Latest news with #rivers
The Independent
14 hours ago
- Health
- The Independent
Thousands of river species at risk as dams block critical migration routes, study finds
Dams are severely disrupting life cycles of aquatic species that migrate between rivers and oceans, according to a major global review of scientific research. The review, published in Biological Reviews, finds that dams are reducing the populations, species diversity, and genetic health of diadromous species – fish, eels, crabs and snails that depend on connected river and marine systems to feed or reproduce. These disruptions are fragmenting habitats and cutting off access to vital breeding and feeding grounds. 'Dams fragment rivers and block essential routes between coastal waters and upstream habitats,' Dr Jia Huan Liew, freshwater ecologist at the University of Tasmania and a co-author of the review, said. 'This is making it harder for migratory species to survive and complete their life cycles.' The review, led by researchers from Hong Kong, analyses nearly 100 studies. It's the first to comprehensively assess the global impact of dam-induced fragmentation on these species. The findings reveal that even widely used mitigation tools such as fish ladders – designed to help aquatic animals bypass dams – frequently fail to protect vulnerable species. 'Despite their widespread use, fish passes often underperform, particularly when designed without understanding the specific behaviours and traits of local species,' Dr Liew said. He added the impact was especially severe for species that could not survive in landlocked habitats, or those with poor climbing abilities. The review concludes that the most effective way to restore river connectivity is dam removal but acknowledges this can be expensive and complicated by human needs for hydropower and irrigation. The review also highlighted a significant gap in global research: most existing data is based on temperate fish such as salmon while little is known about how dams affect tropical species or non-fish diadromous animals like migratory snails and crabs. 'There are many ways to measure the impacts of dams before they're built and to optimise their design and location,' said Dr Liew. 'What we really need to do is be as thorough as possible during planning stages to understand and mitigate harm to our wildlife before it happens.' As dam-building surges globally, the review warns that freshwater biodiversity will continue to decline unless all future infrastructure projects account for the ecological needs of migratory species.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Pesticides, antibiotics, animal medicines: the chemical cocktail seeping into our rivers
Rivers carry more than just water through Britain's landscapes. A hidden cocktail of chemicals seeps out of farmland, passes undetected through sewage treatment works, and drains off the roads into the country's rivers. Normally these chemicals flow through unreported, silently restructuring ecosystems as they go, but now, UK scientists are building a map of what lies within – and the damage it may be causing. Trailing down the centre of Britain is one river whose chemical makeup scientists know better than any other. The Foss threads its way through North Yorkshire's forestry plantations, patchworked arable land and small hamlets, before descending into the city of York, passing roads and car parks, gardens replacing farmland. Along the course of its 20-mile (32km) length, the chemical fingerprints of modern life accumulate. 'The Foss is the river that we understand the most,' says Prof Alistair Boxall from the University of York, who has been leading the research across Yorkshire's rivers. He leads the Ecomix research project which studies 10 rivers across the region, developing ways to examine these chemicals in greater depth than ever before. 'This is the chemical pulse of Yorkshire water,' he says, and the findings from the water here are likely to be replicated across the country. 'People are surprised. They typically think of plastics and sewage. People don't make the connection between the chemicals we use and the environment.' The story these rivers are telling is worrying, says Boxall. Among the thousands of chemicals detected was the tyre additive 6PPD-quinone, which has been linked with mass salmon die-offs in the US. In urban sites across Sheffield, Leeds and Wakefield it was found in about three-quarters of samples. Fungicides and herbicides were among the most detected chemicals. About 500 pesticides – which includes insecticides, fungicides and herbicides – are approved for use in Europe, and 600 are greenlit for veterinary use on livestock and pets. Research has shown antihistamine levels in the water rise when hay fever is bad – one of many pharmaceuticals that end up in rivers after being flushed down the toilet. Monitoring the Foss started in Stillington Mill, in the back garden of a former headteacher. He is one of the volunteers who made this research possible – either by taking samples or allowing monitoring to be done on their land. This spot is about 10 miles from the source of the Foss. Fields of wheat and oilseed rape back on to the water from the other side of the river. Three thousand chemicals were detected here (of which 40% are likely to occur naturally). In the targeted analysis scientists identified 40 chemicals including livestock medicines, pharmaceuticals, UV filters, fungicides and herbicides. In total they were looking for 52 chemicals (excluding metals) and found 44 across the three sampling sites on the Foss. They chose to focus on these chemicals because they are known for toxicity and potential harm to aquatic organisms. By the time it reaches York city centre – about another 10 miles away – an additional 1,000 chemicals have been added to the river, including household chemicals such as antibiotics and cosmetics as the river passes from agricultural areas into villages and towns. On the outskirts of York at New Earswick, Boxall documented the second highest level of paracetamol in the water ever measured in Europe, after a sewage system failure. It was 1,000 times the normal level. In Boxall's lab, a set of creatures he calls 'little beasties' live in fish tanks – a tiny menagerie including duck mussels, swan mussels, ramshorn snails, bloodworms and leeches collected in the ponds around campus. These are species commonly found in UK rivers. Twelve cultures of cyanobacteria – blue-green algae – are siphoned around, each a slightly different shade of green. 