, authoritative Potomac
Basin institution to guide it and put it into effect.

There are two main alternatives to such flexible planning and
coordination and they both, under present and probably future
conditions, point toward slightly modified chaos. The first would be to
allow going or incipient Federal and State programs for water quality
improvement and erosion control and such things to take their overall
course, while water supply, landscape protection, and other problems
are dealt with in the traditional, piecemeal, localized manner as
conditions here and there become bad and force action, or as "fall-out"
from non-Basin programs takes casual effect. This relinquishment of
coordination would make the task of clean-up immensely harder and less
effective in the long run, and it would turn over most of the Basin's
unprotected scenic amenities to exploitation on the basis of their
short-term utility and the profit they could be made to yield.

The second alternative would be to shape a rigid overall plan for the
Basin prescribing definite solutions, feasible in terms of tried and
true technology, for all its problems that exist today and are expected
to materialize in the future, and then to seek authorization and funds
to put the plan into effect. This procedure has disadvantages already
noted in detail in this report. It makes large irreversible decisions
that future generations, stuck with the results, may find less than
totally attractive, especially since they very probably will have better
ways of doing things. It pins itself to fallible assumptions about those
future generations, and must be formed in terms of present laws and
policies, which are not always ideal. Physically, a plan of this kind
could be worked out that would function with reasonable efficiency, at
least in water matters, for there is nothing primitive about today's
technology. But esthetically it would leave much to be desired even by
present standards, and politically, furthermore, its very wholeness and
rigidity would mean that it would have to be sold as a complete package
or else be doomed to fragmentation, which would lead to much the same
sort of piecemeal expedient development as no plan at all. Quite aside
from the budgetary difficulties of the moment, the Potomac Basin's
political complexity makes whole acceptance and implementation of such a
plan extremely doubtful.

The question of an agency

If flexible coordinative planning's advantages for a place like the
Potomac Basin are recognized, and it is accepted as the most reasonable
and hopeful way to approach problems there, the question arises as to
what kind of agency is best suited to carry it forward and to act on it.
Besides certain unique agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority
several types of institutions are available that can be oriented toward
a whole interstate river basin.

An _interstate compact_ is a detailed agreement between two or more
States to act toward a common specific goal. It needs the approval of
Congress, but the Federal government usually takes no formal part in the
compact commission's activities, nor are Federal activities in the basin
subject to compact commission control. A _Federal-interstate compact_,
on the other hand, does have Federal participation and provides for some
limitation on Federal freedom to act on basin problems without compact
commission consent. Compact commissions under either of these types of
agreement can have wide or quite limited powers in regard to planning,
construction, management, and such things, depending on the specific
agreement itself.

Two kinds of Federally-directed bodies with primary emphasis on planning
are in operation in various river basins. _A Title II river basin
commission_, as defined in the Water Resources Planning Act of 1965, is
formed by the President to carry out comprehensive basin planning, with
a Federal chairman and members from Federal agencies, Basin States, and
approved interstate or international agencies with jurisdiction in the
Basin. A _Basin inter-agency committee_ is created by agreement among
Federal agencies for an assigned mission, usually the coordination of
Federal and State planning through the exchange of information about
programs and projects.

The main work of the Federal Interdepartmental Task Force on the Potomac
has been done at the same time that the new Water Resources Council has
been studying out its powers and putting them to use. Formed before the
Water Resources Council, the Task Force was assembled as a unique entity
rather than as one of the categories of Federal planning organizations
mentioned above. But, having been shaped after a directive from the
President and having worked in cooperation with the Basin States'
Governors' Advisory Committee, the Task Force together with that
Advisory Committee has been exercising some of the main functions of a
Title II river basin commission. These commissions can plan flexibly, in
stages, if this is desirable. They make recommendations for
comprehensive development which can quite compatibly be implemented by a
separate basin management authority, perhaps of a type recommended by
the commission.

In these terms, the water-related recommendations that accompany this
Interior Department report, which have been concurred in by the other
Federal agencies on the Task Force and by the Governors' Potomac River
Basin Advisory Committee, can be considered a first stage in a new
approach to comprehensive planning for the Potomac. Hence it is time not
only to undertake these recommended initial actions toward the balanced
development and preservation of the Basin, but also to consider an
agency or agencies to take over such coordinative planning, management,
and operation as may be necessary. From the start, it has been
recognized that a long-term management agency was going to be desirable,
and we have been inquiring toward its definition. From the start also,
it has seemed obvious that some form of Federal-interstate compact
offered the most promise, for various reasons.

