awareness of the need to restore and to preserve, to think twice
before making massive environmental changes, soaks out through the
complex network of government and has its influence on attitudes.
Increasingly, not only Federal but State agencies are making decent land
use, recreation, and scenic preservation a partial condition and
sometimes a whole reason for aid programs and public works.

Many programs can be adapted to such purposes. One interesting example
in the Potomac Basin is a study being undertaken in the Georges Creek
valley of western Maryland by Frostburg State College. Under an
educational grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
members of the college's faculty have embarked on research aimed toward
a demonstration project of economic, social, and landscape restoration
in the whole Georges Creek watershed as a unit. Action resulting from
the study will involve a number of their State and Federal programs.

Often, of course, the benefits of such practices are "intangible" in
terms of the market values that have traditionally been used for
justifying government projects, and adequate ways of giving them their
true weight against other values that may be in conflict with them have
not yet really been worked out. Nevertheless, the fact that they have
strong and sometimes overriding benefits is being recognized.

Insofar as such programs encourage Basinwide landscape improvement and
protection and major recreational opportunities, they are instruments
for accomplishing overall Basin aims, usable as such now by Federal and
State agencies and at the future disposal of any Basinwide coordinative
organization that may evolve. Insofar as they permit and stimulate
counties and municipalities to do better environmental planning and give
them money and morale to implement and enforce planning, they are
available at this indispensable level of action where--as we have
seen--the obstacles to doing things right are often huge. The programs
put within reach of local officials the principles of good planning and
management, and help them to achieve its details, from wildlife refuges
to neighborhood parks, from the maintenance of riverside beauty and the
restoration of historic shrines to the construction of small reservoirs.
As knowledge of their existence and their advantages gets around, they
are beginning to have much effect, especially at larger centers of
population.

Nevertheless, it is impo