proposed to hack out a strip
for a new line along a route that included country associated with the
campaigning around Antietam Battlefield in the Civil War, without an
adequate attempt to find alternative routes.

In this instance, public protest shaped up a fight against the line, in
which the Interior Department has become involved because of the
Federally owned battlefield and the nearby C. & O. Canal. But often
elsewhere, the great skeletal towers linked by thick transmission cables
march where they please, indifferent to local objections. What is
certain is that modern America needs the electricity transported thus,
and the gases and liquids that run through great pipelines. Hope for the
long run is offered by research that may open the possibility of putting
high-voltage transmission lines underground, but in the meantime what is
needed is an awareness on the part of utilities planners that scenic and
historic values have to be given full weight in their computations.

The kind of agriculture that has so much to do with the Basin's scenic
appeal is not entirely healthy these days. We have mentioned the
difficulty created near Washington--and around other Basin centers of
population and in many places where vacation colonies are burgeoning--by
skyrocketing speculation and a general absence of strongly based and
well-defended plans of preservation. As the development value of land
rises in such places, local systems of taxation based on that value
rather than on actual use may drive farmers out of business whether they
want to stay in or not. Since 1945 in Fairfax County, Virginia, for
instance, the number of commercial farms has dropped from 1788 to about
200, and it is still going down.

Even where the tax trouble has been recognized, as in Maryland, and
taxation adjusted to reality for people who want to go on farming, few
tillers of the soil are devoted enough to their acres to hold onto them
in the face of the kind of cash that is often dangled before their eyes,
for the flat and fertile tracts that make the best farms are also the
easiest to subdivide and build on in standard fashion. For that matter,
the usual form of tax relief on agricultural land can be used as a tax
loophole by speculators. Thus, whenever tract values rise and
development impends, good productive land, which the country may well
miss later as populations grow and food supplies for them thin out, goes
permanently under pavements and con