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There is little point, of course, in getting the acid out of the lower North Branch unless the other pollution in that area is dealt with too. This compounded trouble, involving a considerable number of towns and industries with insufficient waste treatment or none at all, is made to order for a pilot application of the regional or sub-basin type of waste management authority mentioned earlier in this chapter. Not only is the problem on the North Branch bad enough to warrant special overall measures, but the area's topography is well suited to collection of wastes and their conveyance to first-rate centralized treatment plants. This approach too is being studied out by INCOPOT, not only for the North Branch but for other well-adapted problem watersheds such as Antietam Creek. Like similarsystems in Germany that have long been admired, it would pool the resources of all sub-basin waste producers, get appropriate government funding, and subject all the pollution of a given drainage area to intensive and comprehensive correction.
Though its spread-out economic benefits are almost incalculably great, good waste management unfortunately is seldom a money-making affair for those who sponsor it. Therefore, it is not usually so much the concern of private enterprise as of citizens in general and the various levels of government that look after the citizens' desires and wellbeing. It depends on laws to back it up, and on institutions and programs established by law. These are the only machinery by which it can be adequately stimulated, unless we assume that all waste producers are altruistic to a point of self-sacrifice, an assumption which history does not encourage.
Thanks to thoroughly justified public anxiety over the state of American waters, there is presently on hand the best assortment of such legal machinery that has ever existed, much of it so new as to be mainly untested. The Key Federal item is the Water Quality Act of 1965, which established the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration and set into motion a national program to clean up interstate and tidal waters. In the program the States were allotted primary responsibility for setting standards of cleanliness and were given until June 30, 1967, to work them out and submit them to the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration for review.Later came the Clean Waters Restoration Act of 1966, which authorized funds for F.W.P.C.A. construction grants to help communities build waste treatment facilities. Programs under other government agencies are also aimed at helping towns and cities deal with wastes.
In May of 1966 the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration was transferred from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the Department of the Interior, with a good many changes in personnel. A valuable move toward the longrun unity of Federal environmental study and action, this change has meant that the agency's shakedown period in its new surroundings has come during the latter part of our Potomac work, and that some large questions of policy and procedure are only now being answered. Furthermore, the fact that our study has coincided with the inevitably lengthy shaping of the State standards, and with their review and their coordination on specific interstate streams like the Potomac and its main tributaries, has somewhat blurred our view of this most significant legal machinery of all. For it is through these standards and their enforcement that the fundamental action toward a clean Potomac will be taken. The emphasis in formulating them and reviewing them has been on vast improvement, not on a rationalization of existing conditions, and behind them there is going to be legal muscle for enforcement.
Erosion and sedimentation, particularly from urban and industrial sources, will be of concern in these State programs, and in fact some Basin States already have powers for use against them that have never been broughtfully to bear, but undoubtedly will be with the new impetus. At the Federal level, going programs of the Department of Agriculture—primarily under the Soil Conservation Service but also involving the Forest Service—are the best machinery we have. Their techniques of soil protection and runoff detention have been described earlier, and are often applied in a coordinated way to whole small watersheds. Mainly they are put into practice through the voluntary cooperation of landowners, watershed associations, and local or State governments, stimulated by Federal technical assistance and cost-sharing.
It was noted earlier that these techniques can also be effective against careless urban land shaping and other new concentrated sources of silt such as strip mines. But in terms of legal machinery, these areas present problems, chief among which is the matter of incentive on the part of those who must cooperate if the programs are to work. In an agricultural watershed, the effect of soil conservation practices and flood control measures on the health and productivity of the land is sharply evident to rural landowners and others in the neighborhood, who all benefit from it and usually are eager to cooperate. But strip mine operators and urban developers and road contractors and such folk seldom have to live personally with the erosion and mud and trouble that may result from the way they move earth and change the landscape. To them, sediment control and respect for the way watersheds work, even with cost-sharing, is likely to loom as simply an extra expense.
Under these circumstances, only stiff controls are going to make watershed programs and other devices work right. Local sediment ordinances are acutely needed, but are generally lacking or inadequate or poorly enforced, perhaps mainly because silt, in common with other pollutants, has some of its worst effects at points far removed from where it originates and local governments prefer not to stir up local developers and mine operators. It is a facet of what we called earlier the philosophical source of pollution.
Small Watershed Projects Boost Economy of Communities
This being so, the good of the Basin and the Potomac as a whole is going to require the exercise of State and interstate and Federal power against silt as well as against other pollution, especially around populated areas, until such time as the populated areas have developed the political maturity to take firm hold of their responsibilities in such matters. Laws and ordinances of themselves solve nothing. For example, many of the pollutive dribbles along Rock Creek and other metropolitan watercourses are based in clearly illegal practices and hence slovenly inspection and enforcement of existing regulations. Others occur because of defects in the sewer system that could and should be found and repaired. A shortage of manpower is one reason for such trouble, but poor philosophy is a bigger one.
