y and being affected by
them. Thus, as we have already noted in more than one way, the
management of land and the management of water are closely intertwined,
from the way human use of a flood plain may demand structural
interference with a river's old habits, to the way erosive farming in
some West Virginia valley may help to make it harder to navigate Swedish
newsprint into Alexandria by ship.

In a like way, "practical" and "esthetic" considerations as to how both
land and water are treated are not easily disentangled from each other.
How much of the rising tide of public concern over American rivers and
lakes, for instance, comes from an awareness of what dirtied water costs
the economy, and how much is rooted in simple disgust over a monstrous
ugliness that should not be? Gullied and abandoned land grown up to
scrub and weeds is not only useless as it stands but also a sadness on
the landscape, a reminder of how far from the naive, often sentimental,
but lastingly powerful 18th century ideal of oneness with nature men
have wandered in their progress. A belching factory in the wrong place
can perform such multiple functions as blighting a countryside,
polluting a stream, lowering subdivision property values, and increasing
the local rate of emphysema.

Only lately has it begun to grow clear that in the traditional concern
with market exploitation of resources, moderns have not even evolved a
language or a scale to evaluate the loss to them inherent in a wrecked
landscape, a spoiled stream, and such things, or the positive worth of
an unspoiled section of countryside. But it is becoming obvious enough
that objections to environmental destruction are not necessarily
sentimental, naive, or impractical. A bit late, realization is growing
that the world has a certain longstanding wholeness with which people
interfere massively at their own peril. Landscape in the widest
sense--the sense of the integrity of a place to look at, to be in, to
use and to know and to know about--matters to human beings, and the
terms in which it matters involve incentive, fulfillment, and sanity.
And while human beings are soaking in this fact, the American landscape
is being rapidly gutted by human activity.

A stately avenue rots to slums before everyone's eyes. A pastoral valley
fills with houses gable on gable in six months' time; its stream runs
red with mud, floods wildly out of banks with every heavy shower,
shrinks to a foul dribble