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 if 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