opened from Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and many other
cities, the process may be expected to blight most shorelines throughout
the Basin unless something is done to control it. And not only the
county councils and boards of supervisors but the rest of us as well are
going to inherit the problems associated with it, for these waters and
shores are of more than local concern, in terms of the loss of amenity,
in terms of pollution, and in terms of the quite frequent certainty of
future flood damages, a demand for protection at general public expense,
and possibly the loss of further amenities and resources at the site of
a protective reservoir upstream.

From an abstract point far outside the boundaries of these rural
counties, it is easy enough to condemn the frame of mind that lets such
things take place. But the fact is that people in rural local
governments and those who elect them often have even more respect and
love for the landscape around them than the most esthetic of
metropolitans. They may take it too much for granted, but they have
grown up close to it and they can feel the loss acutely when it
deteriorates. Some of the usual obstacles to their doing anything to
prevent the deterioration were mentioned earlier--money is short, and so
is planning know-how. Probably the greatest obstacle, however, is the
matter of personal relationships. Not in terms of outright corruption,
which is far more likely in the anonymous atmosphere of great cities,
but in terms of the need of people in small communities to get along
with one another, combined with traditional profit motives.

Suppose a local planning or zoning board is taking action to determine
whether or not a big corporation from elsewhere can buy and subdivide
some flood-plain land belonging to a well-liked fellow townsman, a
hardware dealer whom all of them have known from childhood and with whom
they will be doing business the rest of their lives. Despite the
inappropriateness of the land for human occupation and the mess that is
going to be established along their pretty river, is it to be reasonably
expected that a voting majority of them are going to decree that a
friend be deprived of a half-million dollars' profit? The dilemma is a
serious one, perhaps the weakest point in the land-use control at this
local level, and it may mean that higher levels of government will have
to take over some of the responsibility and get local governments