With good reason, people sometimes claim that the Potomac has been
studied more often and more thoroughly than any other American stream.
Its intimacy with the national capital at Washington and with great
figures and events of our history have centered much American interest
on it. In many ways it is a classic Eastern river, copious and scenic,
that drains some 15,000 square miles of varied, historic, and often
striking landscape, from the green mountains along the Allegheny Front
to the sultry lowlands of the estuary's shores where the earliest
plantations were established among the Indian tribes. It has tributaries
large and small whose names echo with connotations for American
ears--the Shenandoah, the Monocacy, the Saint Mary's, Antietam Creek,
Bull Run....
And it has long been the subject for debate and discussion over how it
may best be handled to serve man's ends, for in common with other rivers
in civilized regions it has developed problems of pollution, of
landscape destruction, of occasional floods, of impending shortages of
water for its basin's increasing population. Out of the debates have
emerged studies and plans, some fragmentary and some whole, some
specialized and some general. This present report concerns the latest
study, made under the leadership of Secretary of the Interior Stewart L.
Udall according to a directive given him by President Johnson in 1965.
The report is "final" only in that it sums up this study. It is by no
means final in terms of the Potomac, for it points toward future action
and continuing study and planning, and an important part of its function
will be to show why a degree of inconclusiveness in such matters is
necessary and desirable.
Within a remarkably few years after Captain John Smith sailed up the
Potomac estuary in 1608 to assess its treasures and to make the
acquaintance of the Algonquian tribesmen whose villages flourished on
either shore, other vigorous white men came there to stay, on both the
Maryland and Virginia sides. In the century that followed they raced and
leapfrogged one another upriver, elbowing the Indians out, and with the
aid of indentured labor and later of African slaves they helped to shape
the Tidewater tobacco civilization that engendered so many future
leaders of the American republic. Near the head of navigation, shipping
centers grew up--among them Alexandria and Georgetown, forerunners of
the metropolis that bestrides the river at the Fall Line today. Above
there in the upper Piedmont, and then across the Blue Ridge in the Great
Valley, the westering waves of migrant English met other waves of
Scotch-Irish and the Germans coming down from Pennsylvania, and before
the American Revolution the combined breeds of men had built up enough
pressure to push Indians almost entirely out of the Potomac Basin and to
occupy all the good farmland, even in the Basin's ridged western areas.
Since then their successors have used the land for farming and for other
purposes. In using it they have changed it, and the changes have
registered in the river system that drains it. For land, water,
vegetation, wildlife, minerals, and men's habits are not separable from
one another in the natural frame. So that if the early planters, using
methods of hoe tillage scarcely less primitive than those of the
Indians, mined the Tidewater soils for tobacco production in a way that
required new fields every few years, one result was that those soils
tired and thinned and finally stopped supporting the social magnificence
that had grown up there, for production and prosperity moved inland and
west. And another result was that the Potomac estuary itself grew
shallower and different with the silt that washed down off the land, and
many a tributary bay that once served as harbor for oceangoing ships is
now a rich, reedy marsh with a single narrow gut of shoal water
wandering down across it to the Potomac.
And if later generations of men cut down the forests on the mountains in
the western Basin, and fire followed the cutting, thousands of years of
soil washed down from those slopes too to change both mountains and
river, and elk and panther vanished. And if along the Potomac's North
Branch there was once a fine coal boom, there is now the boom's legacy
in the form of gray dour towns and dark sad streams corrosive with mine
acids.
And if old Alexandria and Georgetown and all the land around them have
burgeoned into one of the nation's great cities, there has been a price
to pay for that also. The stately upper estuary on which they front is
often turbid with silt and sometimes emerald green with algae nourished
on sewage and other septic riches, and the hills stretching back from
the river are spiky with tall buildings linked by urban and suburban
clutter, where life lacks the natural elbow room that the old Tidewater
folk--planters and yeomen and bondsmen and slaves alike--were able to
take for granted.
These are facets of an Age of Problems, of course. They and other
related troubles have been growing apace lately as men have grown in
numbers, in the demands they make on the natural environment that shaped
and nourished their species, and in their technological power to enforce
those demands. The troubles pose a threat to men of flavorlessness and
grayness and the loss of essential meanings, a threat of diminished
humanity. For dependence on that environment, intricate and deep-rooted,
psychological as well as physical, has not grown less with the human
advance toward power and sophistication.
