A change is gonna come...
Liz Bonnin has been inspired by a fight to restore a Californian river back to health
BBC
- Radio Times Staff
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“If you listen, there’s a song there. When a river is happy again, it sings.” Yurok tribal member Chemooch McCovey shared these words as we watched the Klamath River flow freely in northern California for the first time in 100 years.
Our crew, from the new series of Our Changing Planet, had travelled here to film the demolition of four hydroelectric dams. This followed a hard-won fight by Indigenous peoples to restore the health of a river that had once been home to one of the largest salmon runs in the western United States.
The Klamath River sustained the Yurok tribe for more than 10,000 years. But for over a century the dams – which had become obsolete as new renewable forms of energy were found – had blocked salmon migration routes and made the warming reservoir water toxic, resulting in the deaths of thousands of species (Chinook salmon numbers plummeted by 90 per cent).
And so, the largest dam removal project in US history was just the beginning. An ambitious nature recovery project was also under way.
Our rivers are in trouble. They have been manipulated, over-extracted and polluted by the modern world, in the name of progress. Global freshwater species have declined by over 84 per cent since 1970, twice as fast as land and marine species. Here in the UK, river pollution has reached critical levels. Agricultural run-off and sewage spills have dumped dangerous bacteria and chemicals into our waterways, with 75 per cent of rivers across the UK now in poor ecological condition.
Sharing stories of hope can help to inspire others to follow suit
Rivers are the lifeblood of landscapes. Every species in a riverine ecosystem plays a vital part in maintaining its ecological health, each one dependent on the other, in a beautiful, interconnected web of life. We’re only beginning to understand just how complex and far-reaching these connections are. Safe to say that if a microorganism, plant or fish has evolved over millions of years to be there, it has a function, and ultimately has helped to make our planet habitable.
Around the world, people are striving to turn things around for riverways and, to coincide with Earth Day on 22 April, we wanted to share their stories to show what’s possible when the will to act for nature is there.
I was truly inspired by the Klamath dam removal and nature restoration projects. With the future of Indigenous tribes, who rely on the river for sustenance and vital cultural traditions, under threat – and with every species, from milk-weed to bears, ospreys to river otters, and even orcas in the Pacific impacted by the dams – people from different cultures joined forces with the shared passion of recovering salmon populations and bringing the Klamath back to life.
Surveys were carried out from the air to map the river as it forged a new course. Juvenile salmon were health-checked to monitor how they will fare in new parts of the river; California condors, crucial scavengers for the ecosystem, were reintroduced; and vast reservoir beds, exposed for the first time in a hundred years, were sown with billions of seeds from over 90 native plants. This is what can be achieved when we work together for nature!
River restoration is just as possible in urban settings. In Paris, ahead of last year’s Olympics, my co-presenter Ade Adepitan visited an underground basin, engineered to hold floodwater and prevent sewage spills, as part of the plan to make the Seine clean enough to swim in for the first time in 100 years.
He also discovered how over 600 homes have been fitted with toilets that separate urine from waste water to stop hormones and pharmaceuticals from ever entering our waterways, instead of being processed into fertiliser.
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There’s no reason projects like these can’t be done elsewhere. Sharing these stories of hope can help to inspire others to follow suit, speeding up the ripple effect of change, as we reconnect to each other and the natural world.
Authors
Radio Times Staff
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