The Three Ages of Water by Peter Gleick;

Author:Peter Gleick; [Gleick, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Even with the attention of the mayor, this fire might still have faded into the history books like all the previous fires if it hadn’t been for Time magazine. A month after the fire, Time published a story on the fire in their August 1 issue as part of their new “Environment” section, along with a dramatic archival photograph from the earlier 1952 river fire (see Figure 23). Time described the river as “chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. ‘Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown,’ Cleveland’s citizens joke grimly. ‘He decays.’”15

The next year, Representative Louis Stokes, the mayor’s brother who represented parts of Cleveland in the US Congress, referred to the Cuyahoga River fire when he supported a federal water-pollution bill: “The rape of the Cuyahoga River has not only made it useless for any purpose other than a dumping place for sewage and industrial waste, but also has had a deleterious effect upon the ecology of one of the Great Lakes.”16

Just a short time after the Cuyahoga burned in 1969, the heavily polluted River Rouge in nearby Michigan, also contaminated with untreated wastes from refineries and other polluting industries, burned. The fire on the River Rouge started when a construction worker dropped a torch into the river, setting fire to oil spilled from a Shell Oil refinery. It also ignited public opinion. The Detroit Free Press editorialized: “When you have a river that burns, for crying out loud, you have troubles. It happened on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga and now it has happened on the Rouge River.… The public agencies are now acting on public pollution problems. Will industry do as much? Or will even a fire on the river not awaken the social consciences of those whose complicity or acquiescence has permitted this abominable condition to evolve?”17

On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day mobilized an estimated 20 million Americans, motivated in part by the Cuyahoga and Santa Barbara stories. National Geographic magazine, which reached into nearly 7 million homes and every public library in the United States, included a story on the “sad, soiled waters” of the Cuyahoga River in their December 1970 issue dedicated to “Our Ecological Crisis.” With public pressure mounting over these accumulating water-pollution disasters, Congress finally forced industry to pay attention by creating the federal Environmental Protection Agency in December 1970 to oversee air- and water-pollution regulations. And finally in 1972, Congress overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto to pass the federal Clean Water Act into law. The Stokes brothers’ efforts to call attention to the crisis in Cleveland played an important part in the passage of this law.

Since these early efforts, the United States has implemented a series of environmental laws that have helped decrease water pollution and address environmental damages resulting from water policies, including laws addressing pesticide use, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act governing the disposal of hazardous wastes, the Superfund Act to clean up contaminated sites, and protections for endangered species and wild and scenic rivers.

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