Most of the known basic techniques of landscape protection have already
been discussed or touched on in this report: ways of cleaning up rivers
and assuring their flow, ways of halting erosion and siltation, ways of
planning land's use by concentrated human populations with as little
loss as possible of amenities, ways of patching up old damage. Many of
them are imperfect as yet and for some problems tools are still missing,
nor are the existing techniques being applied in a completely
coordinated manner anywhere on this continent except in a few
experimental places of restricted size. But they do exist; they are
available if human beings and human institutions can be persuaded to put
them to use. And it is not possible to repeat too often that the need
for their use is urgent.
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A great deal of legal machinery at various levels is available to
stimulate the use of such techniques and to enhance outdoor recreation.
Some of it has already been put to work in the Potomac Basin; some of it
needs reshaping for application to the conditions found there; and to
cope with certain of the problems, specific legislative action tailored
to the needs is going to be required.
Active Federal programs of public works, technical assistance, grants in
aid, cost sharing, taxation, home loans, mortgage insurance, and such
things--often with counterparts at state levels--penetrate every level
of the economy and have profound effects on the landscape. Some of them
have a direct concern with the landscape as such: among these are the
Department of Agriculture's soil conservation and forestry programs,
Interior activities ranging from water pollution control to trails,
parks, and wildlife refuges, and Housing and Urban Development programs
for the restoration, protection, and creation of urban amenities--all
being applied in the Basin, though some need legislative adjustment or
extension if they are to be fully effective there. Most also have
associated recreational purposes.
Others among the going high-level programs have only a tangential
interest in the landscape per se, though frequently much influence upon
it. In the past, as we have observed earlier, many of them have been
responsible for a good deal of landscape damage, encouraging sprawl and
other forms of bad land use, instituting great public projects without
enough thought to their effect on esthetics and ecology, and so on. Some
are still being conducted in this manner, though less and less as a
general awareness of the need to restore and to preserve, to think twice
before making massive environmental changes, soaks out through the
complex network of government and has its influence on attitudes.
Increasingly, not only Federal but State agencies are making decent land
use, recreation, and scenic preservation a partial condition and
sometimes a whole reason for aid programs and public works.
Many programs can be adapted to such purposes. One interesting example
in the Potomac Basin is a study being undertaken in the Georges Creek
valley of western Maryland by Frostburg State College. Under an
educational grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
members of the college's faculty have embarked on research aimed toward
a demonstration project of economic, social, and landscape restoration
in the whole Georges Creek watershed as a unit. Action resulting from
the study will involve a number of their State and Federal programs.
Often, of course, the benefits of such practices are "intangible" in
terms of the market values that have traditionally been used for
justifying government projects, and adequate ways of giving them their
true weight against other values that may be in conflict with them have
not yet really been worked out. Nevertheless, the fact that they have
strong and sometimes overriding benefits is being recognized.
Insofar as such programs encourage Basinwide landscape improvement and
protection and major recreational opportunities, they are instruments
for accomplishing overall Basin aims, usable as such now by Federal and
State agencies and at the future disposal of any Basinwide coordinative
organization that may evolve. Insofar as they permit and stimulate
counties and municipalities to do better environmental planning and give
them money and morale to implement and enforce planning, they are
available at this indispensable level of action where--as we have
seen--the obstacles to doing things right are often huge. The programs
put within reach of local officials the principles of good planning and
management, and help them to achieve its details, from wildlife refuges
to neighborhood parks, from the maintenance of riverside beauty and the
restoration of historic shrines to the construction of small reservoirs.
As knowledge of their existence and their advantages gets around, they
are beginning to have much effect, especially at larger centers of
population.
Nevertheless, it is impossible at present to be sure that any given
locality is going to take meaningful steps toward staving off blight and
landscape destruction, and a great many of them in the Potomac Basin
have not done so. Partly this is because the imperative need for
planning is only now beginning to dawn upon many smaller communities.
But even where it has dawned and planning has been undertaken by men of
good will, the great obstacles still exist and often block their
efforts--the lack of money to match Federal or State program funds, the
inability to convince fellow citizens who have to approve actions, the
fat profits in real estate, the pervasive influence of personal
relationships.
Ideally, for a number of attractive reasons, it would be preferable to
let local people solve local landscape and recreation problems in every
case, with outside higher levels of government furnishing only advice
and money on request. In regard to many types of problems, this is what
is being done and will be done on into the future, for people living in
a place are the ones who determine whether the place is going to be
ugly or pretty, pleasant or grim. The trouble is, however, that as
understanding of the interrelationships between land and water and the
other elements of the landscape, even on a Basinwide scale, has grown,
it has become more and more obvious that there are only a few strictly
local landscape problems. Most local jurisdictions have within their
boundaries critical watersheds, unique scenic assets, flood plains whose
unwise use will require elaborate and costly structural protection later
on, and other such features. This being so, the effects of mismanagement
are certain to reverberate elsewhere, and it becomes the concern of
people other than those who live in that neighborhood. It becomes other
people's business, distasteful though this idea may be to communities
with a tradition of self-sufficiency.
