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 brought fully 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.
[Illustration: 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 important of 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 plain development, 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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]