twentieth century, public officials and environmentalists on the urban edge had been more concerned with losing the natural amenities of rural land than with farming operations per se.78 This fostered support for policies that restricted the development potential of land and offered incentives to discourage farmers from selling their land because it was too expensive to work. The tendency to see farms as land to preserve rather than businesses to support frustrated farmers because it was often associated with limiting the infrastructure they needed to support their operations and reducing the developable potential—and thereby the value—of their land as collateral to borrow funds to reinvest in their highly capitalized businesses.79
Gradually, environmentalists realized it took more than land preservation to protect farms from suburban encroachment; it also required support for farms as businesses. Montgomery established an Agricultural Services Division in 1996 (renamed the Office of Agriculture in 2016) to help them navigate local planning issues, manage local preservation programs, and provide technical assistance, Loudoun took similar measures.80 Getting the public to visit farms and buy locally also became more popular. By 2000, there were thirty farmers markets in the Washington area and several farm tours. Some localities, especially in Virginia, had success with marketing local farms as part of a rural tourism strategy including historic sites and outdoor scenic and recreational opportunities.81
The feverish growth of Greater Washington during the 1990s sowed seeds of discord for slowing it down. As metropolitan development became more diffuse, sprawl consumed rural land, degraded resources such as water and open space, drove up taxes to pay for public services further out, and failed to resolve mounting traffic congestion. These consequences forged a broad but loose coalition of civic, environmental, antitax, and broader-based groups committed to compact, transit-oriented development—the basis for the smart growth movement.82
CHAPTER 1
A River Revived
In a 2012 story for the Washington Post, Ed Merrifield reflected on his work over the previous decade as president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network. The group was one of several civic organizations in Greater Washington devoted to curbing water pollution, enhancing recreational opportunities, and protecting river habitats. In discussing their approach to environmental stewardship, Merrifield avowed, “If it’s illegal pollution, we go after it as fast as we can to tell them you have to stop. We use all legal means necessary. We won’t back down.”1 Potomac Riverkeeper engaged in political lobbying, like many environmental groups, but was better known for providing environmental education and hands-on activities to cultivate public stewardship of the Potomac. This kind of work proved ever more valuable during the late twentieth century as sprawling development expanded the sources of pollution and encouraged environmentalists to see their work in the context of the smart-growth movement that was taking shape in the region.
Cleaning up the Potomac River was the most unifying environmental issue of Greater Washington over the past half century. In the early 1970s, the river, like many in the United States, was heavily polluted because of inadequate wastewater treatment, storm-water runoff and erosion from land development, and poor regulations on industry. In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act (CWA), which featured strict water quality standards and a permitting system to govern the discharge of pollutants. Over the next decade, state and local officials built and upgraded wastewater treatment facilities to comply with federal policy, but they still had to find the political will and resources to clean up pollution—and that often depended on pressure from grassroots activists. Environmentalists were supportive of cleaning up pollution but worried that increasing treatment capacity would unintentionally spark growth in outlying areas. In the mid-1980s, the limitations of federal policies for addressing indirect or “nonpoint” sources of pollution that were not connected to sewage treatment infrastructure became more visible. Controlling storm-water runoff, for example, was a significant problem in built-up urban and suburban environments with a high percentage of impermeable surfaces such as roads and rooftops.2 As a result, citizen-led activities that tapped into, and grew, public investment in the health and welfare of the Potomac became even more important.
Through the interplay of policy making and grassroots activism, the “nation’s river” is healthier now than at any point in the past fifty years. Citizens pushed officials to clean up the Potomac primarily through community-based debates to address the environmental impact of existing development rather than seeking additional growth. In the mid-1990s, grassroots activists began to take more direct ownership of pollution cleanup. Greater political cooperation across the region supported public-private partnerships between government and environmental organizations. Environmentalists also broadened their approach from a focus on lobbying public officials to more direct activities including trash cleanups, river monitoring, and environmental education. Finally, they adopted a more holistic perspective on river cleanup to address the issues of habitat and species protection, ecological restoration, and open space preservation. The focus of local environmentalists on critiquing both the environmental and financial costs of growth reflected a critique of 1970s metropolitan America that returned with renewed force in the late 1990s under the more formal banner of smart growth. The cleanup of the Potomac, then, was an environmental success story as well as an integral part of metropolitan Washington’s smartgrowth movement.
The Potomac in Postwar America
Postwar growth took a heavy toll on the Potomac. The river, which is 383 miles long with a watershed of 14,700 square miles, knits together Greater Washington as it reaches into West Virginia and Pennsylvania. At its southern end, the Potomac has an estuary with the Chesapeake Bay.3 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Washington built a combined system to convey sewage and storm-water runoff into the Potomac. By the late 1930s, the most developed sections of the region had their own sewer systems, including the District of Columbia, the City of Alexandria, and Arlington County, and the southern third of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties. In 1938, Washington opened a regional wastewater treatment facility known as Blue Plains to screen and remove suspended solids as well as to accelerate the breakdown of organic waste by waterborne organisms. Postwar growth, however, soon outstripped the facility’s capacity, resulting in raw sewage being regularly dumped into the Potomac as overflow. Upgrades to expand the plant’s capacity and quality of treatment failed to keep pace with population growth, resulting in pollution levels that were higher by 1970 than in the early 1930s.4
Figure 3. The Potomac River Basin. Source: Kmusser, Wikimedia Commons.
Insufficient capacity at Blue Plains was not the only problem. Many postwar suburbs relied on septic tanks, which were easier to construct and less expensive than sewers but had shorter life spans and were more likely to leach sewage into local groundwater that made its way to the Potomac. Fairfax, for example, had two thousand such defective tanks by the mid-1950s. A second issue was sediment runoff from site development, where large lots were left bulldozed and without trees for extended periods before construction was completed. By 1960, streams in the Washington area dumped one million tons of sediment into the Potomac each year.5
The worsening condition of the Potomac was the result of rapid suburbanization and the unwillingness of jurisdictions in Greater Washington to work together to curb pollution. In 1940, Congress chartered the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB) to coordinate development of the river’s resources. Its members included elected government officials and experts from the federal government, the four states in the Potomac’s watershed, and Washington, D.C. The commission regularly warned of the need to build more wastewater treatment facilities, reduce erosion, and undertake regional-level planning for compact, gradual growth.6 Communities in the basin, however, chose to focus on their local growth and did not feel bound to work together to curb pollution.7 “Each community now moves independently in a different direction,” the producer of a local television series about the Potomac remarked. “The interstate commission sets standards