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 vacation lots 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.
[Illustration]
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 names that 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 still has 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.