People's need for outdoor activity in their spare time varies a good deal. An oysterman-crabber working out of the Yeocomico through the progression of seasons and weathers, a Shenandoah plowman turning earth his great-great-grandfather turned at the foot of the blue-green mountains, a timber cruiser in the high forests--such individuals are not as likely to need to go looking for added outdoor satisfactions as most other kinds of people, for whom ordinary life tends to be more separate from pleasure in the open air. Maybe if the cities can be brought back to health and their growth shaped to fit in better with human needs, this will change. But with more and more people coming on, more and more leisurely and affluent as technology cuts down on work, more and more urban, outdoor recreation as a specific goal is going to be an ever more important consideration in planning. It is already important--and already, as we are reminded with statistics, big business. City recreational needs Recreation in and around the central city of Washington has to be a primary aim. The most people are in this area, many of them through poverty or habits of life not given to farflung pleasures but constrained to seek them where they live, or near at hand. The worst environmental threats are here as well, despite the foresight and pride that have saved much more open space and pleasant park land than most other American cities can show. The metropolitan river has to be cleaned up and made attractive. It used to be the city's most supremely valuable amenity and potentially it still is. Measures within reach can realize much of the potential inside of a reasonably short time, so that productive and varied fishing and good boating and a beautiful wide body of water will be within strolling distance for people in the central parts of the metropolis on both sides of the Potomac, and the recreational value of the lands already preserved along its shores will be incalculably multiplied. Safe swimming and other water contact sports in the open metropolitan estuary, often mentioned as an aiming point for clean-up programs, may be a somewhat more distant future prospect. Our studies in the past three years have made it clear that pollution here is more complex and diffuse in origins than had ever been supposed, and that sources of dangerous bacteria are probably going to continue to exist for a good while despite all efforts against them. The goal of swimming is a worthy one and will probably be reached, but not quickly. In the meantime, more public pools in the City and easy transportation to public areas farther down the estuary may be required.