Though the ugliness and dreary crowded sameness with which standard sprawl replaces decent landscapes are reason enough for opposing it, other good reasons exist as well, perhaps especially in rural counties. It has been customary for local promoters of such development to celebrate the additional tax revenues that new inhabitants are going to pour into the community's coffers. But community services in such areas--things like sewage collection and disposal, water supply, trash collection, roads and streets, schools, libraries--are seldom extensive or elaborate, because they do not need to be in a rural stage of things. If a subdivider erects, however, some 1500 new homes on a patch of countryside, providing them with an inadequate supply of well water and with individual septic tanks, and then shoves along to other fields before things start breaking down and the protests start rising from the 1500 families who came there for lyrical but convenient country living, the ensuing results for the county's finances can be catastrophic. In some parts of America already, around $17,000 worth of community services are said to be needed for every new family that moves in, a sum which from one viewpoint amounts to a subsidy furnished by taxpayers to land speculators and developers. Even assuming that those services provided by the developer are adequate, and that some aid in providing the rest can be obtained by the community through State and Federal programs--thereby passing on a part of the cost to other taxpayers--a rural county proud of its traditionally low tax valuations and of the Jeffersonian simplicity of its local government, as most are, flatly cannot dig up the remainder without a big revision of its old way of being. In bad cases, the alternatives to digging it up may be water pollution, health hazards, siltation and perhaps floods, sour public discontent among new elements unsympathetic to Jeffersonian simplicity, and the rapid deterioration of the new suburbs into rural slums--a combination of factors that in itself may bring about drastic change in the community. Thus in one way or another contemporary rural individualism tends to bury itself, but often too late for the salvation of the woods and pastures and clear waters and human dignity it took for granted and placed so little value on. Vacation colonies are a rather distinct consideration, for they are independent of ordinary and predictable population growth and they tend to spring up in places of special natural beauty and value. There is no reason why they should not be pleasant additions to a community or to a landscape, and a good many are--well planned in terms of both practical details and esthetic values, unobtrusive, and pretty. Unfortunately, though, this kind is not the rule, for in many spots in the Basin such colonies are a sort of haphazard mushroom growth with miserable side effects.