The following is a piece I wrote for Teaching Cleveland's new locally-driven curriculum for regional students and is being re-printed with permission. The content was made possible through the efforts of Michael Baron and Greg Deegan. Click here to check out the Teaching Cleveland site.

The fire is being fought, but the flames do not seem to diminish, and the clouds of smoke get thicker, and the ashy black flakes keep falling. Heat presses down on their bodies worse than if they were standing next to a bonfire. They do not stop holding hands. The tears in their eyes could certainly be blamed on smoke. Time stops, and they watch the river burn.

—Mark Winegardner, Crooked River Burning (2001)

Achieving the lowly designation of getting water to catch fire—it happened dozens of times in Cleveland, with the Cuyahoga River eventually becoming synonymous with the unthinkable, the unnatural: water on fire. And while the last of these fires in 1969 was mild in comparison to the five-alarm spark that rampaged through sections of the Flats in 1952, it was nonetheless memorialized in the nation's mind's eye through a Time article dated August 1, 1969, which states: "Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown, Cleveland’s citizens joke grimly. He decays..."

Most everyone agrees economic gain is good. Many just disagree on how to get there. There's the old way—or working with money itself as a means to create more of it. Think casinos. Think derivatives. Think shooting dice against the back of a building in an alley. Or short-sales on houses. The list is endless really. But this list is comprised of what's hallow, as it is like buying a diamond watch to repair a wrist that's broke.

Then there is the alternative, or the more long-lasting way to worth. And the method here is simple: instead of just messing around at the surface of money you begin the fertile manipulation of that which preceded money, or more exactly: the manipulation of our environmental and human capital. In short, by investing in the earth on which the people depend, and then investing in the people from which the concept of cash was derived, what you have is a sounder interplay between natural resource to human resource to concept and innovation, and then voila: a humming engine of quality, of growth.

Perhaps it’s best to clarify with an example, using the Cuyahoga River as the common denominator between the old and tired way of making bank and the more long-term process to growth. Let's begin with the latter.

• The new and long-lasting

Everyone knows the Cuyahoga was shredded of its vitality. Even back in the 1880's it was referred to as “an open sewer” by the mayor. The main reason for this was because Rockefeller et al. saw the water as there to be used to make product to make paper. The flow, then, died in the minds of those who saw no worth in the asset that enabled them.

Pretend its 1970 and you’re walking along the Cuyahoga River. Smoke curls thickly above you as it is being coughed from a smokestack like an endless cigarette exhale. Water life is missing in a flow as stiff as poured cement. Fumes make you dizzy. The air makes you sick. You leave, needing relief. But when you get home to Parma or Rocky River or Collinwood there is none, as there is something disjointed in that deep part of you that’d arrived from the land and water—or the part that you seek to come back to when longing for the feeling of having arrived.

This disjointedness—it is what philosopher Glenn Albrecht has termed solastalgia, or the psychic pain created by environmental degradation in one’s home environment. Solastalgia is prevalent, occurring in Appalachian mining towns, farming towns in New South Wales, and then most recently in Hungary where a river made red from aluminum byproduct has created visions that are imaged in bibles.

Have you ever tried changing your life? I mean really changing it—like breaking the defensiveness you get when you’re called out—or kicking away the comforts of that dead-end job for the edginess of a dream. Well, if you know the difficulty in changing oneself then you can imagine the hardness that is changing the aggregation of selves that comprises the compilation of a city that is us…

This more than anything was on my mind as I sat through the Sustainability Summit. And the thought was flared by two things. First, I winced when the branding consultant the City hired came up to say that Clevelanders thought of themselves as the dog in response to the animal most like us, and then the “worn work boot” in relation to the article of clothing most identified with. Sure, then: loyalty and comfortability are often good things. Except here, right now. Because what we face presently in our crisis of insecurity calls for a result that will not be found by the resting on our laurels. And this is especially so given that our laurels have been devalued into failures: the loyalty flaking into that leering grin of cronyism, and our wornness not even comfortable anymore—but rather static, worn.