Hunters need more room outdoors than most people, because of their guns and because they move about in search of game. Fortunately, the fall and winter months when they function are times when relatively fewer other people are out roaming. The public forests of the upper Basin are a main resource for hunting now and in the future, and the kinds of public access that are established on the estuary and the main rivers will have to take hunters' interests into account. Even so, if they increase in numbers as much as has been predicted, the added demand for places to go will require more lease and day hunting on private land in the long run than exists at present, and improvement of that land's wildlife potential.
Certain other kinds of recreational facilities, constituting the bulk of profitable enterprises associated with America's outdoor pleasure, will have to depend mainly or solely on private development of them. Amusement parks, marinas, and ski lifts are examples, and so are most of the lodging places, restaurants, and other service facilities that thrive wherever increased public recreational activity takes place.
Most Americans do some driving for pleasure, and some of them do a great deal of it, using their four-wheeled bugs not just as a way of getting to pleasant places but as an indispensable adjunct to being in them and enjoying them. In certain respects, the Basin falls short of providing for their needs. The explosive demand in the past few years for auto campgrounds where people can stop with their cars, trailers, and pickup units has caused a shortage of adequately equipped facilities of this sort, especially within easy reach of Washington, which will have to be supplied by both public and private effort. Roads specifically designed for leisurely pleasure driving, in contrast to high-speed throughways, are another need. The Basin has two such motorways now—the George Washington Memorial Parkway at the metropolis, a much-used city road in its present form though still a main amenity, and the Skyline Drive along the Blue Ridge, with the Blue Ridge Parkway extending southward through it and out of the Potomac country. This magnificent low-speed mountain-top route looks out alternately over the Great Valley and the Piedmont, and the heavy use it receives, increasing year by year, shows what the right kind of scenic motor routes can mean to people.
For a multitude of residents and visitors, nothing would contribute more to appreciation of what the Basin has to offer than a system of unobtrusive parkways and scenic wandering roads joining together the region's attractions—history and scenery and sports, rivers and valleys and mountains. A major element in such a system, being studied, would be a great loop parkway tying together the existing parkways by an extension along the river and turning southward into the country along the historic James, then back to the Blue Ridge. Scenic roads tributary to the system would utilize existing rural routes for the most part, enhanced and protected by State and local action.
For the many other people who seek a more active and less mechanized relationship with natural things, a connected regional network of trails for walking or riding or cycling is a main need and a main opportunity. Like the parkways or even more than them, it could be a framework for open space preservation and an intimate means of using that open space. Tied in with existing segments like the C. & O. towpath and the Appalachian Trail, linking the towns and cities with ridges and riversides and parks and historic places, it would provide the most fitting kind of access to the whole Potomac realm of things for anyone willing to take an afternoon's stroll or a week's hike.
More fundamentally still, it would be a powerful and continuing element in conservation education of the best kind, the participating kind. For generation after generation of the young people who would use it most, it would shape a feeling for rocks and water, creatures and trees, sun and wind and rain and hills and valleys, old houses and ruins and bloody fighting grounds, together with a sense of man's natural origins. And shaping the feeling, it would shape some comprehension.
The Potomac Basin is going to need that kind of comprehension; the whole country is. Recreation means fun, and it probably ought not be overweighed with solemnities. But outdoor fun is dependent on the wellbeing of the outdoors, and increasingly the outdoors depends on the understanding and sympathy of human beings who possess new great power of destruction and have been using it widely. So that if any form of outdoor recreation can furnish, however slightly, some comprehension of what the natural world is like and how it works, it amounts to quite a lot more than a bit of needed relaxation from the week's toil at one's job or in the kitchen and nursery, though it may be that as well. With the comprehension, it becomes an enlargement of one's grasp of things, and it adds a little substance to the hope that people will keep on caring about the integrity of the world around them and defending it as best they can. And no safeguard this present mortal generation can set up is more meaningful than that hope.
Avenues toward coping with landscape problems
Most of the known basic techniques of landscape protection have already been discussed or touched on in this report: ways of cleaning up rivers and assuring their flow, ways of halting erosion and siltation, ways of planning land's use by concentrated human populations with as little loss as possible of amenities, ways of patching up old damage. Many of them are imperfect as yet and for some problems tools are still missing, nor are the existing techniques being applied in a completely coordinated manner anywhere on this continent except in a few experimental places of restricted size. But they do exist; they are available if human beings and human institutions can be persuaded to put them to use. And it is not possible to repeat too often that the need for their use is urgent.