United States. Department of the Interior

“ 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. ”

“ Throughout its days, beginning with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Glacier country has been a lodestone for the scientist, attracted from every corner of the earth by the combination of natural wonder and beauty to be found here. ”

“ As time goes in the United States, the Potomac Basin has been populated by our restless people for a long while, and very little of it has not been affected as a result—the deep exhaustion of the Tidewater when the tobacco bonanza ran out, the lumbering off of the mountains, the grubby continuing reign of coal along the North Branch, and now the explosive growth of the Washington metropolis and the other centers of industry and people. ”

“ In addition to its sublime peaks and canyons, the Grand Teton National Park includes six large lakes and many smaller bodies of water, glaciers, and snowfields, and extensive forests of pine, fir, spruce, cottonwood, and aspen. However, much of the park area is above timber line (10,500 feet) , the Grand Teton rising to more than 7,000 feet above the floor of Jackson Hole.
The great array of peaks which constitutes the scenic climax of this national park is one of the noblest in the world. It is alpine in the truest sense. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Parks and open areas within the metropolis and out from it are often crowded, trampled, and belittered during most times when people can get away from making a living to visit them, and thus can furnish only a little of the quiet and elbow room that might be their main contribution to urban peace of mind. They are also subject to pressure and often damage from outside, stemming from the economics, the politics, the governing mood of restless growth. ”

“ A bit late, realization is growing that the world has a certain longstanding wholeness with which people interfere massively at their own peril. Landscape in the widest sense—the sense of the integrity of a place to look at, to be in, to use and to know and to know about—matters to human beings, and the terms in which it matters involve incentive, fulfillment, and sanity. ”

“ So that if any form of outdoor recreation can furnish, however slightly, some comprehension of what the natural world is like and how it works, it amounts to quite a lot more than a bit of needed relaxation from the week's toil at one's job or in the kitchen and nursery, though it may be that as well. With the comprehension, it becomes an enlargement of one's grasp of things, and it adds a little substance to the hope that people will keep on caring about the integrity of the world around them and defending it as best they can. ”

“ In many rural reaches of the Basin, for that matter, the kind of use private ownership gives the land is still an enhancement of the landscape rather than a smear on it. The beauty of farm land and pastures and old structures is as much a part of this country's heritage as is wilderness, for in its traditional [Pg 70c] forms farming has shaped a kind of wholeness and beauty all its own, blending with nature and working with it. ”

“ Some of the big creeks are silted in now with mud washed down off the land in the old days, but in the flatter country toward the Bay most of the larger ones are still pretty and useful harbors for pleasure boats and for the fleets of varied commercial craft that go out to gather the estuary's crabs, oysters, clams, perch, striped bass, shad, and other edible creatures, including even eels for the European market. From hillsides, mellow mansions look down on the water that used to be their highway to the outside world, some crumbling, others proudly maintained. ”

“ Within a remarkably few years after Captain John Smith sailed up the Potomac estuary in 1608 to assess its treasures and to make the acquaintance of the Algonquian tribesmen whose villages flourished on either shore, other vigorous white men came there to stay, on both the Maryland and Virginia sides. In the century that followed they raced and leapfrogged one another upriver, elbowing the Indians out, and with the aid of indentured labor and later of African slaves they helped to shape the Tidewater tobacco civilization that engendered so many future leaders of the American republic. ”

“ Thus the main cause of urban silt is faulty or nonexistent or powerless land planning, and the problem merges with the whole question of landscape preservation. The ecological principles involved in good practical land planning—the distribution of uses based on what land and water can take without being degraded and causing silt, flooding, and downstream pollution—are the same basic principles that lead to scenic beauty and a decent human environment. ”

“ The miles on miles of varied, carefully managed fields and pastures, with fat herds and handsome old stone houses and barns, nearly always against a backdrop of dark mountains and with a pleasant river or creek running at hand, among trees, have a potent storybook appeal that sticks in the memory of anyone who ever saw them. ”

“ A river system draining the basin it has carved out over geological eons of time is one of the more meaningful units in nature, but within it there may be great variety. The Potomac starts as a multitude of diverse trickles and oozes in the high green places of Appalachia, where spruce forests and berry meadows and bogs know the tread of bear and deer, beaver and bobcat, hunter and hiker and logger. ”