Regional planning organizations that can pool counties' and towns'
resources, take a broad view, and pay for professional help can overcome
some of the obstacles, if local governments can be persuaded to join
them. Certain of the State and Federal programs mentioned above are
being applied mainly through such bodies. But it seems to be an
unavoidable conclusion that if local government continues to be the
weakest link in the chain of planning, preservation of the environment
is going to require not only stouter incentives to elicit cooperation
from communities, but also more authority at higher levels of government
to guard against at least the worst types of landscape abuse. In terms
of water, this kind of authority will shortly be operative with the
enforcement of the new State water quality standards. In terms of the
other elements of the landscape, it is equally justifiable.
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And, just as in water management in all its phases, central and
continuing Basinwide coordination of practices to restore the landscape,
to protect it, and to make possible its pleasant use by the public is
going to be needed. If landscape problems could be divorced from water
problems it might be a good deal easier, at this point in time, to
identify a fairly full range of "right" measures that could be taken to
achieve such restoration and protection for a long, long period into the
future than it would be to do the same thing for water problems.
Restoration and protection are not irreversible actions in the sense
that some of the technological measures associated with water management
are, and the main danger of rigid landscape planning would not be that
it might go too far, but that it might not go far enough to save all
that ought to be saved.
But, as we have observed time and again in these pages, no divorce is
possible between land and water. They are interdependent, and whoever
concerns himself with one must perforce concern himself with the other.
Much of the action in regard to both is going to have to be long-term,
continuing into the future. New threats are going to arise, some of them
quite possibly based in a divergence of aims among various government
programs with environmental effects. Thus, if a Basin-oriented agency is
required--as we strongly believe--to oversee continuing action to clean
up the Potomac river system and keep it clean, and to develop it for
man's use in a wisely flexible and coordinated manner, that organization
is going to have to take on a degree of responsibility for landscape
matters as well, and is going to need some authority over them.
Many things can be identified that need doing now if irreplaceable
assets in the Potomac environment are not to be lost, and if people are
to be given a full chance to enjoy what is there. Some of these things
that need doing have been named in this chapter or previously, and
others are implicit in the report's discussions. We have worked out
recommendations for action that can get them done, and the
recommendations are presented with this report. They include some
specific recreational proposals, and they urge prompt and authoritative
protection of certain assets that are going to be destroyed if
protection does not come soon, long-term programs to bring about
detailed and overall restoration and protection and continued study and
research into means of coping with threats not yet fully understood,
like some of those along the estuary and the North Branch.
The main recommendation with a specific objective of preserving the
landscape and providing recreation proposes the designation of the main
river from Washington to Cumberland as the Potomac National River.
Though it is to remain accessible for appropriate use by towns and
industries, its banks and islands will be protected and public access
assured by means of a sheath of park land, in Federal, State, and local
ownership and with associated areas preserved by easements and similar
devices, for the entire 195 miles. The proposal, refined since its
initial mention in the Interim Report, is a major one--but so, as we
have seen, is the need it is designed to meet. This main reach of the
flowing river, the Basin's hydrologic and scenic lifeline, is greatly
menaced by rapid and inappropriate development along its banks, and
through most of its length it is hard for people to reach. It has unique
majesty and beauty and both historic and symbolic associations that
warrant a special degree of protection for it, and warrant also the
assurance of the kind of public appreciation and enjoyment the park
sheath would permit.
* * * * *
The recreation and landscape recommendations as a body are attuned to
reality as well as to needs. They represent things that can be done, at
prices that can be paid--minimum initial steps toward ultimate
achievements that would be inferior to none that our changeful age might
produce. This is an insistently momentous time, with boom, frenetic
pleasure, sophisticated communications, space exploration, racial
crisis, young rebellion, and all the other contemporary phenomena
demanding attention and stirring up a dust that makes clear vision hard.
There is nothing minor about any of them. But one thing seems clear
enough. When the dust settles down and those who walk here afterward
look around them for the eternal wholeness of earthly things, they are
going to have a hard time finding it if matters keep going as they have
been going lately. If we who are here now fail to hand over to them a
physical world that relates them to old reality and serves them well and
helps to make them glad to be alive, then whatever other things we hand
over to them may seem very small potatoes.
The Potomac Basin is only a piece of what needs to be done. But it could
be a beginning.
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