Yet in the Potomac Basin as a whole the threat so far is mainly still a
threat, not a reality. Where men's employment of the land has been
reasonable, as it has in the Great Valley almost from the start, the
land not only remains useful and pleasant but has a specific traditional
beauty dependent on man's presence. Where new comprehension of the
processes of destruction has been attained and shared, as in soil
conservation and forestry and such fields, much damage done in the past
has been repaired.
Most of the Potomac river system's flowing waters are unnaturally
polluted to one degree or another, but only in spots does the pollution
even approach the sort of poisonous hopelessness to be found along some
more heavily populated and industrialized American rivers, and on the
Potomac its spread is already being slowed. Water shortages loom, but
have not yet seriously materialized. Floods threaten, but only at
certain definable spots. Human beings boom outward from the Washington
metropolis and the other centers of population in search of a fuller
life, and the consumptive sprawl and sameness of the communities built
to receive them often deny it to them. But in modern terms there are not
really enormous numbers of them yet, and for their pleasure and
fulfillment a great deal of varied and handsome and historic landscape
has been more or less preserved, by design or happy accident.
[Illustration: Proposed Water Resource Development
1. Sixes Bridge
2. Sideling Hill
3. Town Creek
4. Little Cacapon
5. North Mountain
6. Verona (Staunton)
]
[Illustration: North Mountain]
[Illustration: Town Creek]
The Potomac Basin, in other words, is still generally a wholesome place
two-thirds of the way through the 20th century. If it gets the
protection it deserves, and is developed thoughtfully and decently to
meet men's demands upon its resources, it can stay a wholesome place
into the indefinite future.
* * * * *
Water pollution was the first Basinwide problem to make itself
thoroughly evident, and the need to deal with it led to the first
Basinwide activities besides studies. Soil conservation practices for
sediment control were instituted in the 1930's, and in 1940 the
Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, often called INCOPOT,
was formed by compact among the four Basin States and the District of
Columbia, with the formal permission of Congress. INCOPOT's powers are
only advisory in relation to State and community action against
pollution, and it has never been generously financed. But during the
quarter-century of its existence it has developed a wise combination of
investigation, persuasion, and public education to fight this problem,
with the result that on the Potomac conditions have in some ways
actually improved during a period of wars and booms and haphazard urban
expansion when many other rivers were headed straight down to stinking
corruption.
In 1956 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was directed by Congress to
undertake a Basinwide study to develop a plan for flood control and the
conservation of water resources and related land resources. The emphasis
in this assignment was upon a full long-term functional solution for the
Basin's water problems in feasible economic and technological terms. In
carrying it out, the Army enlisted the aid of other Federal agencies,
and their _Potomac River Basin Report_, published in nine volumes in
1963, presented the study's results and a plan for Basin water
development to meet needs to the year 2010. It is a monumental piece of
work to which anyone concerned with the Basin henceforth will have to
refer, because of the completeness with which it examines the Potomac
water resource and the careful technical knowledge it brings to bear on
Potomac problems.
However, the plan it presents--including recommendations for sixteen
major multipurpose reservoirs on the Potomac and its tributaries--would
bring about a massive and permanent revision of the free-flowing stream
system and would inundate much valley land. It aroused articulate
opposition at local, state, and Congressional levels, a good deal of
which was focused on the key Seneca dam on the Potomac main stem just
above Washington--an area where earlier single proposals for dams, first
at Great Falls and then at River Bend, had provoked similar resistance.
Clearly enough, a powerful continuing body of opinion cares about
something more than strictly functional values along the Potomac and in
its Basin. It is a long-settled region, whose natives generally cherish
what they have in the way of scenic and historic amenities. It is the
part-time home of many influential lawmakers, who concern themselves
about its beauty and well-being. And together with the national capital
at the core of its metropolis, it is the vacation goal of millions of
American tourists from elsewhere each year, who go home aware not only
of monuments and marble halls of state but of crucial Civil War
battlefields, dark mountain ridges overlooking classic river valleys,
rolling Piedmont estates, and the wooded headlands of Virginia and
Maryland that recede behind one another into haze as one looks down the
estuary in summertime.
This national interest in the river was recognized publicly early in
1965 by President Johnson when, in connection with his noted "Message on
Natural Beauty," he issued directives to Secretary Udall making him
responsible for the preparation of a conservation plan for the Potomac.
