The Nation\'s River

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Dilution of this acid pollution helps to minimize its effects, not
actually neutralizing them but reducing their severity in periods of low
river flow. It can be accomplished by impounding mine drainage for
release only during periods of high flow, though where sources are many
as on the North Branch this would be difficult. Or fresh water can be
held in bulk storage for release during low flow. In helping acid
conditions along the lower North Branch, therefore, the authorized
Bloomington reservoir may play a part, though it will do nothing for the
upper reaches of the river and the reservoir water itself will be acidic
if nothing is done to neutralize it. Under INCOPOT auspices, a promising
inquiry is being conducted into the possibility of instream acid removal
above the reservoir, using an energy process possibly powered by
electricity generated at the dam. If it works out as well as seems
probable, the benefits can be huge.

[Illustration]

There is little point, of course, in getting the acid out of the lower
North Branch unless the other pollution in that area is dealt with too.
This compounded trouble, involving a considerable number of towns and
industries with insufficient waste treatment or none at all, is made to
order for a pilot application of the regional or sub-basin type of waste
management authority mentioned earlier in this chapter. Not only is the
problem on the North Branch bad enough to warrant special overall
measures, but the area's topography is well suited to collection of
wastes and their conveyance to first-rate centralized treatment plants.
This approach too is being studied out by INCOPOT, not only for the
North Branch but for other well-adapted problem watersheds such as
Antietam Creek. Like similar systems in Germany that have long been
admired, it would pool the resources of all sub-basin waste producers,
get appropriate government funding, and subject all the pollution of a
given drainage area to intensive and comprehensive correction.

Machinery

Though its spread-out economic benefits are almost incalculably great,
good waste management unfortunately is seldom a money-making affair for
those who sponsor it. Therefore, it is not usually so much the concern
of private enterprise as of citizens in general and the various levels
of government that look after the citizens' desires and wellbeing. It
depends on laws to back it up, and on institutions and programs
established by law. These are the only machinery by which it can be
adequately stimulated, unless we assume that all waste producers are
altruistic to a point of self-sacrifice, an assumption which history
does not encourage.

Thanks to thoroughly justified public anxiety over the state of American
waters, there is presently on hand the best assortment of such legal
machinery that has ever existed, much of it so new as to be mainly
untested. The Key Federal item is the Water Quality Act of 1965, which
established the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration and set
into motion a national program to clean up interstate and tidal waters.
In the program the States were allotted primary responsibility for
setting standards of cleanliness and were given until June 30, 1967, to
work them out and submit them to the Federal Water Pollution Control
Administration for review. Later came the Clean Waters Restoration Act
of 1966, which authorized funds for F.W.P.C.A. construction grants to
help communities build waste treatment facilities. Programs under other
government agencies are also aimed at helping towns and cities deal with
wastes.

In May of 1966 the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration was
transferred from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the
Department of the Interior, with a good many changes in personnel. A
valuable move toward the longrun unity of Federal environmental study
and action, this change has meant that the agency's shakedown period in
its new surroundings has come during the latter part of our Potomac
work, and that some large questions of policy and procedure are only now
being answered. Furthermore, the fact that our study has coincided with
the inevitably lengthy shaping of the State standards, and with their
review and their coordination on specific interstate streams like the
Potomac and its main tributaries, has somewhat blurred our view of this
most significant legal machinery of all. For it is through these
standards and their enforcement that the fundamental action toward a
clean Potomac will be taken. The emphasis in formulating them and
reviewing them has been on vast improvement, not on a rationalization of
existing conditions, and behind them there is going to be legal muscle
for enforcement.

Erosion and sedimentation, particularly from urban and industrial
sources, will be of concern in these State programs, and in fact some
Basin States already have powers for use against them that have never
been brought fully to bear, but undoubtedly will be with the new
impetus. At the Federal level, going programs of the Department of
Agriculture--primarily under the Soil Conservation Service but also
involving the Forest Service--are the best machinery we have. Their
techniques of soil protection and runoff detention have been described
earlier, and are often applied in a coordinated way to whole small
watersheds. Mainly they are put into practice through the voluntary
cooperation of landowners, watershed associations, and local or State
governments, stimulated by Federal technical assistance and
cost-sharing.

