it
is an open question, as we have seen, whether or not contact with the
water is prudent. And almost everywhere, aging locals can recall a time
when their stream was a happier amenity than now--when it held more
fish, ran clearer over stones and gravel not coated with weeds and
green slime, did not have the smell it presently emanates, was colder
and more copious....

Their nostalgia probably does not play them false, even though
conditions in many places are better now than in the intermediate past,
after modern times had settled in, but before INCOPOT and the Soil
Conservation Service and such influences had begun to push for reform of
the casual, anciently human ways of doing things in which present human
populations can no longer afford to indulge themselves. Some of the
gains that have been made are being cancelled out by growth and new
types of pollution, however, and in general the flowing Potomac river
system is teetering at the brink of bad trouble. It needs help.

If the flowing upper Potomac had any lingering oxygen deficiency in its
lower stretches--though it seems usually not to--it would tend to
rectify the lack in its turbulent eighteen-miles descent across the Fall
Line, a superb natural "treatment plant." Normally it arrives at
Washington charged with oxygen, but does bring down with it the part of
its nutrient load that has not fertilized upstream weeds and algae,
periodic waves of bacterial concentration, and a great deal of debris
and silt in season.

In the broadening, slowing upper estuary, its sluggish currents confused
by the twice-daily surge and ebb of tides, these materials from above
are stirred in with an array of specifically metropolitan
pollutants--with more silt off of the outraged urban watershed, with
junk and debris of a thousand sorts, with decaying substances and
bacteria from many sources, and with vast new quantities of nitrogen and
phosphorus. The consequence is a weighty and sometimes spectacular
pollution problem directly adjacent to the proud national capital. It is
at its vivid and aromatic worst in summer, when the most Americans come
there fondly to view the city and the Potomac, and when locals who want
to boat and fish and swim and do the other things one does on water
would make most use of the river--indeed, do make use of it in spite of
everything.

Like the meek, the upper estuary inherits the earth, or at least that
part of the Basin's earth that is washed dow