A great deal of legal machinery at various levels is available to stimulate the use of such techniques and to enhance outdoor recreation. Some of it has already been put to work in the Potomac Basin; some of it needs reshaping for application to the conditions found there; and to cope with certain of the problems, specific legislative action tailored to the needs is going to be required.
Active Federal programs of public works, technical assistance, grants in aid, cost sharing, taxation, home loans, mortgage insurance, and such things—often with counterparts at state levels—penetrate every level of the economy and have profound effects on the landscape. Some of them have a direct concern with the landscape as such: among these are the Department of Agriculture's soil conservation and forestry programs, Interior activities ranging from water pollution control to trails, parks, and wildlife refuges, and Housing and Urban Development programs for the restoration, protection, and creation of urban amenities—all being applied in the Basin, though some need legislative adjustment or extension if they are to be fully effective there. Most also have associated recreational purposes.
Others among the going high-level programs have only a tangential interest in the landscape per se, though frequently much influence upon it. In the past, as we have observed earlier, many of them have been responsible for a good deal of landscape damage, encouraging sprawl and other forms of bad land use, instituting great public projects without enough thought to their effect on esthetics and ecology, and so on. Some are still being conducted in this manner, though less and less as a general awareness of the need to restore and to preserve, to think twice before making massive environmental changes, soaks out through the complex network of government and has its influence on attitudes. Increasingly, not only Federal but State agencies are making decent land use, recreation, and scenic preservation a partial condition and sometimes a whole reason for aid programs and public works.
Many programs can be adapted to such purposes. One interesting example in the Potomac Basin is a study being undertaken in the Georges Creek valley of western Maryland by Frostburg State College. Under an educational grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, members of the college's faculty have embarked on research aimed toward a demonstration project of economic, social, and landscape restoration in the whole Georges Creek watershed as a unit. Action resulting from the study will involve a number of their State and Federal programs.
Often, of course, the benefits of such practices are "intangible" in terms of the market values that have traditionally been used for justifying government projects, and adequate ways of giving them their true weight against other values that may be in conflict with them have not yet really been worked out. Nevertheless, the fact that they have strong and sometimes overriding benefits is being recognized.
Insofar as such programs encourage Basinwide landscape improvement and protection and major recreational opportunities, they are instruments for accomplishing overall Basin aims, usable as such now by Federal and State agencies and at the future disposal of any Basinwide coordinative organization that may evolve. Insofar as they permit and stimulate counties and municipalities to do better environmental planning and give them money and morale to implement and enforce planning, they are available at this indispensable level of action where—as we have seen—the obstacles to doing things right are often huge. The programs put within reach of local officials the principles of good planning and management, and help them to achieve its details, from wildlife refuges to neighborhood parks, from the maintenance of riverside beauty and the restoration of historic shrines to the construction of small reservoirs. As knowledge of their existence and their advantages gets around, they are beginning to have much effect, especially at larger centers of population.
Nevertheless, it is impossible at present to be sure that any given locality is going to take meaningful steps toward staving off blight and landscape destruction, and a great many of them in the Potomac Basin have not done so. Partly this is because the imperative need for planning is only now beginning to dawn upon many smaller communities. But even where it has dawned and planning has been undertaken by men of good will, the great obstacles still exist and often block their efforts—the lack of money to match Federal or State program funds, the inability to convince fellow citizens who have to approve actions, the fat profits in real estate, the pervasive influence of personal relationships.
Ideally, for a number of attractive reasons, it would be preferable to let local people solve local landscape and recreation problems in every case, with outside higher levels of government furnishing only advice and money on request. In regard to many types of problems, this is what is being done and will be done on into the future, for people living in a place are the ones who determine whether the place is going to be ugly or pretty, pleasant or grim. The trouble is, however, that as understanding of the interrelationships between land and water and the other elements of the landscape, even on a Basinwide scale, has grown, it has become more and more obvious that there are only a few strictly local landscape problems. Most local jurisdictions have within their boundaries critical watersheds, unique scenic assets, flood plains whose unwise use will require elaborate and costly structural protection later on, and other such features. This being so, the effects of mismanagement are certain to reverberate elsewhere, and it becomes the concern of people other than those who live in that neighborhood. It becomes other people's business, distasteful though this idea may be to communities with a tradition of self-sufficiency.
Regional planning organizations that can pool counties' and towns' resources, take a broad view, and pay for professional help can overcome some of the obstacles, if local governments can be persuaded to join them. Certain of the State and Federal programs mentioned above are being applied mainly through such bodies. But it seems to be an unavoidable conclusion that if local government continues to be the weakest link in the chain of planning, preservation of the environment is going to require not only stouter incentives to elicit cooperation from communities, but also more authority at higher levels of government to guard against at least the worst types of landscape abuse. In terms of water, this kind of authority will shortly be operative with the enforcement of the new State water quality standards. In terms of the other elements of the landscape, it is equally justifiable.