* * * * *

It was noted earlier that these techniques can also be effective against
careless urban land shaping and other new concentrated sources of silt
such as strip mines. But in terms of legal machinery, these areas
present problems, chief among which is the matter of incentive on the
part of those who must cooperate if the programs are to work. In an
agricultural watershed, the effect of soil conservation practices and
flood control measures on the health and productivity of the land is
sharply evident to rural landowners and others in the neighborhood, who
all benefit from it and usually are eager to cooperate. But strip mine
operators and urban developers and road contractors and such folk seldom
have to live personally with the erosion and mud and trouble that may
result from the way they move earth and change the landscape. To them,
sediment control and respect for the way watersheds work, even with
cost-sharing, is likely to loom as simply an extra expense.

Under these circumstances, only stiff controls are going to make
watershed programs and other devices work right. Local sediment
ordinances are acutely needed, but are generally lacking or inadequate
or poorly enforced, perhaps mainly because silt, in common with other
pollutants, has some of its worst effects at points far removed from
where it originates and local governments prefer not to stir up local
developers and mine operators. It is a facet of what we called earlier
the philosophical source of pollution.

[Illustration: Small Watershed Projects Boost Economy of Communities]

This being so, the good of the Basin and the Potomac as a whole is going
to require the exercise of State and interstate and Federal power
against silt as well as against other pollution, especially around
populated areas, until such time as the populated areas have developed
the political maturity to take firm hold of their responsibilities in
such matters. Laws and ordinances of themselves solve nothing. For
example, many of the pollutive dribbles along Rock Creek and other
metropolitan watercourses are based in clearly illegal practices and
hence slovenly inspection and enforcement of existing regulations.
Others occur because of defects in the sewer system that could and
should be found and repaired. A shortage of manpower is one reason for
such trouble, but poor philosophy is a bigger one.

States, interstate bodies, and municipalities, however, can exert no
control over another and rather shameful set of pollution sources noted
earlier in this chapter. These are the delinquent Federal installations
in the Basin, generally but not always in the neighborhood of the
capital, that are contributing to the river's problem. Recent publicity,
much of it deriving from aspects of this present study, has been
bringing about some improvement, as has President Johnson's Executive
Order 11288, which directed that Federal facilities set the best example
in the matter of pollution control. But the order has obviously not been
obeyed with uniform enthusiasm in all quarters, defective philosophy and
short waste-disposal budgets being no exclusive property of local
governments. Sometimes this is because limited funds force agencies to
put waste treatment far down on their list for spending, and little is
left over for it. Whatever the reason in individual cases, a
continuation of persuasion and enforcement by the F.W.P.C.A. within the
Federal establishment is going to be essential, and Federal
installations ought to be required at least to equal or excel the
quality of treatment provided by other waste producers on the same
streams or bodies of water. Furthermore, all the diverse pollutive
activities dependent on Federal aid and cost-sharing--such as road
construction, for instance--ought to be brought under similar controls.

* * * * *

Certain major changes in public policy are needed if different
techniques of water quality improvement are to be combined in such a way
as to give the most economical, appropriate, and effective protection to
specific streams or river systems. The most important of these needed
changes concerns the role of flow augmentation as a tool, for inclusion
of water quality storage capacity in Federal reservoirs is a fairly new
and uncertain practice, and some rather deep pitfalls are becoming
evident.

