HOW CAN Rappahannock be preserved as a beautiful, rural

HOW CAN Rappahannock be preserved as a beautiful, rural county, concerned people ask. How can we prevent our county from becoming another “bedroom community” for long-distance commuters? How can we avoid the ugly landscape of tract houses, spoiled streams, paved-over pastures that have transformed counties to the north of us into suburban wastelands?

There are a lot of people who don’t care, who say it’s “inevitable,” anyway, and so why bother—why not cash in on the change, call it “progress,” and go somewhere else?

Well, we happen to think that it is not “inevitable,” that no one has a “right” to despoil Rappahannock or any other beautiful place. We also think something can be done about it, but in saying so, we realize that necessary actions won’t be easy. Possible solutions won’t always be universally popular, either, nor politically expedient.

But it must be done. It is necessary to save what beauty and farmland remain because of a stark fact of our times: There aren’t many places left to run away to. There aren’t many places to go and start all over again.

Once we pave over the ariable land we have now, there won’t be any more. Once we destroy the beautiful heritage that was handed us by previous generations, there won’t be anything left to hand on to the generations to follow. Nothing but garish commercial strips, deadening miles of uniform boxes, noisy and polluting highways, stinking streams, diminished ground water (more than likely contaminated), and all the rest that “progress” brings.

SO WHAT can we do? First of all, we must stop thinking of land as nothing but a commodity to buy and sell. We must cherish the land and not regard it as something only to exploit for profit. Good farmers have always tried to put - back into the land as much as they took out of it. Not only is this good agricultural business, it is demonstrating a sense of responsibility to the