or recreation in
the Potomac Basin will be tremendously increased. Recreation and
preservation are not separable subjects. If a river is cleaned up and
its shoreline protected against clutter and ugliness, its use by
fishermen and boatmen and others will be enhanced. If a park is
established to protect a unique natural asset, people's enjoyment of
that asset will be assured. Most preservation leads to more recreational
opportunity; many things that are done to provide outdoor recreation
afford some measure of protection for the environment as well, but the
emphases are sometimes different.

Among specific recreational problems, access is a major one. For those
who can afford cars, getting around the Basin grows easier all the time
as roads proliferate, but getting at the agreeable things to do is hard
in many places. Here and there important parts of the public lands in
the National or State forests, for instance, are cut off from easy use
by private inholdings. But the main amenity that is usually hard to
reach is water, which happens also to be the major magnet for outdoor
recreation of many kinds.

The estuary's 200,000 acres of superb recreational potential are a case
in point. It has a few drawbacks that can and ought to be dealt with,
like the thousands of old sunken pilings and stakes that make boating
dangerous in many places, and some others that may be tougher to
eliminate, like the great annual summertime incursions of stinging
jellyfish in its lowest reaches, the milfoil weed that sometimes clogs
its tributaries, and the erosion of its shores by winter storms. But
even as it stands, it offers fishing and boating and hunting of the
finest sort in its lower part, with excellent swimming higher up where
salinity drops and the jellyfish cannot come--a zone whose useful length
will increase upstream as metropolitan pollution diminishes. Yet along
the estuary's shores, except at certain historic sites like Wakefield
where types of use have to be limited, there are only two major public
parks at present and very few other public areas of any size where
people can launch boats, fish, camp, or merely get at the open water.
Some of the great military bases there are closed to the public, while
others permit limited use.

The main stem of the flowing Potomac is parallelled on the Maryland
shore by the C. & O. Canal in Federal ownership, a unique resource. But
the bulk of the land between the canal and the river--720