Jenny Tse-Leon, Head of Conservation and Impact at Froglife
Froglife is supporting the March for Clean Water on 3rd November 2024. I have decided to attend this event not just on behalf of Froglife but with my whole family.
I have to admit the idea of packing up my three young children, to get the train from the south-coast of England up to London, to walk the streets with thousands of other people does fill me with a slight sense of dread. However, it feels more mad that in 2024 we are still polluting our waterways.
I’m of the generation that grew up watching Julia Roberts films. At a formative age I saw Erin Brockovich; an extraordinary story of one woman taking on the corporates to stand up for those that weren’t able to take on the fight themselves. This case shocked the world that groundwater which in turn contaminated drinking water in the communities surrounding the utility plant were being poisoned and people were dying of cancer as a result.
Today, we are not pumping hexavalent chromium into our waters but instead we are facing agricultural runoff, sewage discharge and other chemical pollutants. This contamination damages our freshwater and marine environments, the wildlife that lives in them and us.
The water system is broken. Over the last few years, I have experienced this firsthand. In 2020, a Guardian investigation revealed that raw sewage had been pumped into English rivers via storm overflows more than 200,000 times in 2019. In 2023, following a prolonged dry period paired with the hottest summer on record we had a hose pipe ban as the demand for water outgrew the water companies ability to supply it. As a family we dutifully followed the rules and didn’t use water in our garden. Instead, we aimed to get to the beach as much as possible to cool off. It has become our new normal to not only check the tide times but to also to check the SSRS app to see if raw sewage has been pumped into our sea water. On several occasions we had to cancel our trip to the beach as the water was not deemed safe to swim in. To top this all off we had a leak in our street that was left for over a week to fix which meant that fresh mains water was bubbling out of a neighbour’s manhole running down the street and literally pouring down the drain.
We all have our own reasons and experiences to demand that companies stop polluting our waterways. The government is listening. Steve Reed MP, Secretary of State for DEFRA, has announced a review of the water system, a special measures water bill is being put forward and this will be followed by a further Water Bill. Now is our time to demonstrate how strongly we feel about this and make demands that will change the way water is managed for not just us but our children and their children.
You can find out more about the March for Clean Water and Register at https://marchforcleanwater.org/
