Major electric powerlines and other utilities routed arrogantly with only straight-line distances in mind, up hill and down dale and with their cleared rights-of-way kept brownly dead with herbicides, can intrude starkly on the beauty and mood of historic or pleasantly natural landscapes. In the name of public service, private utility companies in all the Basin States have wide powers of condemnation as emerged to view recently when the Potomac Edison Company proposed to hack out a strip for a new line along a route that included country associated with the campaigning around Antietam Battlefield in the Civil War, without an adequate attempt to find alternative routes.
In this instance, public protest shaped up a fight against the line, in which the Interior Department has become involved because of the Federally owned battlefield and the nearby C. & O. Canal. But often elsewhere, the great skeletal towers linked by thick transmission cables march where they please, indifferent to local objections. What is certain is that modern America needs the electricity transported thus, and the gases and liquids that run through great pipelines. Hope for the long run is offered by research that may open the possibility of putting high-voltage transmission lines underground, but in the meantime what is needed is an awareness on the part of utilities planners that scenic and historic values have to be given full weight in their computations.
The kind of agriculture that has so much to do with the Basin's scenic appeal is not entirely healthy these days. We have mentioned the difficulty created near Washington—and around other Basin centers of population and in many places where vacation colonies are burgeoning—by skyrocketing speculation and a general absence of strongly based and well-defended plans of preservation. As the development value of land rises in such places, local systems of taxation based on that value rather than on actual use may drive farmers out of business whether they want to stay in or not. Since 1945 in Fairfax County, Virginia, for instance, the number of commercial farms has dropped from 1788 to about 200, and it is still going down.
Even where the tax trouble has been recognized, as in Maryland, and taxation adjusted to reality for people who want to go on farming, few tillers of the soil are devoted enough to their acres to hold onto them in the face of the kind of cash that is often dangled before their eyes, for the flat and fertile tracts that make the best farms are also the easiest to subdivide and build on in standard fashion. For that matter, the usual form of tax relief on agricultural land can be used as a tax loophole by speculators. Thus, whenever tract values rise and development impends, good productive land, which the country may well miss later as populations grow and food supplies for them thin out, goes permanently under pavements and construction. Even though it is just in such places that protected, scenic, connotative rural landscapes might have the most meaning for the most people in the long run, their preservation presents some tough questions. Patterns of growth that would spare them could easily be worked out and would fit in well with watershed protection and open space needs, but the economics of compensating farm owners for the loss of the big money they might have received for them is another thing.
In some other parts of the Basin, the implications of a modern unified economy are a threat to traditional farms and farming methods. Labor costs, the need for expensive machinery, superior methods of storage of foodstuffs and easy transport over long distances have put Potomac farmers into competition with other regions, even other countries, where the same products they supply can be raised on an industrial scale of investment and profit. Thus the worth of a field of tomatoes in the Northern Neck of Virginia is affected by massive irrigated production in the Central Valley of California, and thus a Shenandoah farmer may barely break even or suffer a loss on a rather good crop of wheat in the old "bread basket of the Confederacy."
Such influences, even though dulled a bit by protective State and Federal farm programs, are putting a premium on specialization, ever larger farms, and an "agribusiness" approach, with high capital and operating expenses. Their effect on many family farms in the Basin's mountain regions, places with limited acreage of marginally productive land, is severe. These may have supported the clans that own them reasonably well for a century or more, but they cannot compete with Ohio. Unless their owners are willing to keep on farming while holding down a job in town for supplementary cash, they often move away and the places go out of cultivation. Some are consolidated into grazing or forestry units or bigger farms, some stand abandoned, some go on the market as vacation retreats and "hobby farms" for wide-ranging metropolitans.
Richer regions share the troubles. In the classic valley of the Monocacy, some of whose dairy farmers have to import feed now from the Midwest because they cannot raise it cheaply enough themselves, the size of the optimum farm, one that can compete effectively in today's market, has swelled in the past few years from about 150 acres to about 600, according to a study by the State of Maryland. The problem is compounded by rising land prices influenced not by productive value but by the presence of Megalopolis just over toward the Bay. Sprawl throws a long shadow.
Eyeing this array of difficulties, many farmers' sons are prone to seek another livelihood, and the average age of the men who do the farming grows higher all the time. Tiring, many sell out, and thus the family farms that make up the greater part of the Potomac's much-loved rural landscape dwindle in number and change in use. It is not necessary to be mawkish to see this as a loss. In part it is inevitable, but in part too it may be rooted in policies that can be altered and adjusted to keep the farms productive.
Wildlife, along the Potomac as elsewhere, is dependent on whatever habitat it occupies—that is to say on the state of the landscape. If the rivers are cleaned up and kept flowing even during times of drought and heavy use of water, they will support better populations of fish and a greater variety of species. If the subtle interrelationships and the immense value of the estuary's varied nooks and crannies are recognized, studied out to full understanding, and protected—and in time—not only fish and shellfish but ducks and eagles and herons and all the other wild users of the shores and wetlands will benefit. Government refuges and other devices are badly needed for these purposes in that region, now that it is no longer remote and the kind of protection many private owners have traditionally furnished wildlife is diminishing.
