The Nation's River Part 11

Anglers vary widely in their tastes. Some like the pursuit of ba.s.s and sunfish in reservoirs, and for them the upper estuary as well will be a good place to go when it is suitably cleaned up. Some want wide salt water and the lonely cry of gulls, and these the Basin can provide also.

Others prefer trout in highland streams, or smallmouth and catfish in the big flowing rivers, and as the state of the waters grows better, so too will all these kinds of fishing. On certain rivers and streams particularly, the a.s.sured flow that is going to be needed to cope with diffuse pollution will have a strong good effect on aquatic life and sport fishing. The Monocacy and the South Fork of the Shenandoah are examples. And in the Potomac falls and gorge below the metropolitan water intakes, as was noted in Chapter III, a.s.surance of a certain minimum flow would be justifiable on esthetic and recreational grounds alone, even aside from the need for it below in terms of water quality.

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

Certain other kinds of recreational facilities, const.i.tuting the bulk of profitable enterprises a.s.sociated with America's outdoor pleasure, will have to depend mainly or solely on private development of them.

Amus.e.m.e.nt parks, marinas, and ski lifts are examples, and so are most of the lodging places, restaurants, and other service facilities that thrive wherever increased public recreational activity takes place.

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

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

For the many other people who seek a more active and less mechanized relationship with natural things, a connected regional network of trails for walking or riding or cycling is a main need and a main opportunity.

Like the parkways or even more than them, it could be a framework for open s.p.a.ce preservation and an intimate means of using that open s.p.a.ce.

Tied in with existing segments like the C. & O. towpath and the Appalachian Trail, linking the towns and cities with ridges and riversides and parks and historic places, it would provide the most fitting kind of access to the whole Potomac realm of things for anyone willing to take an afternoon's stroll or a week's hike.

More fundamentally still, it would be a powerful and continuing element in conservation education of the best kind, the partic.i.p.ating kind. For generation after generation of the young people who would use it most, it would shape a feeling for rocks and water, creatures and trees, sun and wind and rain and hills and valleys, old houses and ruins and b.l.o.o.d.y fighting grounds, together with a sense of man's natural origins.

And shaping the feeling, it would shape some comprehension.

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

Avenues toward coping with landscape problems

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

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A great deal of legal machinery at various levels is available to stimulate the use of such techniques and to enhance outdoor recreation.

Some of it has already been put to work in the Potomac Basin; some of it needs reshaping for application to the conditions found there; and to cope with certain of the problems, specific legislative action tailored to the needs is going to be required.

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

Others among the going high-level programs have only a tangential interest in the landscape per se, though frequently much influence upon it. In the past, as we have observed earlier, many of them have been responsible for a good deal of landscape damage, encouraging sprawl and other forms of bad land use, inst.i.tuting great public projects without enough thought to their effect on esthetics and ecology, and so on. Some are still being conducted in this manner, though less and less as a general awareness of the need to restore and to preserve, to think twice before making ma.s.sive environmental changes, soaks out through the complex network of government and has its influence on att.i.tudes.

Increasingly, not only Federal but State agencies are making decent land use, recreation, and scenic preservation a partial condition and sometimes a whole reason for aid programs and public works.

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

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

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

As knowledge of their existence and their advantages gets around, they are beginning to have much effect, especially at larger centers of population.

Nevertheless, it is impossible at present to be sure that any given locality is going to take meaningful steps toward staving off blight and landscape destruction, and a great many of them in the Potomac Basin have not done so. Partly this is because the imperative need for planning is only now beginning to dawn upon many smaller communities.

But even where it has dawned and planning has been undertaken by men of good will, the great obstacles still exist and often block their efforts--the lack of money to match Federal or State program funds, the inability to convince fellow citizens who have to approve actions, the fat profits in real estate, the pervasive influence of personal relationships.

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

Regional planning organizations that can pool counties' and towns'

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

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And, just as in water management in all its phases, central and continuing Basinwide coordination of practices to restore the landscape, to protect it, and to make possible its pleasant use by the public is going to be needed. If landscape problems could be divorced from water problems it might be a good deal easier, at this point in time, to identify a fairly full range of "right" measures that could be taken to achieve such restoration and protection for a long, long period into the future than it would be to do the same thing for water problems.

