The River That’s in My Inbox (and sometimes my dreams)
Field notes on trying to save a river and and why imagination might be our greatest tool.
The River Wylye is no longer just a line on a map or a flicker of silver glimpsed from a car window. It’s in my inbox. My calendar. And occasionally, my dreams.
Last week, I dreamt I was walking its banks with my old dog, Dougie. It was stormy. The water was dark. Dougie trotted ahead, not listening, ears turned off as usual. I couldn’t keep up. Later in the dream, there was a meeting. One of those slightly dreadful ones where someone asks a question you didn’t prepare for, and the biscuits are disappointing. Apparently even my subconscious is managing stakeholder engagement now.
In my earlier piece Rivering: On Place, Movement, and Memory, I wrote about all the rivers in my life and how this river now rules my life. That my relationship with the Wylye is no longer just emotional, it’s bureaucratic. Legal. Budgeted.
Which is to say, it’s love, with strict line items.
The Wylye is one of only around 200 chalk streams in the world, and 85% of them are here in England. Just here. Mostly in the soft, rolling south and east. And one of them, the Wylye, threads its way through Wiltshire, quietly working its magic through farmland, water meadows, and market towns.
Chalk streams are rare. Precious. Cold and clear, they bubble up from aquifers filtered through ancient chalk, and spill into the world with that glassy calm that makes you believe everything might just be okay.
But like all beautiful things, they’re under threat.
Pollution. Over-abstraction. Sewage discharges. Nutrient overload. Development pressure. All the familiar wounds of our modern age. Now add the looming Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which could allow development to steamroll straight through the protections chalk streams so desperately need. The Wildlife Trusts have launched a campaign, Save Our Chalk Streams, and if you are so moved, you can write to your MP. Or shake your fist at the clouds. Scream into the void. Or both.
But I’m not writing this as a rallying cry. I’m writing this so you know, deep in your bones, that the Wylye is rare. And beautiful. And endangered.
And that I have the strange honour (and occasional panic) of helping lead its recovery.
The Wylye Valley Landscape Recovery Scheme is part of Defra’s flagship Environmental Land Management (ELMs) programme, and Landscape Recovery is its most ambitious strand. It isn’t about tweaks. It’s about transformation of whole systems and whole places. It is about Ambition, with a capital A. Connection. And a kind of courage.
It’s exciting. Maddening. Utterly absorbing.
It’s about working with dozens of landowners across thousands of hectares, navigating different geologies, business models, values, and visions. It’s about designing a future where the land produces food, sequesters carbon, hosts wildlife, and lets the river run a little freer.
Landscape Recovery asks the hard questions. Not just what to restore, but how. And with who. How we blend public and private funding without selling our souls. How we build governance structures that work for people and nature. How we commit to twenty-, thirty-, fifty-year journeys, when most funding lasts only three.
These aren’t easy questions. But they’re the right ones. And maybe the only ones that matter now.
It’s an exhilarating, often bewildering, sometimes exhausting thing to be part of. It’s like being handed a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are still being designed, and the picture on the box keeps changing depending on the latest Defra memo.
But still. What a thing to try.
To gather around a river and ask: what does it need? What do we need? How do we do this together?
There’s a line I keep returning to, from Mary Oliver’s poem At the River Clarion, where the river speaks:
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.
That’s it. That’s the job. To stretch the boundaries of imagination, of what landscapes could look like, of how we might live differently, of how to meet this moment with courage and care.
Lately, I’ve been listening to What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures - a beautiful book (and movement) that reminds us imagination isn’t naïve, it’s necessary. That might explain why I’m on a bit of a hopeful ramble.
Because even when it’s hard, or confusing, or so frustrating I want to close my laptop, place it gently in a drawer, and pretend it doesn’t exist for a while - the work is still the same.
To imagine something better.
And then keep going.
I always wonder with pieces like this…do you find this interesting?
Do you want to hear more about the projects I’m working on? The behind-the-scenes bits of nature recovery, with all its spreadsheets, hair pulling and slightly surreal meetings?
Let me know in the comments or just hit the little heart if this resonated in some way. I’d love to hear what you think.
So much more of this please Carrie!