States, interstate bodies, and municipalities, however, can exert no control over another and rather shameful set of pollution sources noted earlier in this chapter. These are the delinquent Federal installations in the Basin, generally but not always in the neighborhood of the capital, that are contributing to the river's problem. Recent publicity, much of it deriving from aspects of this present study, has been bringing about some improvement, as has President Johnson's Executive Order 11288, which directed that Federal facilities set the best example in the matter of pollution control. But the order has obviously not been obeyed with uniform enthusiasm in all quarters, defective philosophy and short waste-disposal budgets being no exclusive property of local governments. Sometimes this is because limited funds force agencies to put waste treatment far down on their list for spending, and little is left over for it. Whatever the reason in individual cases, a continuation of persuasion and enforcement by the F.W.P.C.A. within the Federal establishment is going to be essential, and Federal installations ought to be required at least to equal or excel the quality of treatment provided by other waste producers on the same streams or bodies of water. Furthermore, all the diverse pollutive activities dependent on Federal aid and cost-sharing—such as road construction, for instance—ought to be brought under similar controls.
Certain major changes in public policy are needed if different techniques of water quality improvement are to be combined in such a way as to give the most economical, appropriate, and effective protection to specific streams or river systems. The most importantof these needed changes concerns the role of flow augmentation as a tool, for inclusion of water quality storage capacity in Federal reservoirs is a fairly new and uncertain practice, and some rather deep pitfalls are becoming evident.
One pitfall has to do with Federal Cost-sharing and the way it affects the freedom of choice of the States and localities on which the primary responsibility for eliminating pollution must rest. In building treatment plants to lessen the load of wastes discharged to streams, they can presently obtain Federal grants of up to 55% of the facilities' total cost. But if storage capacity for water quality—i.e., for flow augmentation—is provided in a Federal reservoir upstream, prevailing Federal policy based in a 1961 amendment to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act has been requiring them to pay nothing at all for it, though before such storage is authorized they must certify that an adequate standard of conventional treatment will be maintained downstream. Obviously, if this continues to be so, when the inevitable choice comes between improving on that adequate standard by investing in better treatment, either at the beginning or later, and seeking river dilution from a reservoir, they will be forced by sheer economics toward the latter, whether or not it is the right thing to do or in an overall sense the cheapest.
Like other aspects of flow augmentation already discussed, this situation is analogous to that of flood control, where communities have to pay a good part of the cost of local protection works or of controlling flood plaindevelopment, but can get reservoir protection free. In both cases, local authorities are stimulated toward choices that are not necessarily the right ones, taxpayers in general are forced to bear the weight of essentially local responsibilities, and the public may forever lose scenic or recreational amenities of great worth. The Department of the Interior, with a central interest in the problem, is taking the lead in an attempt to arrive at a better flow-augmentation policy that will permit right choices, put costs where they belong, and make certain that at the local level where pollution takes place there is sharp incentive to do something about it.
The other main difficulty has to do with the fact that river water has many uses, which augmentation may enhance or even stimulate. Water released from above during dry periods to increase and steady the river's flow and to help it handle wastes may also help navigation and hydroelectric power generation downstream, though neither of these is any longer a main factor in the flowing Potomac. Augmentation of flow can make the river prettier and more useful for recreation, and it can have stout beneficial effects on fish and wildlife. And under present conditions it constitutes a large increase in water of improved quality for free use by irrigators and industries and municipalities, which may so burgeon as a result that increased water consumption and waste production will cancel out the water quality effects of the reservoir releases in short order.
The need here, of course, is for some agency that can solidly guarantee that water released for quality control will be allowed to achieve that purpose and not be diverted to other uses that conflict with it. Where a river runs within a single State, and the State's constitution permits, the State may be able to adjust its powers of control and provide the guarantee. But where more than one State is involved, as on all the main rivers of the Potomac Basin, a good forceful river basin agency is clearly needed to coordinate water supply with water demand, and to ensure that benefits and cost responsibilities of any necessary reservoirs are meted out where they belong.
In terms of legal and institutional machinery, in fact, such a river basin agency is the most basic and urgent unfulfilled need along the Potomac, for the coordination and continuing supervision of water management in all its phases—assurance of supply, flood protection, quality improvement, recreation—in the vast physical unit of land drained by the river. And because land's condition is so often influential on the quality and utility of water, the agency's concern and authority must encompass some fundamental matters of land use as well.
No clearer illustration of the potential of such a body could be found than the achievements of the present Interstate Committee on the Potomac River Basin—INCOPOT—during the quarter century of its existence. Minimally financed and staffed, granted only advisory powers, toward the cure of a vast and growing sickness, it has managed in many ways to hold the line and even to improve things on the Potomac in a time when conditions on many American rivers were growing drastically worse and worse. Much credit accrues to some of the Basin States as well, but without the continuing focus and hard work of the INCOPOT people, dedicated to Basin thinking, it is doubtful that State efforts would have added up to much help for the Potomac as a whole. Our present strong hope of being able to clean up the river and its tributaries and to make them what they ought to be is perhaps mainly due to this organization's efforts.
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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.
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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 vacationlots 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.
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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 namesthat 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 stillhas 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.
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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 servehuman ends are apt and needful ones.
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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 andrivers slicing down through canyons and out into the troughs of the strikingly corrugated Ridge and Valley Province, growing ever larger by the process of union and addition.
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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 thedry 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 ofthe 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, Chotankthat 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 thelife 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 publicareas 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.
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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.
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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 traditionalforms 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 huntcountry, 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.
All these things, then, are a part of whatthe 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.
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.
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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 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 arrangedalong 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 andhumus 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.