Now Is the Time for the River

You’ve probably heard the story of the time a river caught on fire. It’s sort of famous.

In June of 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught on fire. Technically, an oil slick on the river caught on fire, nearly destroying two railroad bridges and causing over $100,000 dollars in damage (1969 dollars, by the way). Folks in Cleveland, however, thought “NBD” (that’s “No Big Deal” if you’re still using a flip phone).

You see, that wasn’t the first time that the Cuyahoga had caught on fire. The first reported fire on the river was in 1868, and it flared up over a dozen times before the 1969 fire. TIME Magazine said that the river “oozes rather than flows,” and a person in the water “does not drown but decays.” It was TIME, in fact, that made the 1969 fire a very Big Deal. They posted a photo on the cover of the popular magazine showing towering flames engulfing a ship.

That photo, BTW, wasn’t from the 1969 fire. Fires and the level of pollution in the river were so pervasive that nobody thought to take a picture that June. TIME used a photo of a 1952 fire.

At the time, the city of Cleveland had already approved a $100 million bond (again, 1969 dollars) to finance cleanup efforts for the Cuyahoga. In contrast, our Federal government allotted $180 million for water quality and pollution efforts for the entire nation that year. But the photo on the cover of TIME inspired outrage across the country, and a great mob of students from Cleveland State University marched on the river to protest pollution – our very first Earth Day. The 1969 fire inspired our modern environmental movement.

But let’s talk about Time, and not the magazine. From a physics standpoint, Time is a relative construct, and there’s much we don’t know about it. To give you a grasp of how tenuous Time is, consider this: Time is bound relative to gravity. Time ticks by faster at the Summit of Mt. Everest than it does on the floor of Death Valley.

We’ll take a moment of Time and let that sink in…

Put in the simplest terms, Time is like a river: It flows one way. When you’re standing on the riverbank, what rushes past your feet is the right now. Looking up stream, we get a glimpse of what’s coming, our future. Looking downstream, we see things that have already approached and passed. That’s our history, our yesterday.

The problem in Ohio was that the proud Buckeyes had no sense of Time. Everything about their river was downstream. For over a century, the Cuyahoga was nothing more or less than a great place to dump stuff. They never looked upstream.

Many of our efforts, and especially the efforts of you, are focused on running downstream to fix the effects of what some thoughtless individual did upstream. Our groups and affiliates have fished tires out of rivers, tires that have no doubt been there for decades. They pick up litter and clean flowerbeds and more. They are fixing yesterday.

But they often deal with the river at our feet. They create a community garden where there once was a vacant lot. They initiate a recycling program to break the constant stream towards the county dump. They are changing things right now.

Our favorites are the initiatives that focus upstream. These are programs that inform and educate others, warning them of the dangers of ignoring Time and the river, and illustrate the benefits of keeping it clean. They are proactively protecting tomorrow.

Ultimately, our environment is the river, and it will always flow downstream. With our help and protection, it won’t be on fire when it passes the next generation.