The Nation's River Part 12

Public att.i.tudes toward environmental action

One reason it is not certain is that the average person's set of att.i.tudes toward the world around him is not totally determined by the circ.u.mstances of his life--by whether he is a city-dweller or a farmer or a small townsman, an engineer or a poet or a hardware salesman or a factory worker. Southern or Northern, black or white, poor or rich or pleasantly salaried. These things have great weight in coloring people's att.i.tudes, but so do individual tastes and individual ways of interpreting the fact and ideas that flood in upon all of us these days.

And so also do the vast and shifting currents of emotional and philosophical response that sway our society in one direction or another from year to year, from decade to decade.

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

Stout among them is the traditional American--and human--view that the natural world exists for the primary purpose of bettering the lot of such human beings or groups of human beings as may have the ingenuity and the vigor to extract its treasures or to adapt it to their use.

Quite often the activities for which this view provides justification are exploitative--they use up natural resources or they bring about other irreversible changes in the world roundabout. Some conservationists think this makes them automatically evil, but things are not quite that simple. Such exploitative activities have led our species the full length of the road from the Stone Age to the sophisticated and powerful technological civilization of present times.

The idea that we have a full right to engage in them is deeply ingrained, particularly in this country whose memories of the frontier--a hardy, exultant line of subjugation and exploitation moving across the virgin continent--are not remote but fresh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pecuniary matters

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

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Nevertheless, most such projects do have a public purpose with diffuse benefits, and sooner or later most of their cost has to be paid out of public dollars deriving from collected local, State and Federal taxes.

Sometimes it is dispensed through Federal grant programs created by Congress to meet pressing needs, or from other special sources fitting the occasion. More often it must be sought in the standard established manner: concrete proposals for action shaped and presented, with a computation of the cost and the value of expected benefits, to Congress, State legislatures, or local governments for examination and authorization, and funds or bond issues later voted for carrying them out.

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

At this particular point in history, this country has been for some time involved in a tough, costly conflict in Southeast Asia which inexorably absorbs much of the available Federal money. Americans are a rich people, riding a wave of prosperity, and much is left over for other things. But in this turbulent and questing era, they also have a good many other urgent and expensive problems and projects on their hands besides those dealing directly with natural resources and conservation.

The problems are familiar words on the front pages of newspapers and in evening conversations: poverty, urban crisis, transportation, national defense, public health, world hunger and unrest, s.p.a.ce exploration, schools, and the rest. All cost hugely. And, though individual conservation proposals of clearly critical importance most often receive fair and full consideration, one or two or more of these other realms for action usually loom larger to the eye of the public and the Congress than do environmental programs in general. Therefore they get first shot at the funds available for spending year by year.

Most people have a bias in favor of their own chosen field of interest.

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

The implications of complexity

These are not the only uncertainties and complexities that confront anyone who would act toward restoring and preserving the waters and landscapes of the Potomac and making them serve man, but some of the more specific and potent ones not dealt with earlier in this report.

Others have been discussed in former chapters or at least have received cursory mention. Among them are water technology's state of flux that offers a strong if hazily defined hope of being able to do things better and better as time pa.s.ses; the need for more and better data; the problems for which workable solutions simply do not yet exist; the inequities or inconsistencies created by certain present Federal water policies; the dubiousness inherent in forecasts of future human pressures and problems; the frequently crossed purposes of high agencies regarding environmental action; the difficulty of feeding true esthetic and recreational values into cost-benefit computations; and the paralytic tangle of motives and loyalties in regard to planning at the local level. And a great many others could be found.

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

There are two main alternatives to such flexible planning and coordination and they both, under present and probably future conditions, point toward slightly modified chaos. The first would be to allow going or incipient Federal and State programs for water quality improvement and erosion control and such things to take their overall course, while water supply, landscape protection, and other problems are dealt with in the traditional, piecemeal, localized manner as conditions here and there become bad and force action, or as "fall-out"

from non-Basin programs takes casual effect. This relinquishment of coordination would make the task of clean-up immensely harder and less effective in the long run, and it would turn over most of the Basin's unprotected scenic amenities to exploitation on the basis of their short-term utility and the profit they could be made to yield.

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

The question of an agency

If flexible coordinative planning's advantages for a place like the Potomac Basin are recognized, and it is accepted as the most reasonable and hopeful way to approach problems there, the question arises as to what kind of agency is best suited to carry it forward and to act on it.

Besides certain unique agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority several types of inst.i.tutions are available that can be oriented toward a whole interstate river basin.

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

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

The main work of the Federal Interdepartmental Task Force on the Potomac has been done at the same time that the new Water Resources Council has been studying out its powers and putting them to use. Formed before the Water Resources Council, the Task Force was a.s.sembled as a unique ent.i.ty rather than as one of the categories of Federal planning organizations mentioned above. But, having been shaped after a directive from the President and having worked in cooperation with the Basin States'

Governors' Advisory Committee, the Task Force together with that Advisory Committee has been exercising some of the main functions of a t.i.tle II river basin commission. These commissions can plan flexibly, in stages, if this is desirable. They make recommendations for comprehensive development which can quite compatibly be implemented by a separate basin management authority, perhaps of a type recommended by the commission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action now

In the different chapters of this report, various things stand out that need to be started quickly, either to satisfy looming demands for water development and water quality control, or to restore or protect scenic, ecological, and recreational a.s.sets which, if not attended to quite soon, are going to either disappear or suffer irreparable damage. A few recommendations for action on certain of these immediate problems were made in our _Interim Report_ of two years ago, together with recommendation on one or two noncontroversial items clearly not in conflict with any conceivable ultimate Basin aims. In abbreviated essence, the main Interim recommendations, made with Interdepartmental Task Force and Interstate Advisory Committee approval, were as follows:

(1) That a decision on the construction of Seneca dam and reservoir on the Potomac main stem be indefinitely deferred, but that the site be preserved as much as possible against further encroachment, in case it is ever needed;

(2) That three relatively small reservoirs be built on tributary creeks in the Paw Paw Bends area of the upper Basin, in addition to the authorized Bloomington reservoir on the North Branch, to begin providing a safe margin of water for metropolitan Washington and to serve Basin recreational needs;

(3) That a permanent "green sheath" of protection for the Potomac main stem, together with major recreational opportunity, be a.s.sured by means of a new kind of composite park of varying width along both sh.o.r.es from Washington, D.C., to c.u.mberland, Maryland;