Cleveland in the post-World War II era – like many cities in the industrial Rust Belt – was a city in crisis. The Cuyahoga river, Lake Erie, and the city's skies were horribly polluted, and middle-class whites were fleeing for the suburbs by the tens of thousands, exacerbating racial segregation trends and decimating the city's tax base (which in turn crippled officials’ ability to remedy the pollution problem). In the midst of these twin environmental and social crises (the latter of which is commonly known as the “urban crisis”), Cleveland elected Carl Stokes to become the first African American mayor of a major city, but only by the thinnest of margins: he won 50.5 percent of the vote, and only around 20 percent of the white vote (25). In Where the River Burned, David and Richard Stradling aim to show in part how “Stokes realized that the environmental crisis was inseparable from the broader decay of his city” (x), thus offering a more thorough accounting of how African Americans (and people of color more generally) and urban places factored into the nascent environmental movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Where the River Burned is a welcome addition to the historiography in the vein of Environmental Inequalities (1995), Andrew Hurley's study of Gary, Indiana (which, like Cleveland, also elected its first black mayor in 1967), both of which contribute a much-needed historical dimension to scholarship on environmental justice as well as adding a racial dimension to studies of the modern American environmental movement. Indeed, at the core of the Stradlings’ argument is the idea that historians – along with the “mainstream” environmental movement of the time – have too narrowly conceived of what sorts of problem qualify as environmental; they say, for instance, that Cleveland's “struggles in the late 1960s help us think about the environmental movement in a new, more inclusive way” (3), and their examination ranges well beyond the iconic Cuyahoga river fire that instigated the project.

Some of the Stradlings’ most fruitful analysis comes when they examine just how and why the Stokes administration clashed with the state government when attempting to take action on environmental and social problems that affected Cleveland in ways that overwhelmingly white suburban and rural areas largely escaped (111–15, 144–47). Left without the money or political will to remedy Cleveland's polluted waters and skies, Stokes is often left to take almost farcical and dystopian stopgap action, like creating swimmable “pools” in Lake Erie by partitioning off a beachfront area with vinyl curtains attached to floating pontoons and daily dumping hundreds of pounds of chlorine to lower bacteria levels. The tragicomic results (swimmers were left smelling terrible and barrier breaches regularly resulted in fish kills) hint at just how dire Cleveland's environmental problems – and inequalities – were (114–18). Indeed, such incidents strikingly show the uphill battle Stokes faced when taking office, confronted with an electorate starkly divided along racial and geographical lines; elected officials representing suburban and rural white Ohioans were less than eager to pay for cleaning up a city where they no longer lived (and which, hence, was increasingly black).

Yet while the Stradlings argue that Stokes and others were influenced by ecological thought that “encouraged the breaking down of barriers, a heightened awareness of the connectedness of places and people, and an understanding of the connections between environmental and social problems” (xi), a range of evidence including letters from schoolchildren to the Stokes administration more often ends up illustrating the stark divides between white and black and reinforcing the idea (following Samuel Hays) that modern environmentalism was a movement born of suburban white middle-class affluence. Particularly stark examples of this rift, which are left underanalyzed, include Stokes's seemingly purposeful refusal to participate in the first Earth Day (20, 173–78) and his rather unequivocal reply to a letter writer that he “face[s] many more serious crises which affect the lives of my constituents to a greater degree than air and water pollution,” including “housing, jobs, food, clothing, and the ability to live in a society free of racial hatred” (quoted at 43). While historians, informed by the environmental-justice movement, can fruitfully understand that latter set of problems as environmental ones, it seems fairly clear that Stokes himself did not. It perhaps would have been fruitful for the Stradlings to utilize their journalistic and archival skills a bit more, ranging further beyond documents from the Stokes administration to more fully develop African American voices and perspectives. One gets little sense of how black Clevelanders thought about their city and its environment at the tail end of the second wave of the Great Migration that had already more than trebled Cleveland's black population since 1940.

Additionally, the monograph's intentionally “nonlinear narrative” (17) robs the story of clear cause and effect, and long stretches without explicitly making connections to Stokes further muddy the water. Fairly typical of this tendency toward chronological whiplash is a treatment of Cleveland's long history of urban planning that begins with the Erieview towers plan in 1960, then analyzes three separate city plans in reverse chronological order between 1903 and 1959, before leaping forward to a discussion of the Great Depression years – virtually none of which deals directly with Stokes (89–105). Rather than taking on such a broad chronological sweep, more sustained analysis of the Stokes administration's seemingly important environmental actions – including the introduction of a rat control program (44–46), a key bond issue to fund water pollution cleanup efforts (140), and the “acquisition of the nation's largest federal grant for the purchase of open space, used to create new parks, including a number of “vest pocket parks,” which largely replaced abandoned and unkempt lots” (197) – perhaps could have better supported the argument that Stokes connected social and environmental problems in a meaningful way. There is much food for thought here, however, and one can easily imagine similar treatments of Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and the like. A more comprehensive history of how the urban and environmental crises related to one another in the post-World War II era is just waiting to be written.