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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



The two main rivers formed thus are the North Branch, which collects a plenitude of troubles in its progress as we have seen, and the South Branch, which is treated more gently by the farmers and small townsmen who live along it, has no developed coal resources, and is a delightful fishing stream in a fine rural valley. Coming together at Old Town where Thomas Cresap took over a Shawnee site and set up a fortified headquarters in the upper Basin's legendary days, these two form the main stem of the river, which works across the Ridge and Valley washboard by intricate slicings and loopings that shape great bends among the forested hills. Deer and turkey outnumber people in most places there, and always alongside the river or not far away lie the towpath and the dry channel and the occasional stone locks and aqueducts of the old C. & O. Canal. Despite railroad competition and floods and all the other troubles, its barge traffic in coal and flour and whiskey and iron and limestone and other things was the focus of a whole roistering way of life from Washington to Cumberland in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Collecting the water of pristine mountain tributaries like the Cacapon and growing as it goes, cleansing itself of the North Branch's load of trouble, the river finds its way at last out of the washboard and meanders among silver maples and great sycamores across the productive populated expanse of the Great Valley that runs athwart the whole Basin from north to south. The Potomac is in thickly historic country now as it flows under the contemplative eyes of fishermen and past old villages and the relics of generations of human activity going back before written records, for here and there the funnel shapes of stone Indian fishing weirs can still be seen at shallow places and the durable fragments of their way of life can be scratched up along high shores. Of many Civil War clashes in the valley, Antietam was the most crucial; the Potomac shaped Lee's strategy there, and still ripples across fords by which his troops came to that violent place and afterward escaped it.

At Harpers Ferry on the Valley's eastern edge, the river is reinforced by the waters of its greatest tributary, the Shenandoah, rolling north out of the limestone country that fed the gray armies till Sheridan put a stop to that. Then it rams through the high wall of the Blue Ridge and out of the Valley into the Piedmont, and still gathering strength from tributaries like the Monocacy, dotted with big islands and frequented by waterfowl and good fish, moves powerfully downcountry past further mists and layers of history to Great Falls and the rushing, crashing descent through the gorge to tidewater at the capital.

From there down it is, as we have seen, a different thing, an arm of the sea and a sluggish extension of the river, shading from fresh to salt, called a river still but neither river nor sea in its ways, affected rhythmically and obscurely by both of them and subject to its own complex laws as well. In Indian and Colonial times this estuary was the part of the river that counted most for men, because of the bounty that came from its waters, the fitness of its shores for farming, and its navigability for boats and ships in a region where land travel was laborious and whose colonists depended on commerce with a European homeland. Its shores and those of the big tributary embayments—"drowned rivers," they have been called—are thickly sprinkled with traces and remembrances of three and a half centuries' people and events. Mount Vernon, old Fort Washington, Gunston Hall on Mason Neck where quiet George Mason lived and thought ... Aquia Creek where George Brent took his Piscataway bride to live apart from the Marylanders, Potomac Creek where John Smith found the river's namesakes living and another wily captain later tricked Pocahontas into captivity, Port Tobacco and Nanjemoy with memories of brokenlegged Booth, Chotank that gave its name to a whole forgotten way of life, Nomini of the Carters, the Machodocs and the Wicomico and the Saint Mary's and the historic rest.... Some of the big creeks are silted in now with mud washed down off the land in the old days, but in the flatter country toward the Bay most of the larger ones are still pretty and useful harbors for pleasure boats and for the fleets of varied commercial craft that go out to gather the estuary's crabs, oysters, clams, perch, striped bass, shad, and other edible creatures, including even eels for the European market. From hillsides, mellow mansions look down on the water that used to be their highway to the outside world, some crumbling, others proudly maintained.

Aquatic life in the upper freshwater stretches has been somewhat diminished and changed by pollution and silt, by dredging and filling, and by other activity. Runs of spawning shad and herring and perch still arrive there in spring, fortunately a season when heavy river flow keeps oxygen levels high. Along the whole estuary there is an abundance of air-breathing creatures, most noticeably birds, that reflect the wealth in its waters. They are strikingly numerous in the marshes that occur here and there next to the open river but more commonly up the tributaries, perhaps the richest biological areas in the whole river. Herons and egrets, ducks and geese, coots and grebes, hawks and ospreys and even a few bald eagles—a stirring sight so near to Megalopolis—are among the larger birds that congregate to live directly or indirectly off the life in the water, dependent on it.

Productive, healthy in its lower reaches even if under the shadow of change, its fishery intelligently and effectively regulated after the destructive and bitter "oyster wars" that persisted up into the 1950's, the Potomac estuary offers over 230,000 acres of water and some 750 miles of shoreline for human use and enjoyment and for the sustenance of a complex and valuable segment of the natural world. It is a fitting culmination of the river system that feeds down into it.

