, more
effective, and less disruptive ways of dealing with environmental
problems including water; the doubtfulness of sufficient public money
for large conservation projects in a time of international tensions and
urban crisis; and the solid American political complexity of the
boundary-laced Potomac Basin, which bristles with various forms of veto
power and a multiplicity of assorted regional, professional, and
philosophical viewpoints.

Such complexities and uncertainties have a powerful reality and
relevance for planners. They impose a need for breadth of view, for
leaving many future options open, and by the same token they present a
danger of piecemeal action, excessive compromise and indecisiveness.

The body of this report is an Interior Department document, couched
wherever possible in untechnical language in the hope that it may find a
wide lay readership. Necessary technical supporting material mainly has
been or will be made available in separate form. The report examines
environmental problems in the Potomac Basin and possible solutions for
them. Its underlying emphasis is ecological, based in a conviction that
man's own good is heavily dependent on the good of the earth in all its
complexity. No one at this point in time, obviously, is going to be able
to reconstitute the primeval Paleolithic world, nor would many people
want to. The earth has changed with people in their long surge toward
dominion over its ways and its creatures. But there is a difference
between adaptive change and the degeneration that modern times are
forcing on the earth men have always known. Growing millions of people
are coming to consider that human beings' right to see and know woods
and plains and mountains and streams and coasts in a cleanly and decent
condition--whether primitive or adapted in one way or another to man's
use--together with the communities of wild creatures that belong there,
is quite as practical and urgent as their right to usable tap water or
to a share in the Gross National Product. For upon the retention of
these ancient realities future human sanity and wholeness may well
depend.

We who are responsible for this report believe that this point of view
is going to gain enough strength and political acceptance to become one
of the motive forces of this century. Already it has much power. Even
though many established attitudes, laws, and practices are still firmly
rooted in the old exploitative, often hero