The Flow, Rivers, Water and Wilderness, by Amy-Jane Beer, Bloomsbury Wildlife 2023
This must be the longest review I have written, which goes to show how much I love the book – and all I am doing is sharing the sparkliest gems. Amy-Jane Beer writes about another fascination of mine in the chapter ‘Light and water’ – colour. She is more than aware of the Gladstone trap: prime minister Gladstone drew the bizarre conclusion from Homer’s description of the sea as “wine-dark” that ancient Greeks were unable to perceive the colour blue, which of course is nonsense. But different racial groups do perceive colours differently and it is interesting to consider to what extent that may depend on language. Research suggests that the Himba people of northern Namibia and southern Angola “genuinely have no word for blue, and ‘see’ night and water as black or dark, and the sky as white … the Himba easily pick out shades of green that to a European eye blend almost imperceptibly with others, but cannot separate sky blue from a sea of greens.”
I know that my own perceptions of blue and green and red and orange differ from my children’s and most people’s. We can never truly know what another perceives of course. From an evolutionary angle, it seems the blue/green/yellow part of the spectrum came first – prototypical beings needed to react to sunlight. For humans red came late and seeing it at all is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. Animals which live in deep water are often red because it makes them invisible since red light does not penetrate through more than about five metres of water. We cannot see infrared or ultraviolet: snakes and mosquitoes (infrared) and birds and bees (ultraviolet) can. Salmon can see both but at different times in their lives. It is hard to imagine where else one might learn such things. Another new word too: “Fresh snow is white but it sinters into blue …” “Sinter” means something like cohere or coalesce. Later in the book is the word “greige”, a fairly obvious portmanteau word (which people often confuse with compound words) which I had not come across before either. The earliest known use of the word was in 1835.
Two more. “Anadrome”, a word which spells another word when written backwards, such as “stressed” and “desserts” (much loved by crossword setters) but also in this context a migratory fish which lives in the sea but breeds and is born in fresh water, salmon being the best known. There is a third meaning in botany to do with veins and fronds which I can’t quite get my head around. “Redd” (strange how many of these words new to me from this book end in double consonants) is the other, which in Scottish dialect means to tidy up, put in order, but here is where female salmon make their nests.
On rewilding, the author makes short work of the alleged biodiversity of grouse moors as landowners exhaustingly propagandise: she brilliantly conjures up their sheer emptiness. They are of course not wild in any sense.
I wrote about beavers in Animal Wild:
When it comes to beavers, an extinct but native mammal, the same conflicts arise. When they appeared in Scotland they were given protected status, but at the same time licences were issued to farmers and landowners to cull them and remove their dams. A 2019 report from Scottish Natural Heritage, now rebranded as NatureScot, states that 87 of an estimated population of 450 were shot under licence in the eight months since they were granted protection. At least ten of those were kits under a year old. Since they had trained 205 people how to kill them, rather than looking at mitigation methods and even moving the beavers, as has happened elsewhere in Europe, it’s surprising the figures aren’t even higher. The report was welcomed by the National Farmers Union in Scotland. However, a group called Trees for Life won their legal challenge against NatureScot over this.
When beavers appeared in Wales, farmers and anglers warned of “civil disobedience and anarchy” if more were introduced. The editor of Angling News described them as vermin.
But, and it is a big but, fifteen families of beavers were granted the permanent right to remain on the River Otter in East Devon. Contrary to the fears of fishermen and farmers, they have replenished and enhanced the ecology of the river, there are more fish and the water is clearer and cleaner. Their dams reduce the risk of the flooding of houses downstream. The dams do disadvantage farmers who drain and ditch their fields sending water and topsoil flooding down the landscape. The answer surely is not slaughter, NatureScot’s first response, but paying farmers to co-exist with these bringers of life.
Amy-Jane Beer makes very much the same points. Our tinkerings with natural flow, our artificial straightenings of rivers, have tended to have the opposite effect of the benefits beavers bring. Their workings may seem messy, chaotic at first glance, but they are clever architects, ecosystem engineers. So who could possibly argue and campaign against this? As above – farmers, big landowners and some anglers including such bodies as the Angling Trust. Beavers do not eat fish. We should embrace the apparent mess, they make a difference remarkably quickly. Where they have been released they are often not truly free, they are enclosed, but one can hope that will change. We so desperately need to step back and let nature do her thing. The gainsayers are seen by this author as “an old guard of noisy ghosts, reliant on friends in high places and determined never to be a part of a compromise solution.” Beautifully put.
She has no limits to her intellectual curiosity and writes in one chapter for example about Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and then takes your breath away with the simplicity of describing a field as “so vast and empty it makes my stomach clench.” We all get that feeling on most of our badger surveys.
There is a good deal more on sewage and the water companies which I have written about many times, but, to repeat, the last conservative government voted to compel the water companies merely to reduce the impact of their actions, which is meaningless, when they had the chance to stop it. Following public outrage, they set a target to reduce overflows by 40% by … 2040. Amy-Jane Beer points out that this means that in fifteen years time we could still be seeing “filth emptied freely and deliberately into our natural watercourses for up to 1.6 million hours a year by profit-making corporations without anyone being in trouble for it.” “You bet I’m angry…” she adds. Soil and chemical run-off from farms is another huge part of the problem but it is not just the pollution – eventually we will run out of arable, fertile land. As I have also said before, the Environment Agency doesn’t just not enforce the rules concerning slurry, it doesn’t even check. On average once every 263 years according to their own 2018-2019 figures. For a farmer it’s well worth the risk to avoid the cost of proper disposal.
This was one of those books where I felt sorry to be approaching the end. Yet another new word, “ings”, from the Norse, areas of floodplain, wetland and water meadow, and an explanation of the derivation of the name of the city of York. From Brythonic, a group of Celtic languages, Eburakon, a place of yews, Latinised to Eboracum in Roman times, anglicised to Eoforwic, becoming Jorvik under Danelaw, called Everwic and Eborienc under the Normans, compressing in the end from Jorvik to York. A thorough history of our islands in the etymology of a single place name. Languages, trees and rivers – they are in so many ways the same. They have a common structure, as does the evolutionary tree itself. It is no coincidence that Yggdrasil, a sacred tree, is at the centre of Norse cosmology, around which exists all else.
On the monkeyflower we learn that the pattern of red spots in the yellow trumpets has been and is the subject of great deal of research which includes trying better to understand Turing patterns in nature, how spots, stripes, patterns on the earth and even the way in which stars cluster may be governed by mathematical rules.
One last new word, again from the Brythonic, Ituna. It means ‘rushing water’ and from it the River Eden gained its name.
The book closes on an upbeat but I think the last line of one of the other last few chapters struck me the most: “These are truly bridge years we’re living. Water is rising, the crossing is narrow and precarious, and I’m afraid. But we have no choice, we have to try.” We are all afraid I think, especially the young, and if we’re not then we’re not listening, not seeing anything. We can bury our heads in the sand, we can despair, or we can try. And anything, no matter how small, is better than doing nothing.
As a sort of end-piece I saw this Gandalf tree in a front garden on my way to the wildlife rescue and stopped to take a photograph a couple of days ago. Amy-Jane Beer references Tolkien a few times, so it it does not seem inappropriate.
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