Of the Basin's remaining scenic and natural and historic wealth, nearly all of it associated to some degree with a part of the river system, much has stayed intact or has come back to good condition, accidentally or by someone's forethought. Well over a million acres are in public ownership of some kind, about a fifth of this being dedicated primarily to scenic preservation and public enjoyment as parks and recreation areas. These range from the great recently authorized Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area in the Basin's western highlands and the spectacular narrow Shenandoah National Park along the Blue Ridge, to local and county parks of smaller size and special function. In and around metropolitan Washington, good sense and good will on the part of many people in years past has resulted in a fine assortment of parks in an area where they are most needed and used, though with urban expansion more are needed all the time.

They are also harder to come by all the time. A recent and instructive example of this growing difficulty in creating public areas occurred at Mason Neck, a richly scenic and natural bootshaped peninsula projecting into the estuary not far below Mount Vernon, where George Mason's old home and a part of his estate are immaculately preserved by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Neck has twelve miles of riverfront and 6500 acres of undeveloped land only eighteen miles from the center of Washington, and though the river here is part of the eutrophic upper estuary, often thick with algae in summer, the place is a wildlife paradise, with forests of mature and stately trees and a Great Marsh of around 1000 acres. Incredibly, bald eagles still roost and even nest there, a fact which provided the initial spark for heavy public opposition to recent proposals for residential development of the Neck.



Supported by the Potomac Task Force whenever possible, the defenders of the peninsula organized as the Conservation Committee for Mason Neck and fought its cause almost inch by inch, with many setbacks and much expense of time and energy and money, through referendum elections and political hanky-panky and high levels of government. They won; development was forestalled and the nearly certain prospect is for a large composite public holding for park and wildlife refuge use, made up of Federal, state, and regional acquisitions.



In many parts of the Basin, old human excesses that in their time were not at all beneficial or protective have contributed paradoxically to the present good condition of the landscape. After boom had lifted her skirts and moved on elsewhere from the weary Tidewater, for instance, the region's long subsequent drowse on the fringes of action and history meant that it escaped many modern troubles, at least until recently. Not very long ago, many parts of it were more easily reached by slow boat than by car or train. Partly as a result, big tracts of military land there acquired mainly when acreage was cheap—57,000 acres around the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, are one example—form a valuable public asset for potential future use. And throughout Tidewater here and there, old estates in private hands guard their woods and fields and shores against increasing development, though more and more each year crumple before pressure and the temptation of speculators' and developers' cash.

Similarly, after the mountains of the upper parts of the Basin were logged bare and in many places burned off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—"Cut out and get out" was the slogan—their stripped and eroded state and their effect on the streams made it possible, and essential, for the Federal and state governments to buy up wide areas there as public forest land in the 1930's and to nurse them back to beauty and usefulness. The Shenandoah National Park dates from that same time, as do some state parks in the mountain regions. Some private owners of forest land in that area, though not enough, have taken their cue from the government agencies and seek a safe sustained yield of timber and pulpwood rather than a quick cash-in.

In many rural reaches of the Basin, for that matter, the kind of use private ownership gives the land is still an enhancement of the landscape rather than a smear on it. The beauty of farm land and pastures and old structures is as much a part of this country's heritage as is wilderness, for in its traditional forms farming has shaped a kind of wholeness and beauty all its own, blending with nature and working with it. The limestone soils in the huge trough of the Shenandoah Valley, for example, have been tilled and grazed during about two and a half centuries' occupation by white men. But for the most part agriculture there has been devoted to continuing productivity rather than to exploitation, and the rolling terrain, intersected by stream valleys and wooded ridges, has prevented much application of the massive techniques of fence-to-fence cultivation that prevail on the "factory farms" of the Midwest and West nowadays. The miles on miles of varied, carefully managed fields and pastures, with fat herds and handsome old stone houses and barns, nearly always against a backdrop of dark mountains and with a pleasant river or creek running at hand, among trees, have a potent storybook appeal that sticks in the memory of anyone who ever saw them.

The long narrow valley down which the South Branch flows is similar on its scale, as are many other arable strips and patches of the upper Basin that remember Shawnee days and Civil War guerillas. Near Washington, farms are waging a losing rearguard action against speculation and sprawl, but in the Piedmont to the north and west of the city lie some of the most pleasant rural landscapes in the United States. Up the drainages of the Catoctin and the Monocacy north of the Potomac, these are still functional landscapes, used mainly for dairy farming. In Virginia they tend to be less so, for this is the hunt country, where cosmopolitan gentry raise purebred stock on curried pastures, ride to hounds in red coats on frosty mornings and by great expenditure of money not garnered from crops or cattle have tastefully restored and maintained whole neighborhoods of venerable estates, as well as some superb old towns like Waterford, in traditional dignified beauty.

