off
the hook.

Industry in the landscape

Another matter about which small communities can seldom feel impartial
is the prospect of attracting industry. With the growth of the great
cities here and there, perhaps a majority of small towns are faced now
with flagging agricultural prosperity, a lack of jobs, and the resultant
departure--often reluctant--of most of their energetic young people for
the new centers of action. The mere rumor that an industry is
considering setting up a plant in such a place is likely to set off
shock waves of delight and establish a general mood in which almost any
concession will be offered to tempt the corporation--to the point that
authorities, in some places, have issued bonds and built the requisite
factory themselves.

In a good many cases, this particular cure for the community's ills has
proved to be worse than the sickness, leading to total community
dependence on a fallible and perhaps capricious enterprise, pollution of
air and water, noise and flood-plain clutter, and frequently the
destruction of the local riverside where industries tend to locate
unless directed elsewhere. Little of this is necessary now, as a number
of examples of responsible industry in the Basin demonstrate. But it
continues, and will continue as long as communities keep looking on
industry as a source of payrolls only, free of sin: "It smells like
money," some residents of one Shenandoah town say of their factory's
miasmal odor, though other natives phrase their description
differently....

The full legacy of an older time when industry neither knew how to avoid
pollution and other troubles nor saw any reason to try, and no community
leaders saw any reason to bring the subject up, is found in prime
fettle along the North Branch, whose pollution is a sympathetic
reflection of the general state of that region's environment. Though
certain industries there--most notably the huge but aging pulp and paper
mill at Luke, Maryland--have managed at considerable expense to cut down
on the wastes they discharge to the river, the prevalent philosophy
elsewhere in the neighborhood would seem to be that both land and water
are already so afflicted that no single community's or industrial
plant's attempt at betterment could do much good.

This impression is illusory; people along the North Branch, as
elsewhere, are aware of what has been lost. But restoration is going to
be hard. In some of the deep valleys layere