One pitfall has to do with Federal Cost-sharing and the way it affects
the freedom of choice of the States and localities on which the primary
responsibility for eliminating pollution must rest. In building
treatment plants to lessen the load of wastes discharged to streams,
they can presently obtain Federal grants of up to 55% of the facilities'
total cost. But if storage capacity for water quality--i.e., for flow
augmentation--is provided in a Federal reservoir upstream, prevailing
Federal policy based in a 1961 amendment to the Federal Water Pollution
Control Act has been requiring them to pay nothing at all for it, though
before such storage is authorized they must certify that an adequate
standard of conventional treatment will be maintained downstream.
Obviously, if this continues to be so, when the inevitable choice comes
between improving on that adequate standard by investing in better
treatment, either at the beginning or later, and seeking river dilution
from a reservoir, they will be forced by sheer economics toward the
latter, whether or not it is the right thing to do or in an overall
sense the cheapest.

Like other aspects of flow augmentation already discussed, this
situation is analogous to that of flood control, where communities have
to pay a good part of the cost of local protection works or of
controlling flood plain development, but can get reservoir protection
free. In both cases, local authorities are stimulated toward choices
that are not necessarily the right ones, taxpayers in general are forced
to bear the weight of essentially local responsibilities, and the public
may forever lose scenic or recreational amenities of great worth. The
Department of the Interior, with a central interest in the problem, is
taking the lead in an attempt to arrive at a better flow-augmentation
policy that will permit right choices, put costs where they belong, and
make certain that at the local level where pollution takes place there
is sharp incentive to do something about it.

The other main difficulty has to do with the fact that river water has
many uses, which augmentation may enhance or even stimulate. Water
released from above during dry periods to increase and steady the
river's flow and to help it handle wastes may also help navigation and
hydroelectric power generation downstream, though neither of these is
any longer a main factor in the flowing Potomac. Augmentation of flow
can make the river prettier and more useful for recreation, and it can
have stout beneficial effects on fish and wildlife. And under present
conditions it constitutes a large increase in water of improved quality
for free use by irrigators and industries and municipalities, which may
so burgeon as a result that increased water consumption and waste
production will cancel out the water quality effects of the reservoir
releases in short order.

The need here, of course, is for some agency that can solidly guarantee
that water released for quality control will be allowed to achieve that
purpose and not be diverted to other uses that conflict with it. Where a
river runs within a single State, and the State's constitution permits,
the State may be able to adjust its powers of control and provide the
guarantee. But where more than one State is involved, as on all the main
rivers of the Potomac Basin, a good forceful river basin agency is
clearly needed to coordinate water supply with water demand, and to
ensure that benefits and cost responsibilities of any necessary
reservoirs are meted out where they belong.

In terms of legal and institutional machinery, in fact, such a river
basin agency is the most basic and urgent unfulfilled need along the
Potomac, for the coordination and continuing supervision of water
management in all its phases--assurance of supply, flood protection,
quality improvement, recreation--in the vast physical unit of land
drained by the river. And because land's condition is so often
influential on the quality and utility of water, the agency's concern
and authority must encompass some fundamental matters of land use as
well.

No clearer illustration of the potential of such a body could be found
than the achievements of the present Interstate Committee on the Potomac
River Basin--INCOPOT--during the quarter century of its existence.
Minimally financed and staffed, granted only advisory powers, toward the
cure of a vast and growing sickness, it has managed in many ways to hold
the line and even to improve things on the Potomac in a time when
conditions on many American rivers were growing drastically worse and
worse. Much credit accrues to some of the Basin States as well, but
without the continuing focus and hard work of the INCOPOT people,
dedicated to Basin thinking, it is doubtful that State efforts would
have added up to much help for the Potomac as a whole. Our present
strong hope of being able to clean up the river and its tributaries and
to make them what they ought to be is perhaps mainly due to this
organization's efforts.

[Illustration]

The scope of the job to be done is becoming clear. A far-reaching and
well-financed Federal pollution control program is getting under way,
even if some elements of policy and procedure need refinement and a
great deal of research toward the best answers to certain technical
problems remains to be done. The four Potomac Basin States and the
District of Columbia are poised for action at the level where it will
count the most, with new water quality standards to guide them and
Federal money and technical assistance for fuel. At the local level,
incentive to do things right has never been stronger than at present,
and it ought to grow still stronger as the sticks and carrots of the
Federal and State programs come into use and pressure from citizens
disgusted with dirty water builds up.