As these people have grasped—and others like them scattered throughout the Basin—most of the pull of farming landscapes and old houses and towns is nostalgic, rooted in a sense of the past and of the way the look and feel of a stone fence or a portico or a boxwood hedge can fill out understanding of people who were there long long before. This is what has been called "the scenery of association," and it is more deeply ingrained in the Potomac country than in newer parts of the nation, where "scenery" is most likely to denote the aspect of wild and natural places. With a history going back deep into the 1600's and long occupation by Indians before that, the Basin in many places has archaeological layers of such meaning. It tugs powerfully at the imagination of anyone with a sense of human continuity, and is woven in with the natural framework of things, as for instance the grove of chestnut oaks in the Bloody Angle at Gettysburg is inextricable from an awareness of the mighty rebellion that reached that far and no farther.

Most major historic sites and shrines in the Basin have received protection of one sort or another. The core portions of the great Civil War battlegrounds are owned and maintained by the National Park Service, as are Wakefield and Harpers Ferry and the C. & O. Canal and other such places. States, municipalities, organizations, and individuals have saved many others from destruction and decay and sometimes have built them back to what they were—Mount Vernon, Stratford, Gunston Hall, Fort Frederick and one or two of the smaller bastions that George Washington helped to set up against the Indians in the western Basin, and scores of other mansions and cabins and patches of historic soil.

There is still a wide sense of the past's weight among a population of whom many were born where they live and intend to die, and whose ancestors did so too. This sense is shared by many other people who move to the region, and in a few spots—mainly again in Virginia—it has led to a degree of protection for the appearance of whole towns or historic districts, as in Loudoun County with its admirable scenic regulations. Under the Historic Preservation Act of 1966, states are conducting surveys of such assets and studying means of encouraging their preservation. But funds are still short even for the Federal part of the program, and thus only individuals or accidents are still partially guarding some fine old places—Shepherdstown, West Virginia, for instance, or in Maryland the towns of Sharpsburg, Middletown, and Burkittsville—against adornment with chrome and neon and fake-stone veneer. Even in these places, some changes for the worse are taking place.

Troubles and threats

All these things, then, are a part of what the Potomac Basin has to offer in the way of environmental blessings. They form an endowment of national value and importance, and a detailed examination of them would take up more space than we can give them here, though some will come in for more discussion later in this report and others are examined in the corollary report of the Recreation and Landscape Sub-Task Force.

Some of them are in trouble now, and nearly all are faced with trouble as bad or worse if the forces of change are allowed to move as blindly and hoggishly forward as they have been moving during the decades behind us, ever faster and on ever wider fronts. The role of Jeremiah is not an agreeable one in a traditionally optimistic and forward-thrusting society, but those of us who care about the health of the world around us seem to be forced into it often in these times. Therefore let us look at somber matters.

We have catalogued the pollution of the river system and the ways in which it diminishes this most fundamental and valuable resource. We have seen how it varies through the Basin's streams according to the concentrations of people and the kinds of activities they engage in, and have noted that it is truly bad—deep-rooted, past a point of easy return—on the North Branch where coal and industry prevail, and in the upper estuary where the population is heaviest, with localized serious conditions on the Shenandoah, the Monocacy, and a number of smaller streams. And because land and water depend on each other and reflect each other's condition, these tend to be the places where the general environment is having the most trouble too.

The metropolis

Washington and its environs have always been a cynosure for American eyes, a place people have wanted to be proud of and have fought to keep "right." Many of its defenders have been powers in the land, and for a long time in the past the battle was generally a winning one. Even aside from the city's planned monumental Federal center with its government buildings, memorials, formal parks, malls and avenues—largely traceable to the ideas of Pierre L'Enfant and the sporadic respect paid them by the founding fathers—it has amenities undreamed of in and around most American cities: things like the Potomac Great Falls and gorge with the C. & O. Canal alongside, Arlington Cemetery, Mount Vernon, the Georgetown neighborhood where private taste and determination have brought a near-slum back to 18th-century grace and function, Roosevelt Island, several fine local and regional parks, the George Washington Memorial Parkway along the Potomac, and incredible Rock Creek winding down its natural valley through the Maryland suburbs and the District to the river.



Yet the rampaging growth to which the metropolis, in common with other American centers of population, has been subject during the past two or three decades means not only that these pleasant places are being pressed upon by many more people than anyone thought they would ever have to serve, but also that some of them are in danger of destruction or irreparable damage, and the tone of the city as a whole has been changing for the worse. The once magnificent upper estuary, as we have seen, is afflicted with complex and ugly pollution that shuts it off from the pleasant use it might otherwise sustain, and makes it a detraction from the Federal splendor along its northern shore rather than the enhancement it used to be. In places like the Alexandria and Georgetown waterfronts, industrial dilapidation on the shorelines more appropriately matches that pollution in mood, and on the Virginia side here and there undistinguished, often jerrybuilt highrise clutter has taken the place of the calm and wooded hills toward which the capital city once could look.

