Many of the things we have called amenities here are subject to
full-fledged economic uses necessary to the region's wellbeing and not
usually in great conflict with scenic and ecological values if they are
carried out right. Farming and commercial fishing and logging used to be
generally exploitative and hard on the natural scheme of things in this
country, for instance, but they no longer need to be and in most cases
are not. Using the Potomac's water for towns and factories and power and
navigation entails some interference with natural processes, but it does
not have to be widely destructive of them. Discharge of treated wastes
to streams is still necessary to a degree, and up to that degree not
badly harmful, though as we have seen, it is far too often excessive.
[Illustration]
Urban expansion is necessary also with present population pressures. It
is an irreversible exploitation of the landscape, but if the type of
land-use principles mentioned in this chapter were to get wider
employment, urbanization would quite certainly not have to be as
destructive of natural and human values as its present usual form is.
The same thing is true of industry in its many manifestations, including
mining, and of the woven network of roads and utilities. The public
needs them, and the people responsible for them need to be aware of the
great value of the natural framework within which all men must exist.
Average people's direct use of the natural world is most often of the
kind summed up as "outdoor recreation," an umbrella phrase under which
are lumped a diversity of satisfactions found by widely differing
persons in many types of more or less natural places. Muscular hunters
and elderly birdwatchers, water-skiers and bank-fishermen, Sunday
drivers on crowded highways and lean backpackers on dim trails in the
South Branch highlands, baseball players and people who take naps on
the grass beside the C. & O. Canal, amateur archaeologists and stock-car
racing fans--all these and many other kinds of folk depend somehow on
the Potomac outdoors for their pleasure. They use it.
How much they use it and how much pleasure they get out of it are
governed by the time on their hands, the availability of their chosen
recreation, and whether it is good of its kind. A would-be hunter who
cannot escape from the District of Columbia is out of luck unless his
mobility improves. An Alexandria water-skier can divert himself on the
metropolitan estuary during the summer months, but under ordinary
conditions at present it is something less than what is known as a
"quality experience," as is fishing there or any other water sport. A
West Virginian has to have some time to spare if he wants to enjoy
beaches and ocean breezes; so do Tidewater residents with a penchant for
mountain trout fishing.
Nevertheless the Basin holds a great deal for almost all tastes, and
most of what it holds is of excellent quality. The main recreational
needs are fairly clear: to protect and restore the Potomac outdoors from
the deterioration noted in this and earlier chapters, to spread the
chance at different kinds of pleasure around as much as possible, to
guard against clashes between different kinds of use and against the
destruction of the quality of quiet and natural places that occurs when
too many people are jammed together in them, to make the Basin's
pleasant corners and shores and byways easier to get at, and--not least
important--to encourage uses that contribute to appreciation and
preservation, helping to make sure that in the long run outdoor
recreation in this region will be possible.
People's need for outdoor activity in their spare time varies a good
deal. An oysterman-crabber working out of the Yeocomico through the
progression of seasons and weathers, a Shenandoah plowman turning earth
his great-great-grandfather turned at the foot of the blue-green
mountains, a timber cruiser in the high forests--such individuals are
not as likely to need to go looking for added outdoor satisfactions as
most other kinds of people, for whom ordinary life tends to be more
separate from pleasure in the open air. Maybe if the cities can be
brought back to health and their growth shaped to fit in better with
human needs, this will change. But with more and more people coming on,
more and more leisurely and affluent as technology cuts down on work,
more and more urban, outdoor recreation as a specific goal is going to
be an ever more important consideration in planning. It is already
important--and already, as we are reminded with statistics, big
business.