may be rural, based in the old use-her-up-and-move-along pioneer
outlook that has never died out among us despite wide understanding of
better ways of doing things. People in places still overgraze pastures
and clean-cut timber so that rain can get at the soil and eat it away,
and they still farm land too steep to stay in place without its
vegetative cover, or they plow even suitable rolling land in straight
rows up and down hill so that water and soil sluice away together down
the furrows when it rains. Despite a sharply effective three decades of
work and public education by the Soil Conservation Service and other
agencies, these old practices continue in some places and cause much
erosion.

[Illustration]

Also, increasingly, bad land use involves the ways in which great
machines adapt the landscape to hundreds of sophisticated purposes. The
massive eatings of powered blades and scoops to get at coal and other
minerals on the steep slopes of the North Branch watershed and
elsewhere, add heavily to sedimentation. So do broad rights-of-way
gashed out of the countryside and left bare under storms in the months
before highway construction is done, and secondary roads that even when
finished may be left for years or forever with denuded clay shoulders
and ditches and banks that wash with every rain. And so, most
particularly, do the great polygons of rolling land around the Basin's
town and cities that are stripped naked by bulldozers and left sitting
in that condition for long periods, while they await the erection of
buildings and blocks of homes. This is occurring throughout the Basin,
but most notably around Washington, where the highest erosion rates of
all are found. We will take a look at its details and the reasons for it
a little further along in this chapter when we examine the estuary's
situation.

Except for the acid parts of the North Branch, the upper Basin's waters
in most places, most of the time, can still serve the "practical"
purposes to which they are put--irrigation, industrial uses, municipal
supply after purification, and even the absorption and digestion of
effluents from adequate, well-run treatment plants. Most of the streams
are usually good to look at, especially in conjunction with the superb
rural landscapes against backgrounds of wooded mountains that are
characteristic. They furnish much pleasure to fishermen, hunters,
boatmen, swimmers, picnickers, and other folk, though in some places