Saving the Wye

 

I couldn't manage to get to the whole event, but I did get to part of it.  What was happening was a series of ten minute presentations in the tent opposite the food hall in the Festival grounds, and it was packed out, with people standing round the edges (I had brought my little stool again).

When I arrived, a chap was talking about legal challenges to the release of sewage into waterways, and he used the Manchester Ship Canal as his example.  This is not a well loved rural waterway.  This is industrial, for big ships to come up to Manchester from Liverpool.  But enough people do care about it to have launched a legal challenge to the water company responsible, and they are quietly hopeful that they will win in the courts.  If the court decision is favourable, this will bode well for other legal challenges in other parts of the country.

Following him on stage was Oliver Bullough, local author and campaigner for the River Wye, who was talking about gaining bathing status for the Warren.  This is another legal method of forcing the water companies and other bodies who are responsible for the rivers, like National Resources Wales, to actually test the water and do something about the pollution.  They have had to spend quite a long time collecting data on who uses the Warren for swimming, canoeing, and dog walking, to demonstrate that people do use the river, and need to be protected from pollution.  

Apparently, National Resources Wales were quite enthusiastic when Oliver went to them on behalf of the local groups, and set up a time line of what would happen.  One of the main things on the time line was supposed to start in April, but when Oliver contacted them they said they had not been able to fill the post yet, so there was no member of staff to do anything.  They still have not filled the post, at the end of May - but they're very enthusiastic....

Then Angela Jones spoke, passionately, about her love for the river, and her long association with the river.  She's been swimming in the Wye and leading groups to look at nature on the Wye for nearly forty years, and she's probably the nearest thing there is to a human personification of the Goddess of the River Wye.  

She said that she started noticing that the water tasted different, and saw sewage going into the river, and run off from chicken farms, and she saw the consequences of that for the wildlife of the river, and she couldn't understand why nobody was doing anything about it.  She wrote to MPs, and even went up to Westminster to talk to MPs about the problem.  

She's also accosted Therese Coffey, the Minister responsible for the state of our rivers, and she wasn't impressed with any of the answers she got.  Therese Coffey has been in the area this week, and was at a meeting organised by DEFRA about the state of the River Wye.  The Friends of the Upper Wye and River Action were not invited, despite requests to be involved.  The NFU and Avara (the chicken company) were well represented.  It's only this week that the River Wye has been downgraded in status by Natural England due to the decline in Atlantic salmon and other species, and the pollution levels.

Angela got a round of applause when she said that she'd stopped paying her sewage bill to Welsh Water, on the grounds that she  didn't want to pay for it to be dumped straight into the river.  So she's had the bailiffs round to collect the money.  She's also been targetted by vigilantes who want her to keep quiet.

She's not keeping quiet.  As the Wild Woman of the Wye, she swam the length of the river a couple of years ago towing a coffin to raise awareness about the state of the river.  More recently, she's done the trip again, this time towing a giant box of eggs.  She's involved with the Friends of the Upper Wye, and she's also helped to set up the Friends of the Usk, another local river which is having similar problems to the Wye.  

And she has a book out, which she has self-published to raise money for her campaigning.  It took her two years to write, as she is dyslexic.  I went straight off to the Festival bookshop after her talk to buy a copy.  It's also beautifully illustrated with photographs.  The title is Wild Swimming the River Wye.

I had to come away before the next talk had really got going, but it seemed to be going into the reality of what industrialised chicken farms are like.  There are 24 million chickens housed within the catchment area of the River Wye, and they crap, and that crap goes into the river, and the river is dying.