A Cuyahoga Moment
The politicians can see it and now they must act
On the morning of June 22nd, 1969, a slick of oil floating atop a notoriously polluted Ohio river called the Cuyahoga, burst into flames and burned for half an hour. In the end the blaze was extinguished and caused about $50,000 in damage. Though the fire was not particularly harmful from an economic point of view, the image of something so illogically toxic, the image of water on fire, burned itself into the retina of the American public.
Within a year this image of a river in flames became a rallying cry for political action, spurring the suite of laws that made the United States a global beacon for environmental reform: The Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and a federal Environmental Protection Agency to put it all into action.
We now have a Cuyahoga moment for the new millennium. We have a “Freedom” Tower bathed in Martian smoke, radiating to the world the punishment that freedom from regulation brings.
With the Mars-ification of New York City’s air this week from climate-change-enabled wildfires, we at last have an iconic image of the extreme peril into which this generation of…
