WATER 



181 



"The key lies in due control of the water which falls on each acre . . . 

 The highest crop values will usually be secured where the soil is made to 

 absorb as much rainfall and snowfall as practicable. . . . This gives a 

 minimum of wash to foul the streams, to spread over the bottom lands, to 

 choke the reservoirs, to waste the water power, and to bar up the navigable 

 rivers. The solution of the problem . . . essentially solves the whole train of problems 

 running from farm to river and from crop production to navigation" 



Clean Water has been a primary product of our national forests from the 

 first. The economic uses of water rising in or flowing from the forests — 

 water for municipal supplies, irrigation, power, mining — sometimes goes 

 along harmoniously with use of the same water for recreation, but sometimes 

 economic and recreation uses clash. Time was, of course, when our mountain 

 headwaters were untouched by industry. The industrial use of water started 

 in the bottoms. Then, as water sources became more put upon and injured, 

 clusters of industrial structures climbed the streams. As these businesses 

 clambered upstream, water was increasingly diverted, larger and more 

 sprawling structures arose, and the landscape was altered, sometimes 

 tragically, over wide areas. 



If dams and power sites are designed and conducted by their owners with 

 some thought of the rights of those who seek values from the forest other 

 than power or salable products, the necessary conflicts between the indus- 

 trial use of water and its recreational use are few. But when businessmen 

 got there first in our industrial era and reared structures starkly utilitarian, 

 and when they still insist such structures are more beautiful and rewarding 

 than trees and untrammelled streams, then the conflict between a desire of 

 business for stripped-down "improvements" and a popular impulse to 

 return to the shelter of trees still living soon becomes plain. 



Many industrial plants now operating on the forests display, in their 

 clearings, and in the arrangement and architecture of their structures, an 

 utter and arrogant disregard of good planning, and of decent landscape 

 principles. Such stark designs may look all right as part of the urban pageant 

 of man's mighty progress on a wholly denuded mountainside out from, say, 

 Pittsburgh. But they do not look at all right on our remaining forest land. 