'Algae are the base of the food chain,' he says. Here, the invertebrates and algae are exposed to different chemicals and scientists are monitoring the effects. This is the other focus of the Ecomix research: working to understand the effects chemicals are having on the ecology of British rivers. One in 10 freshwater and wetland species in England is threatened with extinction. Boxall believes chemical pollution could be as bad for river ecosystems as sewage spills, which regularly make headlines. Researchers have found that chemical pollution makes a 'significant' contribution to the decline of fish and other aquatic organisms, one that is often missed by regulators. More than 350,000 chemicals are registered for production and use, with about 2,000 new ones added each year. They are probably having a range of unknown negative effects on the ecology of our rivers – changing organisms' behaviour and physiology. Chemicals have been shown to have a diverse impact on fish, including their reproduction, social interactions and feeding behaviour. Studies suggest ibuprofen can affect fish hatching, the anti-inflammatory diclofenac affects fish livers, and antidepressants have been linked to a range of behavioural changes. Salmon exposed to anti-anxiety medication have been shown to take more risks, and some flea treatments like imidacloprid are toxic to invertebrates such as mayflies and dragonflies. 'You've effectively got a situation where some chemicals are hitting the base of the food web, others are hitting the invertebrates, and you've got other chemicals hitting the fish,' says Boxall. The Ecomix study is far more comprehensive than chemical modelling by the Environment Agency, which focuses mainly on 'grab samples', or monthly monitoring at best. Boxall's study looked at 19 sites across 10 rivers over a year of continuous monitoring, during which 20,000 samples were collected. 'The Environment Agency doesn't have the resources to tackle this issue well enough,' said Rob Collins from the Rivers Trust, who was not involved in the research. He added that controlling these chemicals at source was key: 'It is a societal challenge to tackle this problem – we are all involved. We also need to see much stronger government regulation with more hazardous chemicals. 'Once these chemicals get into the environment it's very hard to do anything about them. For example, Pfas – known as 'forever chemicals' – can persist in the environment for more than 1,000 years.' Richard Hunt was one of a dozen citizen scientists who has made this research possible. The results were 'sobering', said Hunt, who took a weekly sample in the centre of York. His was among the sites with the highest level of chemicals – as expected in an urban area. UV filters, fire retardants, de-wormers, DEET and cocaine were among the things swirling around in the water. 'I was gobsmacked by the number of chemicals,' says Hunt. 'If people were instructed on how they could help, they would.' The holy grail for addressing chemical pollution is a constant monitoring system, reporting in real time, says Boxall. Having live updates would alert authorities to possible pollution issues so they could respond faster, although Environment Agency staff have been told to ignore low-impact pollution events because the body does not have the resources to investigate. 'Chemicals are important for society,' says Boxall. 'We benefit from them, but we need to reduce their environmental harm.' Hunt points out that the wealth of his city came from its two rivers – the Ouse and its tributary, the Foss. Understanding what chemicals are flowing through them and working out what we can do to clean it up would be to repay adebt of gratitude. 'York wouldn't be nearly as healthy and successful if not for the rivers. We need to have more respect for them.' Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Specieswatch: freshwater pearl mussel is threatened by disappearing habitat
The freshwater pearl mussel, Margaritifera margaritifera, is our longest lived freshwater species, often exceeding 100 years, and sadly among the rarest. The species was almost hunted to extinction for the pearls they occasionally contained, and is now threatened because the clean, pebbly rivers they live in are disappearing. Swedish research into the much larger populations of mussels in Scandinavia show they can live to 280 years and play a vital role in moderating river flow. They stick out of the riverbed, enabling small trout to thrive by reducing river flow, and they clean the water by filtering out filth. The mussels need a good population of brown trout and salmon to survive. When they breed they release clouds of tiny larvae which are breathed in by the fish and clamp themselves on to their gills, remaining there for months without the fish noticing. When the fish swim upstream the larvae drop off hoping to find a suitable stony bed to start a new colony. The chances of this breeding strategy working are slim, so the mussels live a long time and produce more than a million larvae in a lifetime to ensure survival. Most known mussels colonies are already mostly old specimens, so a breeding programme is under way to try to revive lost populations.
