As mentioned in our podcast with Jonathan Adler yesterday, today is the 50th anniversary of the infamous Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland. The fire continues to be a prominent and compelling image of man’s relationship to the environment. Immortalized in song (Randy Newman’s "Burn On” and R.E.M’s "Cuyahoga”), and fodder for countless Cleveland-bashing jokes from standup comics, the incongruously short-lived fire (it was put out in about 20 minutes, causing a mere $50,000 in damages to a railroad trestle) burns on in memory. "You would think that people would forget about it after all this time—but no,” said Jim White, executive director of the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization, in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer; "I had a visitor here from Russia recently and the first thing he wanted to see was where the river burned.”

Much of what we know and think about the Cuyahoga River fire is myth, as Alder noted in the most detailed scholarly survey of the episode, and the deeper story about the Cuyahoga offers important lessons about familiar patterns of environmental thought that need revising to meet new circumstances. Adler wrote in "Fables of the Cuyahoga” that

"The conventional narratives, of a river abandoned by its local community, of water pollution at its zenith, of conventional legal doctrines impotent in the face of environmental harms, and of a beneficent federal government rushing in to save the day, is misleading in many respects.

"For northeast Ohio, and indeed for many industrialized areas, burning rivers were nothing new, and the 1969 fire was less severe than prior Cuyahoga conflagrations. It was a little fire on a long-polluted river already embarked on the road to recovery.”

The Cuyahoga and other rivers had experienced more severe fires repeatedly over the decades stretching back into the 19^thcentury; indeed, a 1936 fire on the Cuyahoga River burned for five days.Over in Chicago, waste from the meatpacking industry so fouled an urban arm of the Chicago River that it became known as "Bubbly Creek.” Upton Sinclair memorialized it in his muckraking expose of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle:

"Bubbly Creek” is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the square mile of packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the cause of its name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily. The packers used to leave the creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put it out.

By 1969 local efforts to improve water quality in Cleveland were starting to make headway but were ironically impeded by bureaucratic red tape.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 715 words, total size 5 kb.