Things are moving. The chances are that they will move quite fast during
the next few years, as new technology and new understandings ease the
way toward solution of stubborn pollution problems. They are going to
have to move fast, for threats are proliferating fast as well. And if
things are going to move not only fast but right in the Potomac Basin,
they are going to need the guidance of a continuing and authoritative
body that concerns itself with them specifically like INCOPOT, focused
on Basin matters and dedicated to their study, but with a wider realm of
interest and stronger powers of coordination and enforcement to make
certain that the things that are done are the right things, in the right
order and the right places for the whole good of the Basin and the
river.

[Illustration]

IV A GOOD PLACE TO BE

Stream water comes from the surface of the land or out of its porous
underlayers, then flows seaward through its creases and folds, affecting
the land and the land's creatures along the way and being affected by
them. Thus, as we have already noted in more than one way, the
management of land and the management of water are closely intertwined,
from the way human use of a flood plain may demand structural
interference with a river's old habits, to the way erosive farming in
some West Virginia valley may help to make it harder to navigate Swedish
newsprint into Alexandria by ship.

In a like way, "practical" and "esthetic" considerations as to how both
land and water are treated are not easily disentangled from each other.
How much of the rising tide of public concern over American rivers and
lakes, for instance, comes from an awareness of what dirtied water costs
the economy, and how much is rooted in simple disgust over a monstrous
ugliness that should not be? Gullied and abandoned land grown up to
scrub and weeds is not only useless as it stands but also a sadness on
the landscape, a reminder of how far from the naive, often sentimental,
but lastingly powerful 18th century ideal of oneness with nature men
have wandered in their progress. A belching factory in the wrong place
can perform such multiple functions as blighting a countryside,
polluting a stream, lowering subdivision property values, and increasing
the local rate of emphysema.

Only lately has it begun to grow clear that in the traditional concern
with market exploitation of resources, moderns have not even evolved a
language or a scale to evaluate the loss to them inherent in a wrecked
landscape, a spoiled stream, and such things, or the positive worth of
an unspoiled section of countryside. But it is becoming obvious enough
that objections to environmental destruction are not necessarily
sentimental, naive, or impractical. A bit late, realization is growing
that the world has a certain longstanding wholeness with which people
interfere massively at their own peril. Landscape in the widest
sense--the sense of the integrity of a place to look at, to be in, to
use and to know and to know about--matters to human beings, and the
terms in which it matters involve incentive, fulfillment, and sanity.
And while human beings are soaking in this fact, the American landscape
is being rapidly gutted by human activity.

A stately avenue rots to slums before everyone's eyes. A pastoral valley
fills with houses gable on gable in six months' time; its stream runs
red with mud, floods wildly out of banks with every heavy shower,
shrinks to a foul dribble in time of drought, and finally is concreted
over into a storm sewer to subdue it and get it out of sight. The stone
cottage that a town's founder built with his own hands two hundred years
ago gets in the path of a new highway and is pushed down, and its rubble
used for fill beneath an exit ramp. What was once, when someone was
fifteen, a secret clearing in the woods beyond a city's edge, may hold a
hamburger stand or several dozen stacked car bodies when he comes back
to seek it out at the age of twenty. A secluded section of estuarial
shoreline, where eagles nest and Colonial patriarchs once brooded over
the rights of man and a few families now make a living from oysters and
crabs, is sold off to a development corporation headquartered in Chicago
or Houston or somewhere, which, in accordance with certain current
rights of man, divides it into 25-foot vacation lots with 250-gallon
septic tanks, and within four years anyone who wades out of his boat
there stirs up blue clouds of mellow sludge, and where did the oysters
and the eagles go? We Americans are inevitably progress-minded,
practically all of us, but we are beginning to wonder if progress needs
to cost so much.

