One reason it is not certain is that the average person's set of
attitudes toward the world around him is not totally determined by the
circumstances of his life--by whether he is a city-dweller or a farmer
or a small townsman, an engineer or a poet or a hardware salesman or a
factory worker. Southern or Northern, black or white, poor or rich or
pleasantly salaried. These things have great weight in coloring people's
attitudes, but so do individual tastes and individual ways of
interpreting the fact and ideas that flood in upon all of us these days.
And so also do the vast and shifting currents of emotional and
philosophical response that sway our society in one direction or another
from year to year, from decade to decade.
In relation to the environment, certain differing philosophical currents
of this kind have surfaced to view at various points in this report, if
only briefly. They have influenced the fate of past proposals for
dealing with the Potomac river system and landscape, and they are still
here to continue exerting influence. In individual citizens' minds, they
often mix and balance with one another in various ways, but they are
discernible as separate forces.
Stout among them is the traditional American--and human--view that the
natural world exists for the primary purpose of bettering the lot of
such human beings or groups of human beings as may have the ingenuity
and the vigor to extract its treasures or to adapt it to their use.
Quite often the activities for which this view provides justification
are exploitative--they use up natural resources or they bring about
other irreversible changes in the world roundabout. Some
conservationists think this makes them automatically evil, but things
are not quite that simple. Such exploitative activities have led our
species the full length of the road from the Stone Age to the
sophisticated and powerful technological civilization of present times.
The idea that we have a full right to engage in them is deeply
ingrained, particularly in this country whose memories of the
frontier--a hardy, exultant line of subjugation and exploitation moving
across the virgin continent--are not remote but fresh.
[Illustration]
Certainly in its crasser manifestations--this utilitarian philosophy has
widely destructive effects nowadays. Strip mines gouged out without
thought of restoration, wanton land speculation and development, the
casual dumping of raw wastes into streams by towns or industries and a
number of other harmful practices mentioned in this report are all
clearly based in a conviction that what one does to the world around him
is his own sweet business. That conviction has longstanding sanctity
among Americans and many who hold it are moral and upstanding folk. But
in a world as heavily populated as this one, possessed of such augmented
technological ability to assail and exploit the natural world, there is
clearly something wrong with it.
Other exploitative human activity based in utilitarianism is not crass
or all so obviously wrong, especially in today's context. Population
growth poses a moral question but also a logistical one: uncontrolled
growth may well be questionable, but it is a staggering reality. The
additional millions of people thus invited to present and future feasts
must be provided for. Many thinkers view the economic expansionism of
our time, together with the vigorous technology which it fosters and is
fostered by, as the only means toward this end. Some, indeed, view it as
a happy and healthy state of things, indefinitely extensible as
technology itself furnishes substitutes for exhausted natural
substances, natural forces, and natural experiences.
Allied to this view is a sturdy and widely held American belief that
"development" of natural resources is automatically a good thing
regardless of the need--toning up the economy of a region or a state or
a nation, keeping things moving. Most people give it some practical
support, even those who in theory suspect its validity. For we are a
moving people. We have known little stasis in the centuries of our
presence on this continent, and each generation of us is imbued anew in
childhood with certain axiomatic ideas; movement is forward, growth is
up, construction is better than vacancy, not to make economic use of
something is to waste it. These ideas linger in our reactions: "You
can't," the saying goes, "stand in the way of progress."
[Illustration]
Certain other philosophers, growing in numbers these days, say
emphatically that you can and should. These are the history-minded
people, the wilderness folk, the nature traditionalists, and the others
whose main concern is that man and the pleasant world around him have
lost all semblance of a balanced relationship with each other, and whose
view of the sturdy plunderlust of our ancestors is that our inheritance
of it, combined with the technology of bulldozers, is aiming us straight
toward a world in which our own structures and destructions may be all
there is to see, our own fumes and sewage all there is to smell, our own
voices and machines all there is to hear. Some people of this stamp are
quietly pessimistic; others actively commit themselves to fight. Some
who fight see present human growth and the growth of human demands on
resources as the stark unavoidable realities they are, and seek mainly
to guide them and mitigate their effects. Others stiffen their necks
against development to meet those demands, staunch enemies to all
reservoirs and other forms of compromise, stubborn if highminded
nay-sayers against the tide, consistent even when illogical.
Taken as a whole, however, these people with a sense of the imponderable
human value of natural ways and natural things may constitute the most
powerful support available for thoughtful planning and conservation. In
a precipitate and voracious society plunging on into its future, they
look back and seek to retain the best of what has always been, for
conservationism at least in this sense is conservatism too. Upon their
increase in numbers, in broad understanding and in political
forcefulness, upon the arrival of their basic values at a point of
publicly accepted respectability at least equal to that presently
enjoyed by time-hallowed exploitation and the profit motive, hope for a
decent future must heavily depend.
All of these ways of looking at man's problematical relationship with
the crust of the planet he inhabits, plus a number of others, are at
work within the minds of conscious people in this region and in the
great cauldron of its politics. Here they mingle with State and regional
and local loyalties and private self-interests into a fine American soup
of eagerness and reluctance, faith and apprehension, awareness and
befuddlement, chicanery and square dealing, altruism and frank greed,
rage and reasonableness, that is as real as any mountain in the Basin
and as inevitable a consideration for realistic planning as the river's
own characteristics of flow. For any proposal or set of proposals for
action in the Basin that does not take into account what the Basin's
people are like, and how their idiosyncrasies and preferences and
sympathies find political expression, is foredoomed to failure, be it
ever so ideal in anyone's abstract terms.