New roads and highways, regardless of what traffic they carry and where
they carry it, are too often planned and constructed as gashes of
destruction across the landscape and across the "scenery of
association," and frequently fertilize subsidiary ugliness in the form
of billboards and commercial clutter. Attempts to mitigate the worst
aspects of this have had some effect, but have not been widespread or
strong enough to keep up with the growing numbers of cars and the
growing demand for facilities on which to operate them.
[Illustration]
Much could be done at the local level to erase roadside
ugliness--Loudoun County, Virginia, is again a shining and rare example
of a place where the right thing has been done. But more of the trouble
comes from higher up, for it involves the routing and design of the
super-roads, and stubborn considerations of strict engineering
efficiency have usually tended to prevail over esthetics and such
things, despite growing objections. Regardless of their beauty as roads,
the sheer quantity of strip concrete Americans require nowadays is a
basic problem. It has been said that an extraplanetary observer at first
glance might well conclude that this continent was populated primarily
by large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains. Certainly in many
places nowadays the earth is beginning to look as if it were arranged
for the bugs rather than for the brains, if that is what we humans are.
[Illustration]
When the bugs die they go to junkyards. These many-colored necropolises
occupy wide acres of land near every center of population in the region,
occurring quite commonly along the main entrance highways to neat and
historic towns. Their stark and extensive ugliness has made them the
subject of much high-level investigation, most of which has sought to
make their conversion into usable scrap metal a profitable process.
Undoubtedly this will be achieved sooner or later, but in the meantime
the old cars, together with a wealth of other discarded items in
roadside fields and along fencelines and stream channels throughout the
Basin, form a scabby legacy from the recent past, and a less esthetic
"scenery of association."
Major electric powerlines and other utilities routed arrogantly with
only straight-line distances in mind, up hill and down dale and with
their cleared rights-of-way kept brownly dead with herbicides, can
intrude starkly on the beauty and mood of historic or pleasantly natural
landscapes. In the name of public service, private utility companies in
all the Basin States have wide powers of condemnation as emerged to view
recently when the Potomac Edison Company proposed to hack out a strip
for a new line along a route that included country associated with the
campaigning around Antietam Battlefield in the Civil War, without an
adequate attempt to find alternative routes.
In this instance, public protest shaped up a fight against the line, in
which the Interior Department has become involved because of the
Federally owned battlefield and the nearby C. & O. Canal. But often
elsewhere, the great skeletal towers linked by thick transmission cables
march where they please, indifferent to local objections. What is
certain is that modern America needs the electricity transported thus,
and the gases and liquids that run through great pipelines. Hope for the
long run is offered by research that may open the possibility of putting
high-voltage transmission lines underground, but in the meantime what is
needed is an awareness on the part of utilities planners that scenic and
historic values have to be given full weight in their computations.
The kind of agriculture that has so much to do with the Basin's scenic
appeal is not entirely healthy these days. We have mentioned the
difficulty created near Washington--and around other Basin centers of
population and in many places where vacation colonies are burgeoning--by
skyrocketing speculation and a general absence of strongly based and
well-defended plans of preservation. As the development value of land
rises in such places, local systems of taxation based on that value
rather than on actual use may drive farmers out of business whether they
want to stay in or not. Since 1945 in Fairfax County, Virginia, for
instance, the number of commercial farms has dropped from 1788 to about
200, and it is still going down.
Even where the tax trouble has been recognized, as in Maryland, and
taxation adjusted to reality for people who want to go on farming, few
tillers of the soil are devoted enough to their acres to hold onto them
in the face of the kind of cash that is often dangled before their eyes,
for the flat and fertile tracts that make the best farms are also the
easiest to subdivide and build on in standard fashion. For that matter,
the usual form of tax relief on agricultural land can be used as a tax
loophole by speculators. Thus, whenever tract values rise and
development impends, good productive land, which the country may well
miss later as populations grow and food supplies for them thin out, goes
permanently under pavements and construction. Even though it is just in
such places that protected, scenic, connotative rural landscapes might
have the most meaning for the most people in the long run, their
preservation presents some tough questions. Patterns of growth that
would spare them could easily be worked out and would fit in well with
watershed protection and open space needs, but the economics of
compensating farm owners for the loss of the big money they might have
received for them is another thing.
In some other parts of the Basin, the implications of a modern unified
economy are a threat to traditional farms and farming methods. Labor
costs, the need for expensive machinery, superior methods of storage of
foodstuffs and easy transport over long distances have put Potomac
farmers into competition with other regions, even other countries, where
the same products they supply can be raised on an industrial scale of
investment and profit. Thus the worth of a field of tomatoes in the
Northern Neck of Virginia is affected by massive irrigated production in
the Central Valley of California, and thus a Shenandoah farmer may
barely break even or suffer a loss on a rather good crop of wheat in the
old "bread basket of the Confederacy."
Such influences, even though dulled a bit by protective State and
Federal farm programs, are putting a premium on specialization, ever
larger farms, and an "agribusiness" approach, with high capital and
operating expenses. Their effect on many family farms in the Basin's
mountain regions, places with limited acreage of marginally productive
land, is severe. These may have supported the clans that own them
reasonably well for a century or more, but they cannot compete with
Ohio. Unless their owners are willing to keep on farming while holding
down a job in town for supplementary cash, they often move away and the
places go out of cultivation. Some are consolidated into grazing or
forestry units or bigger farms, some stand abandoned, some go on the
market as vacation retreats and "hobby farms" for wide-ranging
metropolitans.
Richer regions share the troubles. In the classic valley of the
Monocacy, some of whose dairy farmers have to import feed now from the
Midwest because they cannot raise it cheaply enough themselves, the size
of the optimum farm, one that can compete effectively in today's market,
has swelled in the past few years from about 150 acres to about 600,
according to a study by the State of Maryland. The problem is compounded
by rising land prices influenced not by productive value but by the
presence of Megalopolis just over toward the Bay. Sprawl throws a long
shadow.
Eyeing this array of difficulties, many farmers' sons are prone to seek
another livelihood, and the average age of the men who do the farming
grows higher all the time. Tiring, many sell out, and thus the family
farms that make up the greater part of the Potomac's much-loved rural
landscape dwindle in number and change in use. It is not necessary to be
mawkish to see this as a loss. In part it is inevitable, but in part too
it may be rooted in policies that can be altered and adjusted to keep
the farms productive.
Wildlife, along the Potomac as elsewhere, is dependent on whatever
habitat it occupies--that is to say on the state of the landscape. If
the rivers are cleaned up and kept flowing even during times of drought
and heavy use of water, they will support better populations of fish and
a greater variety of species. If the subtle interrelationships and the
immense value of the estuary's varied nooks and crannies are recognized,
studied out to full understanding, and protected--and in time--not only
fish and shellfish but ducks and eagles and herons and all the other
wild users of the shores and wetlands will benefit. Government refuges
and other devices are badly needed for these purposes in that region,
now that it is no longer remote and the kind of protection many private
owners have traditionally furnished wildlife is diminishing.
[Illustration]
Upland populations of deer, turkey, grouse, quail, raccoon, fox, and
other sporting and non-sporting species thrive in parts of the Basin
suited to their habits and still in good condition, and shrink
elsewhere. Many stretches of private forest land could support much
higher densities of game and other wildlife, if they were put in better
shape by practices that are available and feasible. Of the more than
three million acres of such land scattered throughout the Basin in small
holdings, much is in poor condition. It is therefore but spottily
productive of game or timber or anything else, and often causes high
runoff and erosion in critical watersheds.
[Illustration]