The Nation's River Part 9

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. Ca.n.a.l 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.

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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 sh.o.r.e rather than the enhancement it used to be. In places like the Alexandria and Georgetown waterfronts, industrial dilapidation on the sh.o.r.elines 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 s.p.a.ce and monumental beauty so purposefully arranged along the Potomac sh.o.r.e. 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 gra.s.ses 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.

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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.

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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.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

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 s.p.a.ce 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-doc.u.mented 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 partic.i.p.ate, for often it forces them into the position of being ma.s.s destroyers of the very things they seek--air and wild greenery, quietness and the elbow room to be themselves.

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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 cl.u.s.ters and townhouses and apartments rightly s.p.a.ced 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 ma.s.s 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 munic.i.p.al or county boundary lines may gut them. Money to buy needed open s.p.a.ce--the only way to ensure its protection--is usually short. And legal inst.i.tutions 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 s.p.a.ce 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 cl.u.s.ter 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.

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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 eas.e.m.e.nts, 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 cl.u.s.tering of dwellings with communal open s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.ble 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, ma.s.sive 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 a.s.suming 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 pa.s.sing 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, un.o.btrusive, 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.

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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 a.s.sortment 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 sh.o.r.eline. 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 sh.o.r.elines 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 a.s.sociated with it, for these waters and sh.o.r.es 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 sc.r.a.ped 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.