These are not the only uncertainties and complexities that confront
anyone who would act toward restoring and preserving the waters and
landscapes of the Potomac and making them serve man, but some of the
more specific and potent ones not dealt with earlier in this report.
Others have been discussed in former chapters or at least have received
cursory mention. Among them are water technology's state of flux that
offers a strong if hazily defined hope of being able to do things better
and better as time passes; the need for more and better data; the
problems for which workable solutions simply do not yet exist; the
inequities or inconsistencies created by certain present Federal water
policies; the dubiousness inherent in forecasts of future human
pressures and problems; the frequently crossed purposes of high agencies
regarding environmental action; the difficulty of feeding true esthetic
and recreational values into cost-benefit computations; and the
paralytic tangle of motives and loyalties in regard to planning at the
local level. And a great many others could be found.
Taken all together and linked to the assumption--fundamental in this
report--that the Potomac and its landscape deserve rescue and
coordinated right use, these areas of doubt, changefulness, and
difficulty add up to a strong body of argument for flexible continuing
planning on a Basinwide scale and for a specific, authoritative Potomac
Basin institution to guide it and put it into effect.
There are two main alternatives to such flexible planning and
coordination and they both, under present and probably future
conditions, point toward slightly modified chaos. The first would be to
allow going or incipient Federal and State programs for water quality
improvement and erosion control and such things to take their overall
course, while water supply, landscape protection, and other problems
are dealt with in the traditional, piecemeal, localized manner as
conditions here and there become bad and force action, or as "fall-out"
from non-Basin programs takes casual effect. This relinquishment of
coordination would make the task of clean-up immensely harder and less
effective in the long run, and it would turn over most of the Basin's
unprotected scenic amenities to exploitation on the basis of their
short-term utility and the profit they could be made to yield.
The second alternative would be to shape a rigid overall plan for the
Basin prescribing definite solutions, feasible in terms of tried and
true technology, for all its problems that exist today and are expected
to materialize in the future, and then to seek authorization and funds
to put the plan into effect. This procedure has disadvantages already
noted in detail in this report. It makes large irreversible decisions
that future generations, stuck with the results, may find less than
totally attractive, especially since they very probably will have better
ways of doing things. It pins itself to fallible assumptions about those
future generations, and must be formed in terms of present laws and
policies, which are not always ideal. Physically, a plan of this kind
could be worked out that would function with reasonable efficiency, at
least in water matters, for there is nothing primitive about today's
technology. But esthetically it would leave much to be desired even by
present standards, and politically, furthermore, its very wholeness and
rigidity would mean that it would have to be sold as a complete package
or else be doomed to fragmentation, which would lead to much the same
sort of piecemeal expedient development as no plan at all. Quite aside
from the budgetary difficulties of the moment, the Potomac Basin's
political complexity makes whole acceptance and implementation of such a
plan extremely doubtful.