reedy marsh with a single narrow gut of shoal water wandering down across it to the Potomac.

And if later generations of men cut down the forests on the mountains in the western Basin, and fire followed the cutting, thousands of years of soil washed down from those slopes too to change both mountains and river, and elk and panther vanished. And if along the Potomac's North Branch there was once a fine coal boom, there is now the boom's legacy in the form of gray dour towns and dark sad streams corrosive with mine acids.

And if old Alexandria and Georgetown and all the land around them have burgeoned into one of the nation's great cities, there has been a price to pay for that also. The stately upper estuary on which they front is often turbid with silt and sometimes emerald green with algae nourished on sewage and other septic riches, and the hills stretching back from the river are spiky with tall buildings linked by urban and suburban clutter, where life lacks the natural elbow room that the old Tidewater folk—planters and yeomen and bondsmen and slaves alike—were able to take for granted.

These are facets of an Age of Problems, of course. They and other related troubles have been growing apace lately as men have grown in numbers, in the demands they make on the natural environment that shaped and nourished their species, and in their technological power to enforce those demands. The troubles pose a threat to men of flavorlessness and grayness and the loss of essential meanings, a threat of diminished humanity. For dependence on that environment, intricate and deep-rooted, psychological as well as physical, has not grown less with the human advance toward power and sophistication.

Yet in the Potomac Basin as a whole the threat so far is mainly still a threat, not a reality. Where men's employment of the land has been reasonable, as it has in the Great Valley almost from the start, the land not only remains useful and pleasant but has a specific traditional beauty dependent on man's presence. Where new comprehension of the processes of destruction has been attained and shared, as in soil conservation and forestry and such fields, much damage done in the past has been repaired.

Most of the Potomac river system's flowing waters are unnaturally polluted to one degree or another, but only in spots does the pollution even approach the sort of poisonous hopelessness to be found along some more heavily populated and industrialized American rivers, and on the Potomac its spread is already being slowed. Water shortages loom, but have not yet seriously materialized. Floods threaten, but only at certain definable spots. Human beings boom outward from the Washington metropolis and the other centers of population in search of a fuller life, and the consumptive sprawl and sameness of the communities built to receive them often deny it to them. But in modern terms there are not really enormous numbers of them yet, and for their pleasure and fulfillment a great deal of varied and handsome and historic landscape has been more or less preserved, by design or happy accident.

Proposed Water Resource Development

North Mountain

Town Creek

The Potomac Basin, in other words, is still generally a wholesome place two-thirds of the way through the 20th century. If it gets the protection it deserves, and is developed thoughtfully and decently to meet men's demands upon its resources, it can stay a wholesome place into the indefinite future.

Water pollution was the first Basinwide problem to make itself thoroughly evident, and the need to deal with it led to the first Basinwide activities besides studies. Soil conservation practices for sediment control were instituted in the 1930's, and in 1940 the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, often called INCOPOT, was formed by compact among the four Basin States and the District of Columbia, with the formal permission of Congress. INCOPOT's powers are only advisory in relation to State and community action against pollution, and it has never been generously financed. But during the quarter-century of its existence it has developed a wise combination of investigation, persuasion, and public education to fight this problem, with the result that on the Potomac conditions have in some ways actually improved during a period of wars and booms and haphazard urban expansion when many other rivers were headed straight down to stinking corruption.

In 1956 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was directed by Congress to undertake a Basinwide study to develop a plan for flood control and the conservation of water resources and related land resources. The emphasis in this assignment was upon a full long-term functional solution for the Basin's water problems in feasible economic and technological terms. In carrying it out, the Army enlisted the aid of other Federal agencies, and their Potomac River Basin Report, published in nine volumes in 1963, presented the study's results and a plan for Basin water development to meet needs to the year 2010. It is a monumental piece of work to which anyone concerned with the Basin henceforth will have to refer, because of the completeness with which it examines the Potomac water resource and the careful technical knowledge it brings to bear on Potomac problems.

However, the plan it presents—including recommendations for sixteen major multipurpose reservoirs on the Potomac and its tributaries—would bring about a massive and permanent revision of the free-flowing stream system and would inundate much valley land. It aroused articulate opposition at local, state, and Congressional levels, a good deal of which was focused on the key Seneca dam on the Potomac main stem just above Washington—an area where earlier single proposals for dams, first at Great Falls and then at River Bend, had provoked similar resistance.

Clearly enough, a powerful continuing body of opinion cares about something more than strictly functional values along the Potomac and in its Basin. It is a long-settled region, whose natives generally cherish what they have in the way of scenic and historic amenities. It is the part-time home of many influential lawmakers, who concern themselves about its beauty and well-being. And together with the national capital at the core of its metropolis, it is the vacation goal of millions of American tourists from elsewhere each year, who go home aware not only of monuments and marble halls of state but of crucial Civil War battlefields, dark mountain ridges overlooking classic river valleys, rolling Piedmont estates, and the wooded headlands of Virginia and Maryland