In addition to the tasks of cleaning up the river, assuring an adequate
water supply for the decades ahead, and providing flood protection, the
Secretary was instructed to protect the natural beauty of the river and
its Basin and to plan for full recreational opportunities there for both
natives and visitors. A stipulated aim, which seized the public
imagination, was to make the Potomac a model of scenic and recreational
values for the entire nation.
In response, the Secretary shaped a Federal Interdepartmental Task Force
under Interior direction, in whose specialized sub-task forces were
enlisted the skills available in the Corps of Engineers, the Department
of Agriculture, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (where
the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration was then located),
and the various concerned bureaus and services of the Interior
Department itself. Shortly after this, Secretary Udall met with the
governors of the four Basin States and the commissioners of the District
of Columbia to ensure that State and local interests would have a hand
in the planning process. Out of this came the Potomac River Basin
Advisory Committee, composed of State and District representatives,
which has conferred often with the Interdepartmental Task Force on
overall questions and has assumed prime responsibility in studying the
central problem of creating a planning and administrative body to handle
Potomac water and related land problems hereafter.
In addition, a blue-ribbon panel of distinguished planners and
specialists, assembled by the former president of the American Institute
of Architects at Secretary Udall's request and subsequently known as the
Potomac Planning Task Force, undertook a separate study of Potomac
questions, both in general and with specific focus on the metropolis.
Their independent report, The Potomac, was lately published. It makes a
detailed, wise, and instructive plea for considering the river and its
landscape as a whole and meaningful thing, for proceeding with their
development and protection according to high esthetic and ecological
principles, and for a distinctive form of management.
Existing private, public, and semipublic organizations with an interest
in the Potomac or in the type of problems it presents have joined in the
present effort by sponsoring public meetings and publishing discussions
or otherwise doing their part to help. Among them may be mentioned
INCOPOT, the Conservation Foundation, the Metropolitan Washington
Council of Government, Resources for the Future, Inc., the League of
Women Voters, the Potomac Basin Center, the National Parks Association,
and a number of local planning or action bodies. Through these meetings
and other media, public comment on the Federal Task Force's work has
been voluminous and often helpful, particularly since the publication of
its _Interim Report_ in January of 1966, which made certain proposals
for immediate action to begin providing for short-term metropolitan
water needs, to protect specific scenic treasures, and to get moving on
the long task of cleaning up the river.
With so many viewpoints somehow included in the planning process,
opinions have often diverged as to how much of what ought to be done
about the Potomac, and how soon, and in what order. Well they may
diverge. In a time of economic expansion and population growth
unparalleled in human history, predictions about the economy and the
population of the distant future--necessary to full planning--verge
perilously near to crystal gazing even when the best available
yardsticks are applied. And this is only one uncertainty. Among the
others which will be examined later in this report are the prospect of
drastic technological change that may soon offer cheaper, more
effective, and less disruptive ways of dealing with environmental
problems including water; the doubtfulness of sufficient public money
for large conservation projects in a time of international tensions and
urban crisis; and the solid American political complexity of the
boundary-laced Potomac Basin, which bristles with various forms of veto
power and a multiplicity of assorted regional, professional, and
philosophical viewpoints.
Such complexities and uncertainties have a powerful reality and
relevance for planners. They impose a need for breadth of view, for
leaving many future options open, and by the same token they present a
danger of piecemeal action, excessive compromise and indecisiveness.
The body of this report is an Interior Department document, couched
wherever possible in untechnical language in the hope that it may find a
wide lay readership. Necessary technical supporting material mainly has
been or will be made available in separate form. The report examines
environmental problems in the Potomac Basin and possible solutions for
them. Its underlying emphasis is ecological, based in a conviction that
man's own good is heavily dependent on the good of the earth in all its
complexity. No one at this point in time, obviously, is going to be able
to reconstitute the primeval Paleolithic world, nor would many people
want to. The earth has changed with people in their long surge toward
dominion over its ways and its creatures. But there is a difference
between adaptive change and the degeneration that modern times are
forcing on the earth men have always known. Growing millions of people
are coming to consider that human beings' right to see and know woods
and plains and mountains and streams and coasts in a cleanly and decent
condition--whether primitive or adapted in one way or another to man's
use--together with the communities of wild creatures that belong there,
is quite as practical and urgent as their right to usable tap water or
to a share in the Gross National Product. For upon the retention of
these ancient realities future human sanity and wholeness may well
depend.
