ubles have been growing apace lately as men have grown in
numbers, in the demands they make on the natural environment that shaped
and nourished their species, and in their technological power to enforce
those demands. The troubles pose a threat to men of flavorlessness and
grayness and the loss of essential meanings, a threat of diminished
humanity. For dependence on that environment, intricate and deep-rooted,
psychological as well as physical, has not grown less with the human
advance toward power and sophistication.

Yet in the Potomac Basin as a whole the threat so far is mainly still a
threat, not a reality. Where men's employment of the land has been
reasonable, as it has in the Great Valley almost from the start, the
land not only remains useful and pleasant but has a specific traditional
beauty dependent on man's presence. Where new comprehension of the
processes of destruction has been attained and shared, as in soil
conservation and forestry and such fields, much damage done in the past
has been repaired.

Most of the Potomac river system's flowing waters are unnaturally
polluted to one degree or another, but only in spots does the pollution
even approach the sort of poisonous hopelessness to be found along some
more heavily populated and industrialized American rivers, and on the
Potomac its spread is already being slowed. Water shortages loom, but
have not yet seriously materialized. Floods threaten, but only at
certain definable spots. Human beings boom outward from the Washington
metropolis and the other centers of population in search of a fuller
life, and the consumptive sprawl and sameness of the communities built
to receive them often deny it to them. But in modern terms there are not
really enormous numbers of them yet, and for their pleasure and
fulfillment a great deal of varied and handsome and historic landscape
has been more or less preserved, by design or happy accident.

[Illustration: Proposed Water Resource Development

1. Sixes Bridge
2. Sideling Hill
3. Town Creek
4. Little Cacapon
5. North Mountain
6. Verona (Staunton)

]

[Illustration: North Mountain]

[Illustration: Town Creek]

The Potomac Basin, in other words, is still generally a wholesome place
two-thirds of the way through the 20th century. If it gets the
protection it deserves, and is developed thoughtfully and decently to
meet men's demands upon its resources, it can stay a wholesome place
into the ind