ken to eliminate these discharges, but it is a
commentary on the complexity and difficulty of the whole task of dealing
with pollution that at the level of government where real concern with
the problem has been acute for a decade or more, and furthermore at and
around the very seat of that government, such practices should have
persisted this long.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Junk and debris of all descriptions infest the metropolitan river,
floating about, washing onto the shores, poking up stolidly here and
there out of mudflats. Most items in a dreary inventory that might be
compiled would turn out to be something that was discarded somewhere it
didn't belong by someone who did not want to go to the trouble to put it
where it did belong. Therefore, the main source is undoubtedly simple
disregard for the sensibilities and rights of others, multiplied and
complicated by the immense number of people in the metropolis and the
wide territory they occupy. In our study of Rock Creek last year, some
powerful subsidiary reasons for the prevalence of debris turned up also,
ranging to streetcleaning methods and the inconvenient hours kept by
some public dumps where citizens have to carry their larger trash.
Metropolitan problems are seldom simple, and many of them in one way or
another manage to inflict a part of their complexity on the river at the
national capital, which is sad but possibly appropriate in a time like
the present.

The lower estuary

Downriver from the main effects of the metropolitan complexities, the
widening brackish and salt portions of the Potomac estuary form a
generally healthy body of water, though changes loom as the metropolis
moves inexorably outward from its center and as hitherto remote
Tidewater areas are brought more and more under the influence of modern
ways of being. Localized problems of pollution point to general dangers
that will certainly materialize unless safeguards are set up in time,
for estuaries are delicate, immensely productive, and still somewhat
mysterious aquatic environments that have been and still are too much
taken for granted.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Rapid human intrusion on estuaries during the past twenty years has
been making apparent their phenomenal value in a natural condition.
Vulnerable, attractive to diverse interests that work their beds for
sand and gravel and fill in their marshes for development and casually
pollute them, they have