And we have – in England’s Environment Agency and Natural England, in Natural Resources Wales, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, plus the newly created Office for Environmental Protection – public bodies aplenty with the powers to enforce those laws. Not only do we have strict laws against pollution, but parliament has just given us a new one, in the shape of the Environment Act 2021. The improvement in water quality we were so proud of as a nation has stopped. Almost 90% of English rivers deemed sites of special scientific interest are not being properly conserved despite their highly protected status. The number of salmon caught in rivers by anglers in England and Wales has dropped from about 20,000 a year in the mid-1980s to fewer than 10,000 a year now. The return of otters to Britain’s rivers has been a conservation highlight of the last few decades, but the latest Welsh survey shows the first decline in their population since the 1970s. Much of the damage has already been done. We must act now to ensure that generations to come can marvel in the joys that our freshwater habitats can provide, from the magical sight of otters playing in our streams, the vibrant blue flash of kingfishers in flight, and the epic migration of the Atlantic salmon,” said a joint appeal by all of Britain’s major conservation organisations published last September.ĭead fish in a waterway in Hampshire after sewage was released from a water treatment works. “Some of our best loved and most iconic wildlife face a perilous future. Barely a seventh of English rivers achieve that level. And if the situation is bad in Wales, where less than half of rivers are classed as having “good status” by the government’s own standards, it is worse in England. Farther south in Wales, the River Usk is, according to a recent report, “degraded and deteriorating”, with trout stocks at their lowest on record. As a boy in the 1980s, I swam past vast swarms of mayfly and huge leaping salmon. I live near the River Wye, which rises in Wales before crossing into England. Even rural rivers that stayed pristine throughout the years of heavy industry are suffering now. And it is not just urban rivers that are in trouble. It is not just Hammond and Smith who are alarmed about their local river: so are anglers, swimmers, canoeists and naturalists all over the country. Thanks to decades of careful and laborious work, salmon returned to the Thames and trout to the Taff.īut in the past couple of decades, that progress has flatlined. But, after the second world war, industries were obliged to be more careful, and water companies were forced to clean up sewage. During the Industrial Revolution, the country used rivers as a waste-disposal mechanism, and they died by the score. Until recently, the story we told ourselves about Britain’s rivers was one of recovery and rebirth. It was only in 2013, when he gained a new neighbour – a keen angler and retired detective superintendent called Ashley Smith – that he realised something was wrong with his Cotswolds paradise. Hammond, a retired professor specialising in machine learning, arrived here two decades ago, and delighted in the variety of wildlife he could see in his garden: voles, otters, deer, foxes, badgers, grass snakes, lizards, swans and ducks, as well as chub, barbel and grayling swimming among the long fronds of the water-crowfoot as it swayed over the gravel beds. To the south is the millrace that once drove the stones that ground the corn to the north is the River Windrush, which runs through Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire on its way to join the Thames. It is a converted mill, and the garden is long, narrow and exuberant, with water on both sides. Peter Hammond’s house is so picture-perfect – honey-gold stone, scarlet postbox by the door, pink roses climbing towards the first-floor windows – that it could host a murder in a detective drama.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |