ssible at present to be sure that any given
locality is going to take meaningful steps toward staving off blight and
landscape destruction, and a great many of them in the Potomac Basin
have not done so. Partly this is because the imperative need for
planning is only now beginning to dawn upon many smaller communities.
But even where it has dawned and planning has been undertaken by men of
good will, the great obstacles still exist and often block their
efforts--the lack of money to match Federal or State program funds, the
inability to convince fellow citizens who have to approve actions, the
fat profits in real estate, the pervasive influence of personal
relationships.

Ideally, for a number of attractive reasons, it would be preferable to
let local people solve local landscape and recreation problems in every
case, with outside higher levels of government furnishing only advice
and money on request. In regard to many types of problems, this is what
is being done and will be done on into the future, for people living in
a place are the ones who determine whether the place is going to be
ugly or pretty, pleasant or grim. The trouble is, however, that as
understanding of the interrelationships between land and water and the
other elements of the landscape, even on a Basinwide scale, has grown,
it has become more and more obvious that there are only a few strictly
local landscape problems. Most local jurisdictions have within their
boundaries critical watersheds, unique scenic assets, flood plains whose
unwise use will require elaborate and costly structural protection later
on, and other such features. This being so, the effects of mismanagement
are certain to reverberate elsewhere, and it becomes the concern of
people other than those who live in that neighborhood. It becomes other
people's business, distasteful though this idea may be to communities
with a tradition of self-sufficiency.

Regional planning organizations that can pool counties' and towns'
resources, take a broad view, and pay for professional help can overcome
some of the obstacles, if local governments can be persuaded to join
them. Certain of the State and Federal programs mentioned above are
being applied mainly through such bodies. But it seems to be an
unavoidable conclusion that if local government continues to be the
weakest link in the chain of planning, preservation of the environment
is going to require not only stouter incentives to elicit c