Latest news with #TopofthePoops
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Warning UK rivers are ‘toxic chemical soup' as all now plagued by sewage
All of the UK's rivers are now polluted with sewage with campaigners warning of a 'toxic chemical soup' in our waters. Leading campaign group Surfers Against Sewage is calling on the government and water companies to tackle the issue, as new data showed only 40 per cent of rivers are deemed to be good ecological health. According to the website Top of the Poops, which collects information on sewage dumps, found there were at least 513,234 spills into rivers in 2024, lasting more than 4 million hours. Sewage can harm wildlife and river ecosystems because chemicals – including everything from pharmaceuticals drugs to phosphates – entering the water from sewage systems are toxic. It can fuel the rapid growth of algae, which can choke out other forms of life by consuming all the oxygen. It can also be a source of E. coli, which can cause diarrhoea, stomach cramps and fever when ingested by swimmers. Wessex Water was listed as the worst offender, with 5,221 sewage spills into the River Avon, which runs through the southwest of England between Bath and Bristol. Other rivers with significant pollution include the River Trent with 3,186 spills last year, as well as the River Ouse in Yorkshire and the River Severn in the South West. In Wales, the River Teifi endured 2,232 sewage spills by Dwr Cymru Welsh Water over 22,288 hours. Consistent dumps were recorded in Cardigan Bay despite its popularity with swimmers, kayakers and its abundance of wildlife. In its annual water quality report, SAS recorded spills into Scotland's rivers and lochs every 90 seconds last year, with a lack of accuracy over its data leaving people unsure if it was safe to swim. The group said that while the 'missing data' means the true figure is not known, it could have been as high as 364,629 discharges. SAS chief executive Giles Bristow told The Independent: 'Every time we test the water we find a worse toxic chemical soup. It's pharmaceuticals, toxins, sewage - it's worse than we've feared, we can only describe it as a continued environmental degradation. 'We are the canaries in the coal mine, these are rivers and lakes that are poisoned with sewage fungus and toxic chemicals. 'Nature does not have a chance, yet we pay these water companies to clear up these issues.' SAS said it received 1,853 sickness reports in the UK last year, which it said was the equivalent of nine years' worth of sick days linked to sewage pollution. But it warned the true scale of sickness was likely to be 'far higher' as most people don't report it. Kirsty Davies, Community Water Quality Manager at Surfers Against Sewage: "Our rivers are in a dire state. 'People up and down the country rely on our blue spaces for their physical and mental wellbeing, but risk their health each time they take a dip. This is unacceptable and all thanks to our profiteering water companies, who treat our rivers like open sewers. "With the weather warming up and the official bathing season about to start, more and more people will be flocking to the UK's rivers and beaches to enjoy their natural beauty. 'However, these waterways remain choked with sewage pollution. Despite the government promising billions in further investment to clean up our waterways, we cannot end the sewage crisis until we see radical, systemic change and end to pollution for profit."
