Two reports

Two reports

TWO REPORTS dealing with the future of Virginia were released this week. A study committee of the Piedmont Environmental Council warned that development pressures are threatening to eliminate farming from the Northern Piedmont, and with it a 250-year-old cultural history aijd tradition. A self-serving “populationdensity”projection commissioned by Virginia Electric & Power Company sees nothing but more of the same sort of heedless “growth” which has done so much devastation in the past ^decade, and concludes (unsurprisingly) that Vepco “must provide new facilities to meet the energy requirements of the Urban Corridor that stretches from Washington to Tidewater.”

What a contrast. On the one hand, the PEC views with alarm the threatened scrapping of a gracious and cherished tradition, and calls for a heightened awareness of what t^is would mean in transformed landscape and altered life styles. On the other hand, Vepco draws the mindless conclusion of typical “progress” and “growth” advocates: “...It is clear from this new study that additional facilities are going to be needed by 1980, particularly in the Northern Virginia area.”

We suppose the “realists” among us will wonder why there should be an expression of outrage over Vepco’s conclusion. But where have these “hard-nosed” engineers, pragmatists, men-ofthe-world taken us so far? To almost weekly air pollution alerts in the immediate D.C. area; to continuing concern about water quality; to rising , crime rates and a cluttered, uglified landscape. This is “realism” and “practicality”? If it is, then give us the “romanticism” of a Piedmont Environmental Council which thinks the heritage of centuries something worth saving, which takes seriously the warnings of agriculturists about future food-production capabilities in a land of ever-rising population.