Parks and open areas within the metropolis and out from it are often crowded, trampled, and belittered during most times when people can get away from making a living to visit them, and thus can furnish only a little of the quiet and elbow room that might be their main contribution to urban peace of mind. They are also subject to pressure and often damage from outside, stemming from the economics, the politics, the governing mood of restless growth. The blowtorch roar and black oily exhaust of jet airliners coming and going at National Airport, for instance, diminish and cheapen all the green space and monumental beauty so purposefully arranged along the Potomac shore. And only the bitterest kind of fight can occasionally save a park or a stream valley or the river itself from a projected addition to the spaghetti network of freeways and beltways and bridges and other high-use traffic channels along which flow swirling, never-ending currents of cars. Or from standard suburban development.

Rock Creek is a complex example of how the city threatens its own amenities. We have glanced at it already—polluted by casual spurts and dribbles of waste from hundreds of thousands of people, its basic hydrology and therefore its very existence as a stream dependent on the proper use of the rural upper third of its watershed. For it has already suffered the loss of many tributary runs and branches in the lower two-thirds during the process of solid development.

In 1966, the critical upper third of the Rock Creek basin was very nearly turned over to suburban developers as a playground for bulldozers by a lame-duck Montgomery County Council on a rezoning spree. When protests against these actions, as well as against the general degradation of the stream, culminated in the issuance of our report The Creek and the City and then in a public meeting under INCOPOT auspices, people who had long been fighting the Creek's battle became the nucleus of a revived public effort. It now appears that under a new Council the upper watershed may be developed in some accordance with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission's protective plan for the area, so as to keep much of its surface covered with the grasses and humus through which rainwater percolates underground into aquifers that feed the creek through dry periods, and with some safeguards against the customary terrific siltation that careless development produces. And pressure has been generated to deal with the creek's other pollution, which is certain to be a long and laborious job.



Suburbanization itself is based in social forces, and this is not a sociological report. The knotted, often bitter, sometimes violent tone of contemporary American cities does not come within our province, but some consideration of it is inevitable. Not only must any planning for a decent environment—like planning for water use—take into account the needs and interest of the majority of the Basin's citizens who live in and around Washington, but it needs to be based in some understanding of the way they are. For in part the way they are is what determines the pattern of urban growth and much of the restless shifting and wandering that makes the city's people a strong influence to the limits of the Basin and beyond. In part also, however, the pattern of urban growth makes the people the way they are—it has been observed, for instance, that if suburban Americans were better satisfied with their manner of life, they probably would not spend so much of their time in automobiles getting away from it.



Within Washington itself, children may be born to erstwhile rural parents and may come to adult years with only a scant sense of the peace and beauty that can be found a few miles away, and often with little sense of anything else but the crumbling, teeming, stifling, noisy, sooty slums where they live—the other side of the monumental splendor along the Federal riverfront. Not all urban frustration is an outgrowth of the physical environment by any means, but much is. And this frustration, plus the pattern of exodus for some and sour jammed imprisonment for the rest, has within the past few years been killing off one by one all the special satisfactions and delights that cities from time immemorial have furnished their inhabitants.

[Illustration:

This 26 square-mile section of the Rock Creek watershed, just above the District line in Maryland, was rural in 1913, with many small tributaries fed by springs and seeps. Ensuing development based on little knowledge of natural processes covered most of the old aquifer recharge areas with pavements and rooftops, so that more precipitation ran rapidly off the land instead of soaking in and flowing out gradually into streams. Flooding during storms and loss of flow at other times caused most of the tributaries to be covered over as storm sewers, so that out of 64 miles of natural flowing stream channels that existed in 1913 in this section, only 27 miles can be found above ground today.]

Fleeing the dissonant center—or avoiding it from the start when they move to the metropolis from elsewhere—citizens who can afford it move into suburbs carved in the outlying countryside by gargantuan machinery, sometimes in compliance with a plan that preserves some trees and airy open space and a sense of the things that were, but more usually not. Here the fugitives place themselves one against the other in the hugeness of their numbers so that very quickly in many places the countryside hardly exists except in leapfrogged forlorn patches or farther out, where its ownership in speculatively held blocks—the old farm houses gone to pot, their fields in weeds or casually tilled or grazed to merit agricultural taxation—avouches the certainty of continuing sprawl. It is a much-documented process with two decades of history behind it now. It is cancerlike in its effect on the region, and disillusioning in its effect on many of those who participate, for often it forces them into the position of being mass destroyers of the very things they seek—air and wild greenery, quietness and the elbow room to be themselves.



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Sprawl as a problem farther out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Industry in the landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Basin landscape problems

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



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.