[Illustration]

The Potomac landscape matters particularly, for certain reasons. One is
that we hope to make a model of it, commencing here processes of
preservation and restoration to show the rest of the country that modern
ways of being need not eat up everything whole and green and old and
meaningful and right. Another--not really separate, for it justifies
that model status--is that the Basin's landscape, not only around the
capital but far down the estuary and up along the flowing main river and
its tributaries, is both physically and spiritually a national
landscape, filled with national memories and meanings.

In the diverse kinds of country it holds and the ways of life they have
fostered--Tidewater, Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Great Valley, and rugged
Appalachia--it sums up much of the old Eastern, pre-Revolutionary
America that people left behind when they shoved off toward the Ohio and
the cotton South and the plains and the Rockies and the Pacific. A
reasonably conscious Oregonian or Iowan or Texan seeing it for the first
time knows that a part of what he is was sculptured there. Its map is
textured with a richness of names that call up remembrance of what
Americans used to be like and what they did, and how all of that led
toward their becoming what they are today. Names of Indian
tribes--Seneca, Piscataway, Dogue, Tuscarora, Anacostia--and Indian
objects and activities by the hundreds. Names tied to men and events
that carved history--old Saint Mary's where Calvert's Catholics came,
Stratford of the Lees, Wakefield and Mount Vernon of the Washingtons,
Braddock Heights, the Shenandoah, Harpers Ferry where John Brown lit a
fuse, Manassas and Antietam and Gettysburg, and a multitude of others.

As time goes in the United States, the Potomac Basin has been populated
by our restless people for a long while, and very little of it has not
been affected as a result--the deep exhaustion of the Tidewater when the
tobacco bonanza ran out, the lumbering off of the mountains, the grubby
continuing reign of coal along the North Branch, and now the explosive
growth of the Washington metropolis and the other centers of industry
and people. But still the Basin in general is not like Long Island,
swarmed upon by daily and weekly waves of millions, hard put to save
even traces of the natural magnificence it once had. It is not like much
of Southern California, packaged and delivered over whole to automobiles
instead of to human beings. It is nine million acres or so of still
mainly rural and agricultural, Eastern, temperate, humid North America
with a resident population of only about 3.5 million people, some
two-thirds of whom live in a relatively few square miles around
Washington. It has had and still has many ardent protectors, ranging
from small-town ladies' garden clubs to Presidents.

In consequence of these grateful facts, it has been able to recover from
most of the damage done in the past, and much of what it has always been
and always possessed still exists. There is enough natural harmony
combined with diversity, enough forward human movement combined with a
sense of what has gone before, to make the Basin's residents and those
who visit glad to be alive in such a world, insofar as the times, their
temperaments, their bank accounts, and their view of the human dilemma
may permit. In general it is still a beautiful and satisfying piece of
country, a good place to be.

But not all parts of it, and not for everyone, and most certainly not
with any guarantee that it is going to stay a good place to be of its
own accord, without any help. It is no privileged wonderland removed
from the dissonance and change of a crowded technological age.

The Basin's amenities

Of all the region's pleasant features, none exceeds the river system
itself, for it ties the others together and shares and adds to their
meanings. We have glanced at some of its "practical" aspects in
preceding chapters, though even there intangibles came into
consideration. It is the river's power to evoke human response and its
relationship to the wholeness of the Basin landscape that most
powerfully make it worth cleaning up, and also impose on planners a duty
to make certain that their proposals for making it serve human ends are
apt and needful ones.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

A river system draining the basin it has carved out over geological eons
of time is one of the more meaningful units in nature, but within it
there may be great variety. The Potomac starts as a multitude of diverse
trickles and oozes in the high green places of Appalachia, where spruce
forests and berry meadows and bogs know the tread of bear and deer,
beaver and bobcat, hunter and hiker and logger. The clear cold
streamlets formed there join together in their downward rush and form
strong whitewater creeks and rivers slicing down through canyons and
out into the troughs of the strikingly corrugated Ridge and Valley
Province, growing ever larger by the process of union and addition.

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