f matters keep going as they have
been going lately. If we who are here now fail to hand over to them a
physical world that relates them to old reality and serves them well and
helps to make them glad to be alive, then whatever other things we hand
over to them may seem very small potatoes.

The Potomac Basin is only a piece of what needs to be done. But it could
be a beginning.

[Illustration]

V COMPLEXITIES AND PRIORITIES

A river basin is a good functional unit of topography, admirably suited
for study and for certain types of resource planning. Because of this,
there is a temptation for those who undertake such study and planning to
assume that river basins have, or ought to have, human unity as
well--unity in politics, economics, and culture--with a consequent
"basin public" inclined to think in basin terms. Basin identity of this
sort would facilitate conservation, development, and management. It
would "make sense," and clearly enough a a great deal of sense needs to
be made, and soon, if people are going to have any hope of balancing
their use of resources against the inevitable continuing requirements of
the long future.

Small watersheds often do have unity of this human sort, but very few
major river basins. And usually the question of whether they ought
ideally to have it or not becomes irrelevant in the face of the
rock-hard reality of the forces working against it. In the Potomac
Basin, the boundaries that ramble among the various political
subdivisions--the District of Columbia and portions of four separate
States, with all or part of some 39 counties and a number of independent
cities--only accidentally and occasionally follow watershed ridges. More
often they reflect the caprice of Stuart kings and Fairfax lords, the
accidents of history, the fortunes of war, and the trampings of young
George Washington and the Messrs. Mason and Dixon and hundreds of less
renowned linemakers. These boundaries, some of them sanctified by
centuries of existence, are one of the Basin's most fundamental sets of
facts, creating genuine differences in the interests, activities,
viewpoints, and even accents of the people. And they emphasize a healthy
political diversity and complexity that in many ways is simply not
amenable to change.

None of the capitals of the four Basin States lies within the Basin's
limits. This means that some of the strongest political loyalties and
energies of the region are directed o