Machinery
Though its spread-out economic benefits are almost incalculably great, good waste management unfortunately is seldom a money-making affair for those who sponsor it. 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.
Thanks to thoroughly justified public anxiety over the state of American waters, there is presently on hand the best assortment of such legal machinery that has ever existed, much of it so new as to be mainly untested. The Key Federal item is the Water Quality Act of 1965, which established the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration and set into motion a national program to clean up interstate and tidal waters. In the program the States were allotted primary responsibility for setting standards of cleanliness and were given until June 30, 1967, to work them out and submit them to the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration for review. Later came the Clean Waters Restoration Act of 1966, which authorized funds for F.W.P.C.A. construction grants to help communities build waste treatment facilities. Programs under other government agencies are also aimed at helping towns and cities deal with wastes.
In May of 1966 the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration was transferred from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the Department of the Interior, with a good many changes in personnel. A valuable move toward the longrun unity of Federal environmental study and action, this change has meant that the agency's shakedown period in its new surroundings has come during the latter part of our Potomac work, and that some large questions of policy and procedure are only now being answered. Furthermore, the fact that our study has coincided with the inevitably lengthy shaping of the State standards, and with their review and their coordination on specific interstate streams like the Potomac and its main tributaries, has somewhat blurred our view of this most significant legal machinery of all. For it is through these standards and their enforcement that the fundamental action toward a clean Potomac will be taken. The emphasis in formulating them and reviewing them has been on vast improvement, not on a rationalization of existing conditions, and behind them there is going to be legal muscle for enforcement.
Erosion and sedimentation, particularly from urban and industrial sources, will be of concern in these State programs, and in fact some Basin States already have powers for use against them that have never been brought fully to bear, but undoubtedly will be with the new impetus. At the Federal level, going programs of the Department of Agriculture—primarily under the Soil Conservation Service but also involving the Forest Service—are the best machinery we have. Their techniques of soil protection and runoff detention have been described earlier, and are often applied in a coordinated way to whole small watersheds. Mainly they are put into practice through the voluntary cooperation of landowners, watershed associations, and local or State governments, stimulated by Federal technical assistance and cost-sharing.
It was noted earlier that these techniques can also be effective against careless urban land shaping and other new concentrated sources of silt such as strip mines. But in terms of legal machinery, these areas present problems, chief among which is the matter of incentive on the part of those who must cooperate if the programs are to work. In an agricultural watershed, the effect of soil conservation practices and flood control measures on the health and productivity of the land is sharply evident to rural landowners and others in the neighborhood, who all benefit from it and usually are eager to cooperate. But strip mine operators and urban developers and road contractors and such folk seldom have to live personally with the erosion and mud and trouble that may result from the way they move earth and change the landscape. To them, sediment control and respect for the way watersheds work, even with cost-sharing, is likely to loom as simply an extra expense.
Under these circumstances, only stiff controls are going to make watershed programs and other devices work right. Local sediment ordinances are acutely needed, but are generally lacking or inadequate or poorly enforced, perhaps mainly because silt, in common with other pollutants, has some of its worst effects at points far removed from where it originates and local governments prefer not to stir up local developers and mine operators. It is a facet of what we called earlier the philosophical source of pollution.
Small Watershed Projects Boost Economy of Communities
This being so, the good of the Basin and the Potomac as a whole is going to require the exercise of State and interstate and Federal power against silt as well as against other pollution, especially around populated areas, until such time as the populated areas have developed the political maturity to take firm hold of their responsibilities in such matters. Laws and ordinances of themselves solve nothing. For example, many of the pollutive dribbles along Rock Creek and other metropolitan watercourses are based in clearly illegal practices and hence slovenly inspection and enforcement of existing regulations. Others occur because of defects in the sewer system that could and should be found and repaired. A shortage of manpower is one reason for such trouble, but poor philosophy is a bigger one.
States, interstate bodies, and municipalities, however, can exert no control over another and rather shameful set of pollution sources noted earlier in this chapter. These are the delinquent Federal installations in the Basin, generally but not always in the neighborhood of the capital, that are contributing to the river's problem. Recent publicity, much of it deriving from aspects of this present study, has been bringing about some improvement, as has President Johnson's Executive Order 11288, which directed that Federal facilities set the best example in the matter of pollution control. But the order has obviously not been obeyed with uniform enthusiasm in all quarters, defective philosophy and short waste-disposal budgets being no exclusive property of local governments. Sometimes this is because limited funds force agencies to put waste treatment far down on their list for spending, and little is left over for it. Whatever the reason in individual cases, a continuation of persuasion and enforcement by the F.W.P.C.A. within the Federal establishment is going to be essential, and Federal installations ought to be required at least to equal or excel the quality of treatment provided by other waste producers on the same streams or bodies of water. Furthermore, all the diverse pollutive activities dependent on Federal aid and cost-sharing—such as road construction, for instance—ought to be brought under similar controls.
