V. COMPLEXITIES AND PRIORITIES
A river basin is a good functional unit of topography, admirably suited for study and for certain types of resource planning. Because of this, there is a temptation for those who undertake such study and planning to assume that river basins have, or ought to have, human unity as well—unity in politics, economics, and culture—with a consequent "basin public" inclined to think in basin terms. Basin identity of this sort would facilitate conservation, development, and management. It would "make sense," and clearly enough a a great deal of sense needs to be made, and soon, if people are going to have any hope of balancing their use of resources against the inevitable continuing requirements of the long future.
Small watersheds often do have unity of this human sort, but very few major river basins. And usually the question of whether they ought ideally to have it or not becomes irrelevant in the face of the rock-hard reality of the forces working against it. In the Potomac Basin, the boundaries that ramble among the various political subdivisions—the District of Columbia and portions of four separate States, with all or part of some 39 counties and a number of independent cities—only accidentally and occasionally follow watershed ridges. More often they reflect the caprice of Stuart kings and Fairfax lords, the accidents of history, the fortunes of war, and the trampings of young George Washington and the Messrs. Mason and Dixon and hundreds of less renowned linemakers. These boundaries, some of them sanctified by centuries of existence, are one of the Basin's most fundamental sets of facts, creating genuine differences in the interests, activities, viewpoints, and even accents of the people. And they emphasize a healthy political diversity and complexity that in many ways is simply not amenable to change.
None of the capitals of the four Basin States lies within the Basin's limits. This means that some of the strongest political loyalties and energies of the region are directed outward toward Richmond and Annapolis and Charleston and Harrisburg, and that much action relating to the Potomac must be sought in those cities, or is decided on incidentally there by legislators, many of whose strongest interests may lie along the James or the Susquehanna or the Ohio or other streams.
The fact that the capital of the United States, together with its attendant metropolis, is located solidly within the Basin at the Fall Line is of immense if problematic significance. For one thing, it fosters a concentrated Federal interest in the Potomac and the Potomac region, in both esthetic and utilitarian terms and at both legislative and administrative levels, which have led to some special amenities in the way of parks and such things and to some Federal efforts to treat the river in "model" terms, however these terms may have been defined at various points. On the other hand, it has also led to a special concern with the river on the part of the almost innumerable interest groups that possess leverage in Washington, from wilderness conservationists to industrial lobbyists, who exercise pulls in a number of different directions.
And the presence of the capital has set up other special currents of influence and sympathy that bypass normal political channels. Many Basin towns and counties look more toward Washington for certain kinds of action than toward their State agencies and legislatures. Federal programs have long been active here close to the main-office sources of expertise and cash, building up respect and trust through local agents, and Basin Congressmen who hardly have to leave home to exercise their legislative function have further strengthened these ties.
The metropolitan jurisdictions, especially, in many ways find more common cause with one another and the Federal Government than with communities and governing bodies elsewhere in their own States. Politically, this sense of collective identity gets official expression in the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional body which, like its counterparts in other urban conglomerations throughout the country, is geared to work directly with the Federal Government in dealing with its own regional problems rather than having to come at Federal programs and agencies along the more lengthy traditional route through the States. The implications of this new kind of alignment are still a matter for debate and conjecture.
Other forces at work along the Potomac similarly have less to do with boundary lines, drainage limits, or Basin thinking than with human ways of being. There are a number of kinds of country here, as we have seen, in various stages of development and with various sorts of people inhabiting them. Yeoman tillers of the Shenandoah's limestone soils may find scant occasion to identify their interests with those of the Washington slums, or even with those of the fox-hunting Piedmont gentry just across the Blue Ridge. Coalmining Potomac Appalachia has more common economic and cultural outlook with eastern Kentucky than with the Potomac Tidewater; southern Maryland and the Northern Neck and the Monocacy's dairy farmers all have their own ways of interpreting human existence and defending themselves against its pitfalls. Within the county governments and the Congressional and State-legislative districts, these local and regional viewpoints choose political leaders who joust for them in higher arenas, often aligning there with forces from outside the Basin. Hence a metropolitan Maryland Congressman may vote in the House with kindred souls from Long Island and Pasadena, and his Basin colleagues with agricultural constituencies may oppose him on some issues in alliance with representatives from Wyoming or Arkansas.
Despite the Basin's special ties to the Federal Government, many rural Basinites are suspicious of Washington and the metropolis, often out of a traditional distrust of "big government" and sometimes because they see the accumulation of city folk at the head of the estuary as a menace to rural modes of existence. Thus they may oppose water projects designed to help the metropolis, or recreational development that threatens to bring down on them large numbers of pleasure-bound outsiders, though local businessmen's hope for a boom sometimes offsets such opposition. The reapportionment of legislative districts now in progress, plus the growing political muscle of metropolitan areas, is probably going to cut down on the power of rural areas and rural viewpoints—though just how much and in what way no one is yet sure. Some prophets claim that these influences are going to erode rural influence utterly; others that they will merely shape an alliance between middle-class suburbs and rural areas against the beleaguered central cities with their slums and other huge specific problems.
Worth noting also is the fact that many erstwhile "rural areas" are getting less rural by the year. With population pressures and industry and pollution and looming water deficits, they have more and more in common with the Washington metropolis, and more need for "big government" programs. In the long run, an overwhelming majority of the Basin's future population will probably be city-dwellers, with a consequent effect on general attitudes toward Basin planning and projects—though exactly what effect is not at all certain.