areas" are
getting less rural by the year. With population pressures and industry
and pollution and looming water deficits, they have more and more in
common with the Washington metropolis, and more need for "big
government" programs. In the long run, an overwhelming majority of the
Basin's future population will probably be city-dwellers, with a
consequent effect on general attitudes toward Basin planning and
projects--though exactly what effect is not at all certain.

Public attitudes toward environmental action

One reason it is not certain is that the average person's set of
attitudes toward the world around him is not totally determined by the
circumstances of his life--by whether he is a city-dweller or a farmer
or a small townsman, an engineer or a poet or a hardware salesman or a
factory worker. Southern or Northern, black or white, poor or rich or
pleasantly salaried. These things have great weight in coloring people's
attitudes, but so do individual tastes and individual ways of
interpreting the fact and ideas that flood in upon all of us these days.
And so also do the vast and shifting currents of emotional and
philosophical response that sway our society in one direction or another
from year to year, from decade to decade.

In relation to the environment, certain differing philosophical currents
of this kind have surfaced to view at various points in this report, if
only briefly. They have influenced the fate of past proposals for
dealing with the Potomac river system and landscape, and they are still
here to continue exerting influence. In individual citizens' minds, they
often mix and balance with one another in various ways, but they are
discernible as separate forces.

Stout among them is the traditional American--and human--view that the
natural world exists for the primary purpose of bettering the lot of
such human beings or groups of human beings as may have the ingenuity
and the vigor to extract its treasures or to adapt it to their use.
Quite often the activities for which this view provides justification
are exploitative--they use up natural resources or they bring about
other irreversible changes in the world roundabout. Some
conservationists think this makes them automatically evil, but things
are not quite that simple. Such exploitative activities have led our
species the full length of the road from the Stone Age to the
sophisticated and powerful technological civilization of present time