IV. A GOOD PLACE TO BE (continued 2)

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.

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.