Rivers on the Edge

Last Tuesday WWF launched its River on the Edge project aimed at campaigning for a more sustainable approach to water resources in the the UK, particularly focussing on the over-exploitation of water from our stressed chalk streams. With WWF putting its lobbying weight and expertise to this cause things may indeed happen.

I've been helping them get the project off the ground and was asked to give a speech at the launch. It was extremely encouraging to see the head of OFWAT nodding as I spoke about how water needs a value that reflects its environmental cost.

Watch this space ...

This is the text of what I said:

I'll begin with a quote about chalk from a famous 19th century geologist, Thomas Henry Huxley: "I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely to have a truer conception of this wonderful universe than the most learned student ... The longest line of human ancestry must hide its diminished head before the pedigree of this insignificant shellfish."

This piece of chalk I’m holding is 100 million years old. It was laid down as the remains of billions upon billions of tiny shellfish that swarmed as plankton in prehistoric oceans. A porridgy ooze of dead shellfish hardened over time to form chalk and rose from the waves to become the chalk downland of England - a landscape as familiar to us as fish and chips. Some of these chalk hills are hundreds of metres deep and every metre of chalk represents about 100,000 years of deposition, every centimetre 1000 years, every millimetre 100 years. Hold that small lump of chalk in the palm of your hand and you are holding more time than has elapsed since the last ice-age.

There’s chalk in other places: in Russia, and Texas, and Australia. But nowhere else in the world other than here in south-east England does chalk and parts of northern France – washed over by our loveably temperate climate – give rise to the spring-fed rivers known as chalk-streams.

The engine room of a chalk-stream is the chalk. Rolling hills of this soft, porous rock. When rain falls on these hills it is soaked up as if by an enormous sponge. The rainwater trickles through the fissures and cracks starting an underground journey that might last a week, or a year, that might take that rain drop five hundred metres or fifty miles. No-one knows what goes on down there. It is a fabulous mystery. But when that water sees daylight again, as a spring creating a river, it is cool and it is fertile and all the extremities of drought and deluge have been buffered by the vast underground reservoir that lies within those chalk hills.

There’s something special about a spring-fed river, any spring fed river. The Romantic poets knew that. Springs are life-affirming, symbolic of something that speaks right to the heart of us and our relationship with the natural world. Coleridge wrote of the mystery of a river that springs from the ground:

Unperishing youth ! Thou leapest from forth
The cell of thy hidden nativity;
Never mortal saw
The cradle of the strong one;
Never mortal heard
The gathering of his voices;
The deep-murmured charm of the son of the rock,
That is lisp’d evermore at his slumberless fountain.

But if spring fed streams are special, then chalk streams – a particular type of spring fed river – are the most precious of all.

All the qualities of a spring-fed river – the constancy of flow and temperatures, the richness of their waters – these are all magnified in a chalk-stream. Chalk streams are spring fed rivers with their tails up – like peacocks. They are an amazing and globally unique ecosystem. And they are here – at our doorsteps, sometimes literally under our feet. They are ours to look after. They are our rain-forest, our Barrier Reef, our glacier. And we are failing them. We are flushing them – quite literally – down the toilet.

Does that matter? There are lots of them. Miles of them.

There were lots of dodos. There were lots of passenger pigeons. The first steps on the road to trashing the natural world consist of complacency in the face of abundance.

And besides chalk-streams are not abundant. There are a little over two hundred of them between the western edge of Dorset and the north eastern edge of Yorkshire: an alphabet of ancient English names: Ash, Beane, Colne, Darenth, Ewelme, Fontmell, Gade, Hiz, Irwell, Jordan, Kennet, Lambourne, Mimram, Nar, Oughton, Purwell, Quin, Rib, Stiffkey, Tarrant, U - no U, Ver, Wissey, no X or Y either, or Z. But for those four letters there are several alphabet’s worth.

To me this number only highlights how finite chalk-streams are. It points to the opposite of abundance. And though, if you laid them all out end to end, there are perhaps thousands of miles of chalk rivers, to me that says the same. God isn’t making any more of them.

But we are sure as hell using them up.

Chalk-streams flow through some of the most highly developed landscape on the planet.

Perhaps in one sense it is a miracle they are there at all: that they aren’t all dry ditches full of tin cans and abandoned shopping trolleys. Many are still beautiful. But when I try to think of a perfect bit of river, one small part I might call perfect, a bit untouched by dredging, or pollution, or intensive farming, or urban sprawl, or abstraction – I can’t.

Chalk-streams are under pressure – any natural ecosystem would be in such a busy part of the world. But my point is that there is room for both. There is room for us and for this amazing habitat which could - which should enrich our lives. With imagination and most of all political will, we can shape the way we interact with this amazing environment, so as to cause it less stress. It is not actually that inconvenient. It just has to matter.

The problem is this: we suck the life out of this environment and we don’t put any value at all on it. We have no real perception of the environmental cost. There is no value to the water.

And every pressure a chalk-stream faces is made worse by the abstraction of water from the springs which feed them and the impact of every pressure would be lessened by slowing down those pumps.

I moved a while ago to a house with a water meter. Not used to looking at one I have to confess I didn’t bother. Our first few bills were much the same as ever and I liked to imagine I was a careful user. But a recent bill caught my eye. It was uncomfortably big. We must have a leak. I hunted for a leak. But there wasn’t one. I don’t know how or why but occasionally were using as much 1000 litres in a day. Twice the family average the Environment Agency is looking for. I spoke with my kids, gave lessons in turning off the tap while brushing teeth, in not turning it on full to wash hands, in only flushing when there’s something considerable to flush. I re-set all the cisterns to close off when two thirds full.

We became more careful with one easy change of mindset, and we went quite easily and with no decline in health or lifestyle from that embarrassing 250 litres per head per day, to 100. And we have maintained it too, quite easily.
The point is, I care deeply and yet I’d never have checked without a bill and never have known without a meter.

Think about how a river connects time. The same river witnessing history unfold, always flowing. There has been water flowing past the Houses of Parliament since there’s been a parliament. Since forever.

Last week I walked along the River Beane in Hertfordshire … and I mean along it … without getting my shoes wet. I did the same along the River Og a month before that.

So Coleridge called it a slumberless fountain? But with unfettered and irresponsible abstraction we have proved him wrong.