get them done, and the
recommendations are presented with this report. They include some
specific recreational proposals, and they urge prompt and authoritative
protection of certain assets that are going to be destroyed if
protection does not come soon, long-term programs to bring about
detailed and overall restoration and protection and continued study and
research into means of coping with threats not yet fully understood,
like some of those along the estuary and the North Branch.

The main recommendation with a specific objective of preserving the
landscape and providing recreation proposes the designation of the main
river from Washington to Cumberland as the Potomac National River.
Though it is to remain accessible for appropriate use by towns and
industries, its banks and islands will be protected and public access
assured by means of a sheath of park land, in Federal, State, and local
ownership and with associated areas preserved by easements and similar
devices, for the entire 195 miles. The proposal, refined since its
initial mention in the Interim Report, is a major one--but so, as we
have seen, is the need it is designed to meet. This main reach of the
flowing river, the Basin's hydrologic and scenic lifeline, is greatly
menaced by rapid and inappropriate development along its banks, and
through most of its length it is hard for people to reach. It has unique
majesty and beauty and both historic and symbolic associations that
warrant a special degree of protection for it, and warrant also the
assurance of the kind of public appreciation and enjoyment the park
sheath would permit.

* * * * *

The recreation and landscape recommendations as a body are attuned to
reality as well as to needs. They represent things that can be done, at
prices that can be paid--minimum initial steps toward ultimate
achievements that would be inferior to none that our changeful age might
produce. This is an insistently momentous time, with boom, frenetic
pleasure, sophisticated communications, space exploration, racial
crisis, young rebellion, and all the other contemporary phenomena
demanding attention and stirring up a dust that makes clear vision hard.
There is nothing minor about any of them. But one thing seems clear
enough. When the dust settles down and those who walk here afterward
look around them for the eternal wholeness of earthly things, they are
going to have a hard time finding it i