l. But as development has proceeded in standard and
careless ways--the wholesale stripping and scarification of big tracts
of rolling, fine-textured land, the long naked wait for development--the
creek has come to be muddy and ugly almost all the time and has been
spewing an estimated 100,000 tons of sediment a year into the estuary,
with frequent floods.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

To help save the creek and its parks and to stimulate a better kind of
development of the rest of its basin, citizens formed a watershed
association under Soil Conservation Service auspices and brought about
the construction of two small upstream reservoirs to control
flooding--with results noted in the preceding chapter--and to collect
silt. They sought to promote better land use as well, for the
reservoirs' effectiveness is obviously dependent on their not filling up
quickly with an excess of sediment. Better land use around a city
depends on zoning and other legal devices to regulate the density and
distribution of construction, and on controls over the way land is
shaped, and a sharp conflict developed between the watershed's defenders
and the Council of Montgomery County, Maryland, in office at that time,
whose rezonings in favor of standard massive suburbanization and whose
failure to enact sediment-control ordinances threatened the whole
effort. Rock Creek has many friends, and their subsequent fight for its
salvation has had good effect, though much remains to be done.

[Illustration]

However, Rock Creek is only one of many metropolitan streams that need
protection, both for their own sake and for that of the estuary. Some
are getting it--in the preceding chapter we noted the happy example of
Pohick Creek in Virginia, where whole watershed planning is being
accomplished almost from scratch, before development. But many more are
being ruined by the steady advance of standard urban sprawl.

Thus the main cause of urban silt is faulty or nonexistent or powerless
land planning, and the problem merges with the whole question of
landscape preservation. The ecological principles involved in good
practical land planning--the distribution of uses based on what land and
water can take without being degraded and causing silt, flooding, and
downstream pollution--are the same basic principles that lead to scenic
beauty and a decent human environment. This is a subject we will explore
in more detail when we arrive at considering the l