ames, then back to the Blue Ridge. Scenic roads tributary
to the system would utilize existing rural routes for the most part,
enhanced and protected by State and local action.

For the many other people who seek a more active and less mechanized
relationship with natural things, a connected regional network of trails
for walking or riding or cycling is a main need and a main opportunity.
Like the parkways or even more than them, it could be a framework for
open space preservation and an intimate means of using that open space.
Tied in with existing segments like the C. & O. towpath and the
Appalachian Trail, linking the towns and cities with ridges and
riversides and parks and historic places, it would provide the most
fitting kind of access to the whole Potomac realm of things for anyone
willing to take an afternoon's stroll or a week's hike.

More fundamentally still, it would be a powerful and continuing element
in conservation education of the best kind, the participating kind. For
generation after generation of the young people who would use it most,
it would shape a feeling for rocks and water, creatures and trees, sun
and wind and rain and hills and valleys, old houses and ruins and
bloody fighting grounds, together with a sense of man's natural origins.
And shaping the feeling, it would shape some comprehension.

The Potomac Basin is going to need that kind of comprehension; the whole
country is. Recreation means fun, and it probably ought not be
overweighed with solemnities. But outdoor fun is dependent on the
wellbeing of the outdoors, and increasingly the outdoors depends on the
understanding and sympathy of human beings who possess new great power
of destruction and have been using it widely. So that if any form of
outdoor recreation can furnish, however slightly, some comprehension of
what the natural world is like and how it works, it amounts to quite a
lot more than a bit of needed relaxation from the week's toil at one's
job or in the kitchen and nursery, though it may be that as well. With
the comprehension, it becomes an enlargement of one's grasp of things,
and it adds a little substance to the hope that people will keep on
caring about the integrity of the world around them and defending it as
best they can. And no safeguard this present mortal generation can set
up is more meaningful than that hope.

Avenues toward coping with landscape problems

Most of the known basic techniques of landscap