Restoration and protection are not irreversible actions in the sense that some of the technological measures a.s.sociated with water management are, and the main danger of rigid landscape planning would not be that it might go too far, but that it might not go far enough to save all that ought to be saved.

But, as we have observed time and again in these pages, no divorce is possible between land and water. They are interdependent, and whoever concerns himself with one must perforce concern himself with the other.

Much of the action in regard to both is going to have to be long-term, continuing into the future. New threats are going to arise, some of them quite possibly based in a divergence of aims among various government programs with environmental effects. Thus, if a Basin-oriented agency is required--as we strongly believe--to oversee continuing action to clean up the Potomac river system and keep it clean, and to develop it for man's use in a wisely flexible and coordinated manner, that organization is going to have to take on a degree of responsibility for landscape matters as well, and is going to need some authority over them.

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

The main recommendation with a specific objective of preserving the landscape and providing recreation proposes the designation of the main river from Washington to c.u.mberland as the Potomac National River.

Though it is to remain accessible for appropriate use by towns and industries, its banks and islands will be protected and public access a.s.sured by means of a sheath of park land, in Federal, State, and local ownership and with a.s.sociated areas preserved by eas.e.m.e.nts and similar devices, for the entire 195 miles. The proposal, refined since its initial mention in the Interim Report, is a major one--but so, as we have seen, is the need it is designed to meet. This main reach of the flowing river, the Basin's hydrologic and scenic lifeline, is greatly menaced by rapid and inappropriate development along its banks, and through most of its length it is hard for people to reach. It has unique majesty and beauty and both historic and symbolic a.s.sociations that warrant a special degree of protection for it, and warrant also the a.s.surance of the kind of public appreciation and enjoyment the park sheath would permit.

The recreation and landscape recommendations as a body are attuned to reality as well as to needs. They represent things that can be done, at prices that can be paid--minimum initial steps toward ultimate achievements that would be inferior to none that our changeful age might produce. This is an insistently momentous time, with boom, frenetic pleasure, sophisticated communications, s.p.a.ce exploration, racial crisis, young rebellion, and all the other contemporary phenomena demanding attention and stirring up a dust that makes clear vision hard.

There is nothing minor about any of them. But one thing seems clear enough. When the dust settles down and those who walk here afterward look around them for the eternal wholeness of earthly things, they are going to have a hard time finding it if matters keep going as they have been going lately. If we who are here now fail to hand over to them a physical world that relates them to old reality and serves them well and helps to make them glad to be alive, then whatever other things we hand over to them may seem very small potatoes.

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

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V COMPLEXITIES AND PRIORITIES

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

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

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

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

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

The metropolitan jurisdictions, especially, in many ways find more common cause with one another and the Federal Government than with communities and governing bodies elsewhere in their own States.

Politically, this sense of collective ident.i.ty gets official expression in the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional body which, like its counterparts in other urban conglomerations throughout the country, is geared to work directly with the Federal Government in dealing with its own regional problems rather than having to come at Federal programs and agencies along the more lengthy traditional route through the States. The implications of this new kind of alignment are still a matter for debate and conjecture.

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

Despite the Basin's special ties to the Federal Government, many rural Basinites are suspicious of Washington and the metropolis, often out of a traditional distrust of "big government" and sometimes because they see the acc.u.mulation of city folk at the head of the estuary as a menace to rural modes of existence. Thus they may oppose water projects designed to help the metropolis, or recreational development that threatens to bring down on them large numbers of pleasure-bound outsiders, though local businessmen's hope for a boom sometimes offsets such opposition. The reapportionment of legislative districts now in progress, plus the growing political muscle of metropolitan areas, is probably going to cut down on the power of rural areas and rural viewpoints--though just how much and in what way no one is yet sure.

Some prophets claim that these influences are going to erode rural influence utterly; others that they will merely shape an alliance between middle-cla.s.s suburbs and rural areas against the beleaguered central cities with their slums and other huge specific problems.

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