In 1969, an environmental catastrophe was brewing in the waterways of northeastern Ohio.

The Cuyahoga River, which meanders its way through a lush valley, passes through Cleveland and eventually empties into Lake Erie, was dying.

After years of unfettered dumping of industrial waste and untreated human refuse, the once pristine waterway had changed drastically.

With algal blooms, caused by the copious amounts of dumped fertilizer, leeching the river’s oxygen, the diverse populations of fish had begun to shrink. The residents of Cleveland were dismayed as they watched as the blue and northern pike, whitefish and sturgeon, once abundant in the Cuyahoga’s waters, all but disappeared.

“The lower Cuyahoga has no visible life,” the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration noted that year. “Not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive in waste (were present).”

Due to Detroit’s booming auto industry, nearby Toledo’s steel mills and the paper plants around Erie, Pennsylvania, the river was also subjected to daily dumping of oils, harmful chemicals and even globules of animal fats from local slaughterhouses.

The river became so polluted that sardonic Cleveland residents would joke that, “anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown. He decays.”

Then on June 22, 1969, the seemingly unimaginable happened: the Cuyahoga caught fire.

In the inferno, caused by the ignition of a thick sheen of oil on the surface of the river, two railroad crossings spanning the river were almost destroyed as the nation looked on in horror.

Finally, America had seen enough.

Partially due to this nearly inconceivable consequence of pollution (water catching fire) and partially due to other environmental catastrophes that same year, the federal government was galvanized into action.

Within a decade, the country would witness its first Earth Day, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act and an across-the-board crackdown and condemnation of lax industrial waste practices.

Today, the Cuyahoga is not out of the woods, so to speak, but it is nearly unrecognizable from its former, contaminated self.

The bald eagles have returned and so have the fish. The waters are no longer bubbling with chemicals or swelled with industrial flotsam and jetsam. Even Lake Erie, which many environmentalists considered a lamentable lost cause, has made an astonishing ecological comeback.

“It is significant that people can now point to the much cleaner (Cuyahoga River) as evidence of how much progress has been made,” University of Cincinnati history professor David Stradling, who has done considerable work on the environmental history of the region, told me in an e-mail.

But today, the Cuyahoga River is low on our national priority list. In fact, it has been completely subsumed by the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – for good reason.

With the relative success of the most recent cap to the ruptured oil well (which at this moment is leaking, albeit in a minor manner), we can begin to look forward to recovery and beyond. In fact, during this respite from a crisis situation, the real work must begin.

Not only must we embark on a robust clean-up and revitalization effort in the Gulf, but we must harness our national outrage.

Once again, for the first time since the 1960s, pollution has become, as Paul Krugman put it, “photogenic” on a grand scale. Much like the shock of watching a river catch fire, most Americans who have seen the 24/7 footage of oil gushing into the Gulf and the shorebirds suffocating from the sticky, toxic sludge are aghast.

So now, we collectively must transform the visceral pain and anguish that comes along with these images into the necessary drive to get the ball rolling on environmental reform.

One of the most redeeming aspects of the 1969 crises was that, as a country, we transcended our parochial visions of the world and, as a nation, committed ourselves to not only cleaning up the Cuyahoga River, but keeping the air above Los Angeles clear of smog and banning the use of DDT on our crops. We acknowledged that while our own local communities were flushed with pollutants and toxins, so were those of our friends and family across the country.

And, knowing that fact, we were no longer content with inaction.

We can also learn from that era that our planet is a resilient one. That it can return from seemingly apocalyptic circumstances and once again resemble something close to its original state when humanity takes the proper steps to protect it. We can learn that when our actions affect the environment in a visual manner, then we can use that moment of political capital to roll back the clock on such issues by making sweeping changes via regulation.

Today, it’s time to use our rediscovered environmental consciousness and call on our national government, specifically President Obama, to press forward on not only reforming the practices of the oil industry, but addressing our growing carbon dioxide emissions, developing cleaner fuel sources and setting a precedent for a green ethic that the world can follow.