“ When conditions are right—when sun, summer temperatures, low inflows from the river above, and a heavy concentration of nitrate and phosphate nutrients all combine to make of the upper estuary one vast inspired pool of fertility—the whole surface of the river may be covered with a thick bright emerald mat, and boats that pass at speed leave wakes of green instead of white. ”

“ What it amounts to is that America has strayed too far from the ancient hard-won wisdom of treating flood plains with respect. It has been lulled by the achievements of engineering, encouraged by a general absence of inadequacy of State and local planning that takes such matters into account, and conditioned to a set of Federal laws and policies piece-built over a long period of time, with consequent inequities, imbalances, and loopholes that tend to emphasize structural protection at Federal expense for indiscriminate flood plain development. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It would be pleasant to believe that this means that the natural and unassisted river system is going to continue to serve human needs in the future as it has served them heretofore—that after cleaning up the network of streams and ensuring against their repollution and the desecration of their landscape, men will be able to leave them respectfully alone to run down toward the Chesapeake Bay as they have run during and before human memory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Above there in the upper Piedmont, and then across the Blue Ridge in the Great Valley, the westering waves of migrant English met other waves of Scotch-Irish and the Germans coming down from Pennsylvania, and before the American Revolution the combined breeds of men had built up enough pressure to push Indians almost entirely out of the Potomac Basin and to occupy all the good farmland, even in the Basin's ridged western areas. ”

“ Within Washington itself, children may be born to erstwhile rural parents and may [Pg 75a] [Pg 74] come to adult years with only a scant sense of the peace and beauty that can be found a few miles away, and often with little sense of anything else but the crumbling, teeming, stifling, noisy, sooty slums where they live—the other side of the monumental splendor along the Federal riverfront. Not all urban frustration is an outgrowth of the physical environment by any means, but much is. ”

“ And upon the emerging potency of this sound and urgent concern with the way the natural world is being used up, we believe a flexible form of planning can be based that will do away with the dilemma posed by the complexities and uncertainties of the moment. With a minimum of compromise, such planning will be able to identify and propose solutions for immediate problems in places like the Potomac Basin, while moving toward longrun solutions for other problems as those problems' dimensions become clearer than at present, and as technology and politics make better solutions feasible. ”

“ In bad cases, the alternatives to digging it up may be water pollution, health hazards, siltation and perhaps floods, sour public discontent among new elements unsympathetic to Jeffersonian simplicity, and the rapid deterioration of the new suburbs into rural slums—a combination of factors that in itself may bring about drastic change in the community. Thus in one way or another contemporary rural individualism tends to bury itself, but often too late for the salvation of the woods and pastures and clear waters and human dignity it took for granted and placed so little value on. ”

“ But still the Basin in general is not like Long Island, swarmed upon by daily and weekly waves of millions, hard put to save even traces of the natural magnificence it once had. It is not like much of Southern California, packaged and delivered over whole to automobiles instead of to human beings. It is nine million acres or so of still mainly rural and agricultural, Eastern, temperate, humid North America with a resident population of only about 3.5 million people, some two-thirds of whom live in a relatively few square miles around Washington. ”

“ Like the meek, the upper estuary inherits the earth, or at least that part of the Basin's earth that is washed downriver as silt. There are enough fine suspended sediment particles in the water of the metropolitan river to make it drably opaque most of the time, even during relatively dry spells, when heavy sand and gravel dredging helps to keep it stirred up. As the current loses force and washes back and forth with the tides, the particles settle out slowly into smothering, continually renewed blankets on the bottom, and over two centuries have accreted into great mudbanks and shoals. ”

“ Therefore, it is not usually so much the concern of private enterprise as of citizens in general and the various levels of government that look after the citizens' desires and wellbeing. It depends on laws to back it up, and on institutions and programs established by law. These are the only machinery by which it can be adequately stimulated, unless we assume that all waste producers are altruistic to a point of self-sacrifice, an assumption which history does not encourage. ”

“ Pollution itself can affect the utility of water as well as people's enjoyment of it in a stream. A creek watershed that has been ignorantly farmed or roughly assaulted with bulldozers for urban development is an eyesore of erosive destruction, unproductive of crops, wildlife, or poetic appreciation, and can cause both heavier stream flooding in time of storm and lower flow in time of drought by the way its disruption alters the normal behavior of rainwater. ”