The Guardian
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rob Macfarlane : ‘Sometimes I felt as if the river was writing me'
Robert Macfarlane has been called the 'great nature writer and nature poet of this generation'. A teacher, campaigner and mountaineer, he has been exploring the relationship between landscape and people since his breakthrough book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003. His latest work, Is a River Alive?, was more than four years in the making, and, he says, the most urgent book he has written. Q: Your book is poignant and inspiring, but one part that made me laugh is where you first tell your son the title and he replies, 'Duh, of course it's alive. That's going to be a really short book.' So, I should first congratulate you on stringing it out for more than 350 pages! A: Ha! Well there were times I dreamed of writing the haiku version, let's say. But much as I would long for the answer to the question of the title to be as simple as [my son] Will found it, of course it is a profoundly difficult one. That's why the title is a question not a declaration: by means of travel, encounter and immersion, the book explores the tributaries and watershed of this vastly complex question of how we imagine rivers – and indeed how we imagine life itself. So I suppose you could say that answering the question of the title couldn't have taken any less time than it did, and couldn't have been written in any fewer pages than it was, much as Will would have encouraged me to be more precise. Q: The idea of a river being alive is quite heretical these days, isn't it? A: I love that description: 'heretical'. Yes! I'm already finding that I'm getting people online who are, on the one hand, saying: 'You idiot, of course a river is alive. Why bother even with the question mark?' And then on the other, I'm getting the rationalists who are like: 'You idiot, of course a river isn't alive. It's just H2O plus gravity. What kind of hippy nonsense are you spouting?' Q: As you point out in the book, even listening to a river was once punished by the lash. Separating people and nature needed violent enforcement … A: Absolutely. The history of the rise of rationalism required the extirpation of 'idolatry', as the New World conquistadors and colonists called it, a version of which was also carried out across the British landscape during the Reformation, when a purging fury was visited upon water in particular as a site of supposedly iconoclastic belief. I'm fascinated by the ways in which the drive to eliminate the dissenting autonomy of water – of running water, of rivers, of springs – has marched often in lockstep with power that seeks to eliminate all forms of spiritual relationships with land and water, replacing the sacred with the fiscal. We are seeing this accelerated now in America, where Doug Burgum, the secretary of state for the interior, at his Senate confirmation hearing, described America's public lands as America's 'balance sheet'. The assetisation of everything is under way. Everywhere now we see a war continuing to be waged between 'anima', between life, and a power that seeks to mortify that life because it knows that the imaginative 'deadening' of land and water is the best step towards maximum extraction. Q: Of all the books you've written so far, you state that none has felt as urgent as this one. Why? A: The world's ecological precarity, I suppose, is the plainest answer to that, and especially the precarity of the world's rivers and freshwater bodies. Q: Although much of the subject matter is quite grim in terms of the despoliation of ecosystems, what comes across is courage, intelligence, love and a desire to do right by future generations and other species. How did it evolve? A: This was initially imagined as a book about 'life'. That was ridiculous hubris, of course, but that was really the source: what are the stories we tell about what is alive and what is dead, and how does that compare to the stories that power tells about what is alive and what is dead? Rationalism and instrumentalism tell a presently dominant story about rivers as 'inanimate brute matter', to quote Isaac Newton; about rivers as nothing more than 'service providers'. But the total dominance of that story is perilous. I guess that, as a writer, one's job is to seek other, better, new-old stories about rivers and our relations with them. Q: You dive into the lives and deaths of rivers on four continents. But it is also very much about human activism – the defenders who are trying to prevent ecocide on the ground, and the Nature Rights advocates who are trying to change the law at a national or global level. What started you off on this? A: I wanted to immerse myself in the sheer tumbling vigour of the young rights-of-nature movement, which is one of the running currents in the book. I would wake up every morning, and there would be a new