The Nations River | Page 6

of Agriculture, the Department of Health, Education and
Welfare (where the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration
was then located), and the various concerned bureaus and services of
the Interior Department itself. Shortly after this, Secretary Udall met
with the governors of the four Basin States and the commissioners of
the District of Columbia to ensure that State and local interests would
have a hand in the planning process. Out of this came the Potomac
River Basin Advisory Committee, composed of State and District
representatives, which has conferred often with the Interdepartmental
Task Force on overall questions and has assumed prime responsibility

in studying the central problem of creating a planning and
administrative body to handle Potomac water and related land problems
hereafter.
In addition, a blue-ribbon panel of distinguished planners and
specialists, assembled by the former president of the American Institute
of Architects at Secretary Udall's request and subsequently known as
the Potomac Planning Task Force, undertook a separate study of
Potomac questions, both in general and with specific focus on the
metropolis. Their independent report, The Potomac, was lately
published. It makes a detailed, wise, and instructive plea for
considering the river and its landscape as a whole and meaningful thing,
for proceeding with their development and protection according to high
esthetic and ecological principles, and for a distinctive form of
management.
Existing private, public, and semipublic organizations with an interest
in the Potomac or in the type of problems it presents have joined in the
present effort by sponsoring public meetings and publishing
discussions or otherwise doing their part to help. Among them may be
mentioned INCOPOT, the Conservation Foundation, the Metropolitan
Washington Council of Government, Resources for the Future, Inc., the
League of Women Voters, the Potomac Basin Center, the National
Parks Association, and a number of local planning or action bodies.
Through these meetings and other media, public comment on the
Federal Task Force's work has been voluminous and often helpful,
particularly since the publication of its Interim Report in January of
1966, which made certain proposals for immediate action to begin
providing for short-term metropolitan water needs, to protect specific
scenic treasures, and to get moving on the long task of cleaning up the
river.
With so many viewpoints somehow included in the planning process,
opinions have often diverged as to how much of what ought to be done
about the Potomac, and how soon, and in what order. Well they may
diverge. In a time of economic expansion and population growth
unparalleled in human history, predictions about the economy and the

population of the distant future--necessary to full planning--verge
perilously near to crystal gazing even when the best available
yardsticks are applied. And this is only one uncertainty. Among the
others which will be examined later in this report are the prospect of
drastic technological change that may soon offer cheaper, more
effective, and less disruptive ways of dealing with environmental
problems including water; the doubtfulness of sufficient public money
for large conservation projects in a time of international tensions and
urban crisis; and the solid American political complexity of the
boundary-laced Potomac Basin, which bristles with various forms of
veto power and a multiplicity of assorted regional, professional, and
philosophical viewpoints.
Such complexities and uncertainties have a powerful reality and
relevance for planners. They impose a need for breadth of view, for
leaving many future options open, and by the same token they present a
danger of piecemeal action, excessive compromise and indecisiveness.
The body of this report is an Interior Department document, couched
wherever possible in untechnical language in the hope that it may find a
wide lay readership. Necessary technical supporting material mainly
has been or will be made available in separate form. The report
examines environmental problems in the Potomac Basin and possible
solutions for them. Its underlying emphasis is ecological, based in a
conviction that man's own good is heavily dependent on the good of the
earth in all its complexity. No one at this point in time, obviously, is
going to be able to reconstitute the primeval Paleolithic world, nor
would many people want to. The earth has changed with people in their
long surge toward dominion over its ways and its creatures. But there is
a difference between adaptive change and the degeneration that modern
times are forcing on the earth men have always known. Growing
millions of people are coming to consider that human beings' right to
see and know woods and plains and mountains and streams and coasts
in a cleanly and decent condition--whether primitive or adapted in one
way or another to man's use--together with the communities of wild
creatures that belong there, is quite as practical and urgent as their right
to usable tap water or to a share in the Gross National Product. For

upon