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane review
Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It's irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He's exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a 'dying' river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: 'Is this thing I'm in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?' He's in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, 'this small country with a vast moral imagination', became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, 'since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings'. This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a 'spiritual and physical entity'. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should be recognised as 'living entities'. And in 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a 'legal person [and] living entity'. The Rights of Nature movement has now reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse. Macfarlane's book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map. In the UK, 'a gradual, desperate calamity' has befallen them, with annual sewage dumps (recorded by a tracker called Top of the Poops) at despicable levels. 'Generational amnesia' means that young people don't know what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wants them to revive – and to remind us of the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, as captured in a Māori proverb: 'I am the river; the river is me.' Many Indigenous communities believe that rivers are conscious, with souls, intelligence, even memory. Macfarlane is less a philosopher wrestling with notions of sentience and pan-psychism than he is a nature writer, the author of memorable books about mountains, landscape and underworlds, as well as a celebrant of words (acorn, bluebell, kingfisher, otter, etc) he fears children no longer know. He's also a dauntless traveller and in his new book records trips to India and Canada as well as Ecuador. To the question 'Is a river alive?' he wants to answer as simply and resoundingly as his nine-year-old son did: yes! And he wills himself to believe it by granting rivers human pronouns: instead of which or that, 'I prefer to speak of rivers who flow'. But it's a long journey, with many challenges along the way. He begins with a modest outing, to the springs near his home in Cambridge which, in the summer of 2022, the hottest on record, have all but dried up. He'll see what a dead river looks like in southern India but in Ecuador's cloud forest, Los Cedros, it's a happier story: here's water saved from 'pollutocrats' by Ecuador's progressive constitution. But not all is as secure as it ought to be. Andean forests and rivers have been wrecked by logging, farming and mining. And a young anti-mining activist, five months pregnant, has just been shot dead in the north of Ecuador. Macfarlane, at least, is among allies. He meets eco-centric lawyers as well as a shambling, bearded castaway, Josef DeCoux, who has fought to protect the river and cloud forest for decades. He's awed by their tireless resistance to corporate profiteering and feels companioned by the forest: 'Lushness beyond imagination. Greenness beyond measure.' His prose aspires to poetry throughout. Fireflies 'score the dark like slow tracer bullets'. Flamingos 'stand in their own reflections, doubled like playing-card queens, blushing the water pink'. Glow-worms 'put tapers on their yellow lantern'. Shooting stars are 'scratches on the world's tin'. A half moon is a 'clipped coin'. He so rarely falters in his 'love-language' for the natural world that when he describes the sun, near Chennai, 'rising red as a Coke can over the ocean' it feels bathetic. But bathos is the point: along with plastic bottles, turds and effluents, the Coke can is emblematic of a polluted coastline. Chennai is the most dispiriting of Macfarlane's visits. The River Adyar, reeking and sewage-stricken, is 'as close to death as any river I have seen in my life'. And the Ennore Creek, a site of heavy industry, hasn't just been infilled, built over and surrendered to heavy industry, but has been erased from the official government map, as if it didn't exist: annihilation cartography. Amid the toxins, hope for rivers is hard to find. He is cheered by a trip to a lakeside waterbird sanctuary ('an avian Venice') and by rescuing turtle eggs on a beach. Still, here and elsewhere doubts creep in. He's a researcher, not an animist (the book has 50 pages of notes). Are Rights of Nature 'an over-enchanted dream'? How compatible is the 'stiff discourse'' of rights with a dashing, quicksilver river? 'For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counterintuitive work,' he says. 'It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The unlearning comes in a remote region of Quebec when, before his epic 100-mile journey trekking and kayaking downstream, he's instructed by Rita, an Innu poet, activist and sage: 'Don't think too much with your head … You will be transported by the river – who will speak through you.' So it does. When he and his companions go over scary rapids it's as if he's been 'flooded from within', the river flowing through him, a process mirrored in the prose, which rushes in long, ecstatic paragraphs that allow themselves commas but resist full stops. The river is under threat from damming but Macfarlane himself is released, surrendering agency to the water, pantheistically enraptured by 'some vast and unknowable other life-way'. 'The river has great wisdom and whispers its secrets to the hearts of men,' Mark Twain said. It's not just Macfarlane who bears this out but the three people he spends most time with on his travels: the eerily intuitive mycologist Giuliana in Ecuador, the geomancer Wayne in Canada and the ecologist Yuvan in India with his 'ductile, fast-flowing mind'. All are grieving when they begin their journeys after the death of someone they loved. But the river consoles and even heals them: 'I felt my power return,' Giuliana says. Here's another reason to fight for the Rights of Nature – not just to save rivers and forests, but to save ourselves. 'The tale of a dying river / Does not end where you stand with the visitors / at a sickbed,' Ted Hughes wrote in his poetry collection River, four decades ago. The battle is to save rivers as living beings. Macfarlane's impassioned book shows the way, ending on a riskily lyrical high with his arrival as a waterbody complete: 'I am rivered.' Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane is published by Hamish Hamilton (£25). 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