Certain major changes in public policy are needed if different techniques of water quality improvement are to be combined in such a way as to give the most economical, appropriate, and effective protection to specific streams or river systems. The most important of these needed changes concerns the role of flow augmentation as a tool, for inclusion of water quality storage capacity in Federal reservoirs is a fairly new and uncertain practice, and some rather deep pitfalls are becoming evident.
One pitfall has to do with Federal Cost-sharing and the way it affects the freedom of choice of the States and localities on which the primary responsibility for eliminating pollution must rest. In building treatment plants to lessen the load of wastes discharged to streams, they can presently obtain Federal grants of up to 55% of the facilities' total cost. But if storage capacity for water quality—i.e., for flow augmentation—is provided in a Federal reservoir upstream, prevailing Federal policy based in a 1961 amendment to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act has been requiring them to pay nothing at all for it, though before such storage is authorized they must certify that an adequate standard of conventional treatment will be maintained downstream. Obviously, if this continues to be so, when the inevitable choice comes between improving on that adequate standard by investing in better treatment, either at the beginning or later, and seeking river dilution from a reservoir, they will be forced by sheer economics toward the latter, whether or not it is the right thing to do or in an overall sense the cheapest.
Like other aspects of flow augmentation already discussed, this situation is analogous to that of flood control, where communities have to pay a good part of the cost of local protection works or of controlling flood plain development, but can get reservoir protection free. In both cases, local authorities are stimulated toward choices that are not necessarily the right ones, taxpayers in general are forced to bear the weight of essentially local responsibilities, and the public may forever lose scenic or recreational amenities of great worth. The Department of the Interior, with a central interest in the problem, is taking the lead in an attempt to arrive at a better flow-augmentation policy that will permit right choices, put costs where they belong, and make certain that at the local level where pollution takes place there is sharp incentive to do something about it.
The other main difficulty has to do with the fact that river water has many uses, which augmentation may enhance or even stimulate. Water released from above during dry periods to increase and steady the river's flow and to help it handle wastes may also help navigation and hydroelectric power generation downstream, though neither of these is any longer a main factor in the flowing Potomac. Augmentation of flow can make the river prettier and more useful for recreation, and it can have stout beneficial effects on fish and wildlife. And under present conditions it constitutes a large increase in water of improved quality for free use by irrigators and industries and municipalities, which may so burgeon as a result that increased water consumption and waste production will cancel out the water quality effects of the reservoir releases in short order.
The need here, of course, is for some agency that can solidly guarantee that water released for quality control will be allowed to achieve that purpose and not be diverted to other uses that conflict with it. Where a river runs within a single State, and the State's constitution permits, the State may be able to adjust its powers of control and provide the guarantee. But where more than one State is involved, as on all the main rivers of the Potomac Basin, a good forceful river basin agency is clearly needed to coordinate water supply with water demand, and to ensure that benefits and cost responsibilities of any necessary reservoirs are meted out where they belong.
In terms of legal and institutional machinery, in fact, such a river basin agency is the most basic and urgent unfulfilled need along the Potomac, for the coordination and continuing supervision of water management in all its phases—assurance of supply, flood protection, quality improvement, recreation—in the vast physical unit of land drained by the river. And because land's condition is so often influential on the quality and utility of water, the agency's concern and authority must encompass some fundamental matters of land use as well.
No clearer illustration of the potential of such a body could be found than the achievements of the present Interstate Committee on the Potomac River Basin—INCOPOT—during the quarter century of its existence. Minimally financed and staffed, granted only advisory powers, toward the cure of a vast and growing sickness, it has managed in many ways to hold the line and even to improve things on the Potomac in a time when conditions on many American rivers were growing drastically worse and worse. Much credit accrues to some of the Basin States as well, but without the continuing focus and hard work of the INCOPOT people, dedicated to Basin thinking, it is doubtful that State efforts would have added up to much help for the Potomac as a whole. Our present strong hope of being able to clean up the river and its tributaries and to make them what they ought to be is perhaps mainly due to this organization's efforts.
The scope of the job to be done is becoming clear. A far-reaching and well-financed Federal pollution control program is getting under way, even if some elements of policy and procedure need refinement and a great deal of research toward the best answers to certain technical problems remains to be done. The four Potomac Basin States and the District of Columbia are poised for action at the level where it will count the most, with new water quality standards to guide them and Federal money and technical assistance for fuel. At the local level, incentive to do things right has never been stronger than at present, and it ought to grow still stronger as the sticks and carrots of the Federal and State programs come into use and pressure from citizens disgusted with dirty water builds up.
Things are moving. The chances are that they will move quite fast during the next few years, as new technology and new understandings ease the way toward solution of stubborn pollution problems. They are going to have to move fast, for threats are proliferating fast as well. And if things are going to move not only fast but right in the Potomac Basin, they are going to need the guidance of a continuing and authoritative body that concerns itself with them specifically like INCOPOT, focused on Basin matters and dedicated to their study, but with a wider realm of interest and stronger powers of coordination and enforcement to make certain that the things that are done are the right things, in the right order and the right places for the whole good of the Basin and the river.
