English rivers like dirty drains

We don’t often strike a personal note in the webpages of LSS, but sometimes our experiences are so vivid they cannot be easily forgotten. Unfortunately. Last week we walked with a friend across the countryside in one of the more opulent parts of Kent. It was a landscape to envy. Deep green fields with horses nodding peacefully over lush hedgerows. Oasthouses peeping against a shock blue sky . And the rivers? Lifeless. Dead. No fish. No plants. No darting insects. Just a kind of dirty blueish fetid open drain. And it’s the same across the whole of this sceptered isle, especially in England.

A little digging revealed why. We’ve got a number of links for you, tell you why in a minute, but they give a pretty good spread of the reasons. George Monbiot of the Guardian [1] zooms in on the River Wye in the west of England. He stresses industrial farming as a major culprit. Esme Stallard [2] widens the national picture for the BBC. Meanwhile, for our more elderly and excitable English readers who might find the above sources a little political, Scott Rotherham for the entirely politics free trade site Pipe Repair tells the same depressing story.

LSS is indeed and Anglocentric blog, mainly because of where we live. But is England so different from your country? Remember all this stuff goes down the stream into the rivers. And from the rivers into the sea. Where the fish get it-plenty. Somewhere, somehow, some way, you are going to drink or eat it.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/21/britains-rivers-suffocating-industrial-farm-waste?msclkid=8a0d8b4ecf6d11ecacb191869ab684a1

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59898988

[3] https://piperepair.co.uk/2020/09/20/the-shocking-pollution-levels-of-rivers-in-england-revealed/?msclkid=80fc9578cf6d11ecb748c3118ee403ec

#pollution #ecocide #clean water #run off #waste #farming #sewage #water companies

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