Exploitation changes the picture, however, as exploitation is wont to do. If a whole neighborhood of farmers seeks such profits, or if real estate men get into the act, or big development corporations that may be operating from almost anywhere in the country, the scale enlarges and purple prose may appear in the metropolitan newspapers to lure nostalgic suburbans out to examine an assortment of lots sliced fine for maximum yield and priced most often according to their proximity to water. Water is usually involved, for it is the fundamental outdoor attraction, whether it is a mountain creek or a river or a made pond or a deep bay off the lower estuary. Its ultimate pollution is often involved as well, for sanitary arrangements tend to be rudimentary and inadequate for concentrations of people, especially when the "second homes" start turning into permanent homes with the retirement of their owners or their sale to younger locals. This latter process, too, sometimes leads to a future demand for schools and other services whose need was not foreseen by local governments when they permitted the development.
In some places along the estuary and the Potomac main stem and the Shenandoah, the creation of such communities has already led to wholesale, ugly, unsanitary clutter along considerable stretches of once beautiful shoreline. It is beginning to shape up even on remoter waterways like the Cacapon and the South Branch, and in some parts of the mountains. As new interstate highways and other avenue of access are opened from Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and many other cities, the process may be expected to blight most shorelines throughout the Basin unless something is done to control it. And not only the county councils and boards of supervisors but the rest of us as well are going to inherit the problems associated with it, for these waters and shores are of more than local concern, in terms of the loss of amenity, in terms of pollution, and in terms of the quite frequent certainty of future flood damages, a demand for protection at general public expense, and possibly the loss of further amenities and resources at the site of a protective reservoir upstream.
From an abstract point far outside the boundaries of these rural counties, it is easy enough to condemn the frame of mind that lets such things take place. But the fact is that people in rural local governments and those who elect them often have even more respect and love for the landscape around them than the most esthetic of metropolitans. They may take it too much for granted, but they have grown up close to it and they can feel the loss acutely when it deteriorates. Some of the usual obstacles to their doing anything to prevent the deterioration were mentioned earlier—money is short, and so is planning know-how. Probably the greatest obstacle, however, is the matter of personal relationships. Not in terms of outright corruption, which is far more likely in the anonymous atmosphere of great cities, but in terms of the need of people in small communities to get along with one another, combined with traditional profit motives.
Suppose a local planning or zoning board is taking action to determine whether or not a big corporation from elsewhere can buy and subdivide some flood-plain land belonging to a well-liked fellow townsman, a hardware dealer whom all of them have known from childhood and with whom they will be doing business the rest of their lives. Despite the inappropriateness of the land for human occupation and the mess that is going to be established along their pretty river, is it to be reasonably expected that a voting majority of them are going to decree that a friend be deprived of a half-million dollars' profit? The dilemma is a serious one, perhaps the weakest point in the land-use control at this local level, and it may mean that higher levels of government will have to take over some of the responsibility and get local governments off the hook.
Industry in the landscape
Another matter about which small communities can seldom feel impartial is the prospect of attracting industry. With the growth of the great cities here and there, perhaps a majority of small towns are faced now with flagging agricultural prosperity, a lack of jobs, and the resultant departure—often reluctant—of most of their energetic young people for the new centers of action. The mere rumor that an industry is considering setting up a plant in such a place is likely to set off shock waves of delight and establish a general mood in which almost any concession will be offered to tempt the corporation—to the point that authorities, in some places, have issued bonds and built the requisite factory themselves.
In a good many cases, this particular cure for the community's ills has proved to be worse than the sickness, leading to total community dependence on a fallible and perhaps capricious enterprise, pollution of air and water, noise and flood-plain clutter, and frequently the destruction of the local riverside where industries tend to locate unless directed elsewhere. Little of this is necessary now, as a number of examples of responsible industry in the Basin demonstrate. But it continues, and will continue as long as communities keep looking on industry as a source of payrolls only, free of sin: "It smells like money," some residents of one Shenandoah town say of their factory's miasmal odor, though other natives phrase their description differently....
The full legacy of an older time when industry neither knew how to avoid pollution and other troubles nor saw any reason to try, and no community leaders saw any reason to bring the subject up, is found in prime fettle along the North Branch, whose pollution is a sympathetic reflection of the general state of that region's environment. Though certain industries there—most notably the huge but aging pulp and paper mill at Luke, Maryland—have managed at considerable expense to cut down on the wastes they discharge to the river, the prevalent philosophy elsewhere in the neighborhood would seem to be that both land and water are already so afflicted that no single community's or industrial plant's attempt at betterment could do much good.