email, a new story, a new contact, a new case about rights of nature. It feels as if that movement is presently stepping forwards very consequentially in terms of re-imagining and re-storying the law in order to strike at some of the deeply anthropocentric foundations of almost all nation-state jurisdictions. Q: Despite the global reach, the different elements seem to be brought together by relationships? A: Absolutely. Other than that of the river, if there is a motif that weaves through the book, it's that of the mycelium. It's the mycelium that sets the night-forest alight in the first pages of the Ecuadorian section, and I hope it is the mycelium that is what might be called the visible 'ethos' of the book. All that emerges in the book emerges as a function of cooperation, of collaboration, of working together. I wanted to try to find a literary form and a kind of polyphonic texture, in order to reflect the many voices and agencies involved in river-thought and river-guardianship. Q: The book calls for revolution. How did you reflect this in the style? A: The revolution it calls for is a revolution of the imagination. The book's language is intended to speak to, and of, a changed relationship with rivers – an animated relationship. To give a simple example of this, I write throughout about rivers who flow, not rivers that or which flow. Now that feels totally normal to me. I'd love that usage to spread. Of course, it is already like that in other languages. In French, for instance, it's la rivière qui coule, le fleuve qui coule. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion In English, we have no verb to river, but what could be more of a verb than a river? At the level of form and pattern, I sought to give the whole book the shape of the water cycle. So we begin at the springs who rise near my home, and we end back at the springs. In between, the book travels up to the mountains and from there descends eventually to reach the sea at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. By the final pages, language has entered a sort of liquid state. Language has been rivered, as well as me. I strongly felt at times that I was writing with the river, or even being written by it. Q: How does that co-authorship with a river work? A: It is glaringly obvious to me that all thought is intersubjective. This book could not have been written by sitting still. It could not have been written from the archive. A great deal of it was written in its first form either on rivers, by the banks of rivers, or within earshot of rivers; having spent days following rivers, being buried within rivers, spat out by rivers. I find it bizarre that copyright law rejects the notion of nature or a natural entity as possessing the capacity to be recognised as a 'moral author' (to use the term of art from copyright law). As I think you know, [the Earth rights scholar] César [Rodríguez-Garavito], [the mycologist] Giuliana [Furci] and [the musician] Cosmo [Sheldrake] and I, as well as, of course, the Los Cedros cloud forest, have brought a case in the Ecuador court system to recognise the moral authorship of the cloud forest in the song that was written in the course of the book's research [called Song of the Cedars]. If you listen to the song, you can hear the voices of the forest (the howler monkeys, the bats, the wind, the rivers, the trees). They're performers of, as well as the co-thinkers of, that song. Q: The book starts and finishes in the little chalk streams of Cambridge. Do you feel people here have the same passion to defend rivers as those you met in India, Ecuador and Quebec/Nitassinan? A: I'm lucky to live on the chalk of southern England. We have around 85% of the world's chalk streams here in England. You could liken it to the Great Barrier Reef, perhaps; a super-rare, remarkable ecosystem. It has brought life to the landscape here, but now we have largely forgotten its marvellousness, its fragility and its rarity. Nevertheless, amazing things are happening in England in terms of what we might call the river guardianship movement: communities rising up to take water companies to court, hold government to account, train a small army of citizen scientists to monitor and test river health. This community response is born of the same impulses, it seems to me, which animate those communities I travelled with and spent time with in other countries. That is to say: born of a belief in water as life, and a belief that our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has. Q: One of the people in your book, the Waanyi writer Alexis Wright, says humanity has never been in more urgent need of powerful storytellers to address the environmental crisis. But I've also heard friends say the time for stories is over, we now need action. How do you respond to that? A: Storytelling remains, to me, central and vital in its powers. I reject the notion that