Film Analysis: The Return Of Cuyahoga River

After watching the movie, “The Return of Cuyahoga River” I was blown away by all of the history, facts, ignorance, and activism displayed in this film. There was so much information packed into this documentary. Information about this 100-mile long river that curves north and then south as it u’s along Lake Erie, and how in “1827 U.S. citizens changed the Cuyahoga River for the first time.” It was originally a swampy marsh infested with mosquitos and caused problems for the city of Cleveland Ohio. Cleveland was a small lazy town until the mouth of the river was widened by humans allowing for mercantile boats to pass by their town. These trade boats came from Europe and now passed through Cleveland on their way down to the Gulf of Mexico polluting at every point along the journey. “In 1862, Congress passed the first of several railroad acts that would eventually connect the continent, lessening the need for rivers as a major mode of transportation within the commercial, public, and military sectors. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Navigation Data Center reported declining commercial traffic on many of the nation's waterways.” (Harlow ) Despite the railroad acts, influential business men

There was a very evident point in time where people took interest in the Cleveland River fire when an important issue of Time magazine came out and happened to have a rather large article about the burning river in a section of the magazine called “Environment”. This image of the dismal state of the river got people thinking about just how nasty the pollution of the industrial revolution was and they began to truly believe that this was harmful to human race. Small groups tried to put in time cleaning up parts of the river on their own and then even bigger waves of change were on the