We who are responsible for this report believe that this point of view
is going to gain enough strength and political acceptance to become one
of the motive forces of this century. Already it has much power. Even
though many established attitudes, laws, and practices are still firmly
rooted in the old exploitative, often heroic urge to seize upon all
resources and put them to use at whatever ultimate cost, disgust over
pollution and the destruction of beautiful places is getting to be a
political factor to be reckoned with at all levels of government. So is
concern over man's lemminglike multiplication in numbers and the way
his technology and his expansionism are gobbling up things quiet and
graceful and eternal--things he needs. It seems certain that political
"muscle" and respectability for the legitimate conservationist viewpoint
is shaping up fast enough that it will be able to dissipate the worst
threats--the grabbing and the spoiling, the ignorance and the archaic
attitudes, the onward shove of brute technology for technology's own
sake rather than for man's--before they have forced mankind on into the
gray sterility of life that would be their ultimate effect.
And upon the emerging potency of this sound and urgent concern with the
way the natural world is being used up, we believe a flexible form of
planning can be based that will do away with the dilemma posed by the
complexities and uncertainties of the moment. With a minimum of
compromise, such planning will be able to identify and propose solutions
for immediate problems in places like the Potomac Basin, while moving
toward longrun solutions for other problems as those problems'
dimensions become clearer than at present, and as technology and
politics make better solutions feasible.
Solutions for pressing and immediate problems have to be in terms of
present possibilities--political, financial, and technological. Some
such immediate problems--of water supply, pollution control, and scenic
preservation--exist in the Potomac Basin and are analyzed in this
report, and presently feasible action is recommended for their
alleviation. A considerable part of the report is concerned with such
problems, with the range of possible solutions for them and with our
reasons for making specific recommendations.
These immediate solutions do not constitute what has been called a
"quick fix"--piecemeal, one-shot action to patch up things until another
crisis arises. As much as possible, they have been worked into the
picture of longterm Basin needs insofar as those needs can be discerned,
and it is intended that action against future problems shall be built
upon them. Furthermore, we have sought to maintain an ample view in
identifying long-term difficulties and indicating what should be aimed
for when it is essential to act against them.
But we have not shaped a rigidly complete, prescriptive plan identifying
exact measures for the cure of all present and future ills of the
Potomac Basin. For a variety of reasons, we have concluded that such a
rigid plan would not only be self-defeating in the long run, but that it
is actually undesirable. We are aware that this conclusion is going to
arouse criticism among those who during the past three years have
consistently demanded that we provide a total answer, for the purpose
either of unseating the governing principles of the 1963 plan or of
reinforcing and amplifying those principles. Nevertheless we are certain
that the conclusion is right.
[Illustration]
It would be right even if the development of new technology were the
only uncertainty confronting planners. Barring a complete breakdown in
the present impetus of research and discovery, radical change in the
technology of water supply and water quality control appears to be
extremely probable within the next few decades. Some of the best of the
emerging tools, there is reason to hope, may permit men to deal with
water problems in ways that are more harmonious with natural ways and
less structurally imposing than present methods. Possibly the present,
often essential reliance on large storage reservoirs, for instance, is
going to be modified, though how much the ultimate way of doing things
will have to combine old and new technologies is something that cannot
be guessed.
If it cannot yet be guessed, it cannot be incorporated in a rigid plan,
which has to deal in technological certainties--i.e. in present
technology--and must therefore impose that present technology on the
future, whether or not the future is going to need it. If we are right
in believing that from this generation on, people are going to be
increasingly jealous in the preservation of their natural heritage,
future Americans will not be likely to thank this generation for having
unnecessarily robbed them of choices as to how to handle the
streamwaters of a superb river basin like the Potomac's. Any more than
they would thank us for having done nothing at all and leaving them to
scramble for water, and filthy water at that. Quite simply, no one has
the right to do either of these things to them.
It is our belief that if genuinely conservationist values are
established as the ruling principles in a flexible, properly paced,
continuing planning process, there will be no need to fear that future
generations are going to be either stuck with large mistakes on our
part, or cursed with shortages, floods, and pollution. With this report
we hope to initiate such a process for the Potomac.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]