storytelling is a fundamentally passive posture. Rather, it can crucially catalyse the conversion of passion into action. It has ways of reaching both heart and mind that argument or polemic can't. Of course, there are bad stories told well by bad people, as well as good ones told well by good people. In terms of powerful storytellers for the good, as it were, I might take the example of the Innu poet, storyteller and community leader, Rita Mestokosho, who is an important character in the final third of the book. Rita is a lifelong activist for the Innu language, Innu people and Innu land. She sees no distinction between her work as a writer and as an activist. During the years of river research, I saw new-old stories being told again and again around the world, thrillingly and with consequence. Q: What would you like readers to take away from this book? A: I want readers to imagine rivers as having lives, having deaths and even having rights – and to see what flows from that re-imagining in terms of law, culture and politics. And I would like them to take the full downriver journey of the book, from mountain to sea. Q: And where do you go next? A: This book has taken a long time, but among its surprises is that it continues to flow; the stories, rivers and people who run through its pages continue to run through my life very consequentially. I remain closely involved with the ongoing guardianship of Los Cedros in Ecuador, and the need to support and maintain the implementation of the protective ruling there. Oh – and we've just completed a big cleanup fundraiser and organisation to airlift out a whole bunch of heavy-duty junk we found high up in the watershed of the Mutehekau Shipu in Canada. Yes, Is A River Alive? just won't stop flowing!
Daily Mail
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The river that can fight for its own future in court
Is A River Alice? by Robert MacFarlane (Hamish Hamilton £25, 384pp) The 21st century has been a bleak time for our planet's rivers. According to environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey, 'every river in England is dying'. In China, the Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze River has diverted so much water that it has actually slowed the rotation of the Earth. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane and his young son Will were gazing at a dried-up river bed during the searing drought of summer 2022 when the boy asked: 'Has the water died?' Although Macfarlane reassured him it hadn't, he secretly wondered if the planet's rivers were in fact dying, and whether it was too late to stop this catastrophe. Travelling to the Indian city of Chennai, he sees a river choking to death on all the effluents and sewage which pour into it. In 1949 there were 49 species of fish in the Cooum River; by 2000 there were none. One consequence of the river's degradation is that, at times of heavy rain, water cascades through the city rather than flowing through the river, leaving Chennai 'locked into a brutal cycle of flood and drought.' Macfarlane writes that the water is 'so chemically polluted that it blisters skin'. In eastern Canada, a hydroelectric scheme threatens to turn the Magpie River into a series of 'chained reservoirs'. A young Innu woman, whose ancestors lived as nomads on this peninsula, tells Macfarlane: 'It seems crazy that we give a corporation that's ten years old rights, but we won't give rights to a ten-thousand-year-old river.' Macfarlane believes the idea of giving waterways rights could revolutionise the way we treat our rivers. In Ecuador, he walks through an area of cloud forest in the north-western Andes, home to amazing species like the spiny pocket mouse, the strangler fig and the spectacled bear. This fragment of land was saved from destruction when Ecuador's Constitutional Court ruled that the river, the forest and its creatures had a legal right to exist, forcing the mining companies to leave. Similarly, in Bangladesh, hundreds of factories were closed because their pollution was 'violating the rights' of the Buriganga River. In 2017, New Zealand's parliament recognised that the Whanganui River has a legal identity, with rights and the capacity to represent itself in court via a River Guardian. And earlier this year, Lewes District Council in Sussex recognised the River Ouse as a living entity – though this isn't yet legally binding. This heartfelt, lyrical book makes for rather depressing reading, yet it suggests rivers can be revived if the will to do so is there. Some enlightened places such as Seoul, Singapore, Munich and Seattle are liberating waterways previously concreted over or turned into narrow canals, which has revitalised the city centres and cooled the surrounding areas. Rivers are not only a vital amenity but an integral part of our history. As Macfarlane says: 'Our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has.'