IV. A GOOD PLACE TO BE
Stream water comes from the surface of the land or out of its porous underlayers, then flows seaward through its creases and folds, affecting the land and the land's creatures along the way and being affected by them. Thus, as we have already noted in more than one way, the management of land and the management of water are closely intertwined, from the way human use of a flood plain may demand structural interference with a river's old habits, to the way erosive farming in some West Virginia valley may help to make it harder to navigate Swedish newsprint into Alexandria by ship.
In a like way, "practical" and "esthetic" considerations as to how both land and water are treated are not easily disentangled from each other. How much of the rising tide of public concern over American rivers and lakes, for instance, comes from an awareness of what dirtied water costs the economy, and how much is rooted in simple disgust over a monstrous ugliness that should not be? Gullied and abandoned land grown up to scrub and weeds is not only useless as it stands but also a sadness on the landscape, a reminder of how far from the naive, often sentimental, but lastingly powerful 18th century ideal of oneness with nature men have wandered in their progress. A belching factory in the wrong place can perform such multiple functions as blighting a countryside, polluting a stream, lowering subdivision property values, and increasing the local rate of emphysema.
Only lately has it begun to grow clear that in the traditional concern with market exploitation of resources, moderns have not even evolved a language or a scale to evaluate the loss to them inherent in a wrecked landscape, a spoiled stream, and such things, or the positive worth of an unspoiled section of countryside. But it is becoming obvious enough that objections to environmental destruction are not necessarily sentimental, naive, or impractical. 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. And while human beings are soaking in this fact, the American landscape is being rapidly gutted by human activity.
A stately avenue rots to slums before everyone's eyes. A pastoral valley fills with houses gable on gable in six months' time; its stream runs red with mud, floods wildly out of banks with every heavy shower, shrinks to a foul dribble in time of drought, and finally is concreted over into a storm sewer to subdue it and get it out of sight. The stone cottage that a town's founder built with his own hands two hundred years ago gets in the path of a new highway and is pushed down, and its rubble used for fill beneath an exit ramp. What was once, when someone was fifteen, a secret clearing in the woods beyond a city's edge, may hold a hamburger stand or several dozen stacked car bodies when he comes back to seek it out at the age of twenty. A secluded section of estuarial shoreline, where eagles nest and Colonial patriarchs once brooded over the rights of man and a few families now make a living from oysters and crabs, is sold off to a development corporation headquartered in Chicago or Houston or somewhere, which, in accordance with certain current rights of man, divides it into 25-foot vacation lots with 250-gallon septic tanks, and within four years anyone who wades out of his boat there stirs up blue clouds of mellow sludge, and where did the oysters and the eagles go? We Americans are inevitably progress-minded, practically all of us, but we are beginning to wonder if progress needs to cost so much.
The Potomac landscape matters particularly, for certain reasons. One is that we hope to make a model of it, commencing here processes of preservation and restoration to show the rest of the country that modern ways of being need not eat up everything whole and green and old and meaningful and right. Another—not really separate, for it justifies that model status—is that the Basin's landscape, not only around the capital but far down the estuary and up along the flowing main river and its tributaries, is both physically and spiritually a national landscape, filled with national memories and meanings.
In the diverse kinds of country it holds and the ways of life they have fostered—Tidewater, Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Great Valley, and rugged Appalachia—it sums up much of the old Eastern, pre-Revolutionary America that people left behind when they shoved off toward the Ohio and the cotton South and the plains and the Rockies and the Pacific. A reasonably conscious Oregonian or Iowan or Texan seeing it for the first time knows that a part of what he is was sculptured there. Its map is textured with a richness of names that call up remembrance of what Americans used to be like and what they did, and how all of that led toward their becoming what they are today. Names of Indian tribes—Seneca, Piscataway, Dogue, Tuscarora, Anacostia—and Indian objects and activities by the hundreds. Names tied to men and events that carved history—old Saint Mary's where Calvert's Catholics came, Stratford of the Lees, Wakefield and Mount Vernon of the Washingtons, Braddock Heights, the Shenandoah, Harpers Ferry where John Brown lit a fuse, Manassas and Antietam and Gettysburg, and a multitude of others.
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. 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. It has had and still has many ardent protectors, ranging from small-town ladies' garden clubs to Presidents.
In consequence of these grateful facts, it has been able to recover from most of the damage done in the past, and much of what it has always been and always possessed still exists. There is enough natural harmony combined with diversity, enough forward human movement combined with a sense of what has gone before, to make the Basin's residents and those who visit glad to be alive in such a world, insofar as the times, their temperaments, their bank accounts, and their view of the human dilemma may permit. In general it is still a beautiful and satisfying piece of country, a good place to be.
But not all parts of it, and not for everyone, and most certainly not with any guarantee that it is going to stay a good place to be of its own accord, without any help. It is no privileged wonderland removed from the dissonance and change of a crowded technological age.