arried out right. Farming and commercial fishing and logging used to be
generally exploitative and hard on the natural scheme of things in this
country, for instance, but they no longer need to be and in most cases
are not. Using the Potomac's water for towns and factories and power and
navigation entails some interference with natural processes, but it does
not have to be widely destructive of them. Discharge of treated wastes
to streams is still necessary to a degree, and up to that degree not
badly harmful, though as we have seen, it is far too often excessive.

[Illustration]

Urban expansion is necessary also with present population pressures. It
is an irreversible exploitation of the landscape, but if the type of
land-use principles mentioned in this chapter were to get wider
employment, urbanization would quite certainly not have to be as
destructive of natural and human values as its present usual form is.
The same thing is true of industry in its many manifestations, including
mining, and of the woven network of roads and utilities. The public
needs them, and the people responsible for them need to be aware of the
great value of the natural framework within which all men must exist.

Average people's direct use of the natural world is most often of the
kind summed up as "outdoor recreation," an umbrella phrase under which
are lumped a diversity of satisfactions found by widely differing
persons in many types of more or less natural places. Muscular hunters
and elderly birdwatchers, water-skiers and bank-fishermen, Sunday
drivers on crowded highways and lean backpackers on dim trails in the
South Branch highlands, baseball players and people who take naps on
the grass beside the C. & O. Canal, amateur archaeologists and stock-car
racing fans--all these and many other kinds of folk depend somehow on
the Potomac outdoors for their pleasure. They use it.

How much they use it and how much pleasure they get out of it are
governed by the time on their hands, the availability of their chosen
recreation, and whether it is good of its kind. A would-be hunter who
cannot escape from the District of Columbia is out of luck unless his
mobility improves. An Alexandria water-skier can divert himself on the
metropolitan estuary during the summer months, but under ordinary
conditions at present it is something less than what is known as a
"quality experience," as is fishing there or any other water sport. A
West Virginian ha