The direct and special interest of the Federal government in the Basin
is extensive, and clearly justifies continuing Federal participation in
any planning and development. On the other hand, to invest all or most
management authority for such a politically complex region in Federal
hands would ignore certain powerful realities, and would throw away a
chance to achieve the most meaningful kind of "creative Federalism." The
Basin States have shown strong willingness to take on responsibility and
authority in relation to the Basin's problems and to cooperate with one
another and with the Federal government toward their solution. An
organization based in such cooperation could cut through much of the
Basin's tangle of jurisdictions involved and to each of them
individually, and would be responsible to each and all. It could mesh
the efforts of the numerous and diverse action agencies sponsored by
each jurisdiction and aim them toward overall Basin goals, probably more
effectively than any other arrangement could.

Early in this planning effort, primary responsibility for inquiring into
the desirable characteristics of such an agency was allotted to the
Governors' Advisory Committee. After over two years' hard work by a
subcommittee, the Advisory Committee has lately made public the
preliminary draft of a Potomac River Basin Compact. It proposes a
compact commission with broad power and responsibilities to adopt and
maintain comprehensive plans for water resources and amenities, and to
acquire, construct and operate facilities related to water problems and
use, watershed management, and recreation. It would be financed by
government and private funds, could issue bonds, would absorb INCOPOT,
and would consist of six members--one each from the four Basin States,
the District of Columbia, and the Federal Government.

The draft compact is currently being discussed at public hearings
scheduled in various parts of the Basin, and is under review by the
Water Resources Council. Undoubtedly it will be altered somewhat during
these processes, and it will very possibly undergo further alteration at
the hands of the State legislatures and the Congress, which will have to
review and approve it before the agency it proposes can be created. All
of this will take a good deal of time. The detailed features of the
institution that may emerge cannot be precisely known at this point,
and a specific Federal recommendation for its establishment is not
yet possible. Nonetheless, the compact draft's essential
principles--adequate authority, accepted responsibility, and protection
of the interests of the participant jurisdictions while moving toward
coordinated Basinwide accomplishment--are sound and needful ones, and
offer the best kind of hope of implementing and continuing the sort of
flexible, coordinated planning and action that we have advocated in this
report.

The members of the Potomac Planning Task Force, the A.I.A. group, in
their recently published independent report, have made a strong
recommendation for a new type of Federal institution, a Potomac
Development Foundation, which would be headed by a Presidentially
appointed administrator and would have a planning staff and a
top-caliber professional advisory board. It would not engage in
construction, operation, or management of projects, but would be
liberally financed over a period of five years out of Federal funds and
would emerge as a self-sustaining agency with power to assist in Basin
planning, to acquire land, to make grants for various purposes, and to
sponsor appropriate development of the Basin's resources with
low-interest loans. With a strong orientation toward ecological values,
scenic preservation, architectural amenity, and recreation, it would
emphasize a long-range approach to coordinated Basin planning.

A Development Foundation of this kind would obviously harmonize with the
main principles enunciated in this present report. It is also envisioned
by the A.I.A. group as compatible with a compact commission or other
management agency, though they have recognized that the relationship
between the two would need to be studied out at length.

The proposal is a bold one and an appealing one, with much promise,
particularly in its potential for giving full weight to ecology and the
amenities in planning. We are hopeful that its basic idea will get
serious consideration during the period of institutional study and
review that is coming up.

In the period before permanent planning and management machinery for the
Potomac materializes, the Basin will get much protection against major
disruptive change through the continuing interest of Federal and State
agencies made aware of its problems during this first-stage planning
effort, through improvement and preservation programs already in
movement or initiated by this report, and perhaps most of all through
aroused and informed public interest. There is room for a broadly based
citizens' watchdog organization to keep tabs on Basin affairs and to
exert leverage in such critical fields as local planning. It might be
formed as a new group or might be built around an existing organization
such as the new Potomac Basin Center, whose function has been to comment
impartially and intelligently on Basin planning and prospects.

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