Upland populations of deer, turkey, grouse, quail, raccoon, fox, and other sporting and non-sporting species thrive in parts of the Basin suited to their habits and still in good condition, and shrink elsewhere. Many stretches of private forest land could support much higher densities of game and other wildlife, if they were put in better shape by practices that are available and feasible. Of the more than three million acres of such land scattered throughout the Basin in small holdings, much is in poor condition. It is therefore but spottily productive of game or timber or anything else, and often causes high runoff and erosion in critical watersheds.
Recreation
Many of the things we have called amenities here are subject to full-fledged economic uses necessary to the region's wellbeing and not usually in great conflict with scenic and ecological values if they are carried out right. Farming and commercial fishing and logging used to be generally exploitative and hard on the natural scheme of things in this country, for instance, but they no longer need to be and in most cases are not. Using the Potomac's water for towns and factories and power and navigation entails some interference with natural processes, but it does not have to be widely destructive of them. Discharge of treated wastes to streams is still necessary to a degree, and up to that degree not badly harmful, though as we have seen, it is far too often excessive.
Urban expansion is necessary also with present population pressures. It is an irreversible exploitation of the landscape, but if the type of land-use principles mentioned in this chapter were to get wider employment, urbanization would quite certainly not have to be as destructive of natural and human values as its present usual form is. The same thing is true of industry in its many manifestations, including mining, and of the woven network of roads and utilities. The public needs them, and the people responsible for them need to be aware of the great value of the natural framework within which all men must exist.
Average people's direct use of the natural world is most often of the kind summed up as "outdoor recreation," an umbrella phrase under which are lumped a diversity of satisfactions found by widely differing persons in many types of more or less natural places. Muscular hunters and elderly birdwatchers, water-skiers and bank-fishermen, Sunday drivers on crowded highways and lean backpackers on dim trails in the South Branch highlands, baseball players and people who take naps on the grass beside the C. & O. Canal, amateur archaeologists and stock-car racing fans—all these and many other kinds of folk depend somehow on the Potomac outdoors for their pleasure. They use it.
How much they use it and how much pleasure they get out of it are governed by the time on their hands, the availability of their chosen recreation, and whether it is good of its kind. A would-be hunter who cannot escape from the District of Columbia is out of luck unless his mobility improves. An Alexandria water-skier can divert himself on the metropolitan estuary during the summer months, but under ordinary conditions at present it is something less than what is known as a "quality experience," as is fishing there or any other water sport. A West Virginian has to have some time to spare if he wants to enjoy beaches and ocean breezes; so do Tidewater residents with a penchant for mountain trout fishing.
Nevertheless the Basin holds a great deal for almost all tastes, and most of what it holds is of excellent quality. The main recreational needs are fairly clear: to protect and restore the Potomac outdoors from the deterioration noted in this and earlier chapters, to spread the chance at different kinds of pleasure around as much as possible, to guard against clashes between different kinds of use and against the destruction of the quality of quiet and natural places that occurs when too many people are jammed together in them, to make the Basin's pleasant corners and shores and byways easier to get at, and—not least important—to encourage uses that contribute to appreciation and preservation, helping to make sure that in the long run outdoor recreation in this region will be possible.
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. Maybe if the cities can be brought back to health and their growth shaped to fit in better with human needs, this will change. But with more and more people coming on, more and more leisurely and affluent as technology cuts down on work, more and more urban, outdoor recreation as a specific goal is going to be an ever more important consideration in planning. It is already important—and already, as we are reminded with statistics, big business.