The seventh age of freshwater conservation—a triumph of hope over experience?

AQUATIC CONSERVATION: MARINE AND FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS

Aquatic Conser6: Mar. Freshw. Ecosyst. 9: 639–644 (1999)

The se7enth age of freshwater conser7ation—a triumph ofhope o7er experience?

BRIAN MOSS*School of Biological Sciences, Uni6ersity of Li6erpool, Li6erpool, UK

KEY WORDS: freshwater management; conservation; legislation; environmental future

INTRODUCTION

‘All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players:They have their exits and their entrances;/And one man in his time plays many parts,/His acts being seven ages’,William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii.

The future for freshwater ecosystems could be bleak—mere reservoirs of water, mere pipes for thetransport of controlled wastes from a drear landscape of genetically engineered monocultures and animalfactories and from a townscape of cheap, ugly buildings. In the uplands, streams might dribble througha scrub of motorcycle trails, holiday developments and fish farms, serving a frenetic population enslavedby high technology and rampant marketing. Or it could be one of diverse, attractive waterways and asustainably managed countryside, providing copious employment and recreation to an urban populationas happy to stay in welcoming cities as to move outside. Either scenario is possible and although theformer yet looks the more likely, the experience of history is that change can be unexpected, rapid andstaggering.

Hutchinson (1965), in his metaphor of ‘the environmental theatre and the evolutionary play’, created aprofound model for thinking about living organisms and their environment. William Shakespeare used arelated theme with such insight that it can be used to assess the course of freshwater conservation overthe last half century in the UK. But first, my assumptions: conservation of substantial habitat diversityis essential. Species diversity follows habitat diversity. High quality freshwater habitats provide services tosociety, from amenity and recreation to flood control and good raw drinking water. Abused habitats maybe health and safety hazards. The case for conservation can be made on economic grounds, but it is thenvulnerable to perceptions of valuation. The better case is simply that the way in which society treats otherorganisms reflects how it will treat its own members; a society antagonistic to its environment is a sociallyabusive one. Conservation is variety, variety is choice, choice is freedom, freedom is pleasure (Green,1997). Freshwater habitats cannot be conserved as isolated islands. Conservation of whole systems isnecessary, from the top of the catchment to the mouth of the estuary. Catchments can only be conservedif their land use is sustainable but ‘sustainable development’ is a sloppy term. It still means, for politicians,less overt but still indefinite exploitation in an expanding economy. Most habitats are already developed

* Correspondence to: School of Biological Sciences, Derby Building, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK. Tel.: +44151 7944995; fax: +44 151 7945094.

CCC 1052–7613/99/060639–06$17.50Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 19 March 1999Accepted 17 August 1999

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beyond the point of sustainability; they would otherwise not be showing the symptoms of acidification,eutrophication, floodplain obliteration, severe engineering, toxic pollution and devastation by exoticspecies. Expanding economies and sustainability are mutually incompatible concepts. So much for theassumptions; how has the play brought us therefore to this? What will be the post-millennial scene?

THE 1940s

‘At first the infant,/Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms’,William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii.

Ideas of conservation are ancient but the pressures of our activity, although never absent since humanbeings first evolved, were not so intense, such that much formal legislation was not warranted untilthis century. The 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act was an infant of suchlegislation and parallels my childhood. Both of us were born of World War II, which has oftendetermined our subsequent development. The Act met a need for townspeople to experience wildcountryside for recreation and although it was the creation of National Parks in England and Walesthat had the greater emphasis, it also provided for the preservation of representative examples ofnatural habitats as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs).

The terminology is significant. It was the ‘scientific interest’ that was to be preserved. Much diversityof habitats not needing special protection was available. In a northern industrial town, I could walkfrom home to a mixed farm, by a stream with bankside woodland, through meadows and sandstoneoutcrops. Food, clothing and furniture were rationed; few were well-off financially and memory isselective, but I have no sense of deprivation. The Agriculture Act of 1947 was passed and rightlywelcomed. It provided grants to increase production and to guard against future jeopardization offood supply by enemy action. The state of rural rivers was good, but urban waters were often pollutedby sewage and industrial waste. Nonetheless, no-one perceived any insuperable problem. It was a timeof innocence, both personal and legislative.

THE 1950s

‘And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly toschool’, William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii.

I discovered ecology in the 1950s, botanizing in the fingers of countryside, then unexcised by themisconceived planning of later decades, which still penetrated Stockport. I came across unfamiliarspecies faster than my abilities with the flora could cope. Trips to the nearby Peak District wererevelations. I was disappointed not to find very diverse plant communities in the uplands but had noinkling that this was because of severe acidification: I thought I was simply not visiting the rightplaces. It was a time of naivety in the conservation movement too. I recall an early publication of theNature Conservancy, set up by the 1947 Act, showing research, idyllic pictures of nature and reliablelooking gentlemen, some even professors, around a table, planning the network of reserves the Actpermitted.

I visited Brown Moss in Shropshire on a field course. My being told that there were some changesin the plant community in one of the constituent pools, because of a soakaway from a nearby cottage,was simply interesting, rather than the portent of a severe eutrophication problem. This innocence wasshared by those who taught me. Ecological problems were perceived as local and interesting smalldeviations from a matrix in which all was fundamentally well.

Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Aquatic Conser6: Mar. Freshw. Ecosyst. 9: 639–644 (1999)

THE SEVENTH AGE OF FRESHWATER CONSERVATION 641

THE 1960s

‘And then the lover/Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad,/Made to his mistress’ eyebrow’,William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii.

Fresh waters really entered my consciousness in 1962 with a second-year university course on algalecology. That interest developed into a PhD and during three years of oscillation between doubt andover-confidence, I read through the library of Penelope Jenkin, one of the earliest limnologists to haveworked in Africa. As a child I had been fascinated by Africa and had a romantic view of it. When myfirst job took me there, I was devastated. A landscape I had presumed wild turned out to be largelyagricultural (Adams and McShane, 1996). Instead of the wildlife I had imagined seeing as I sampled therivers, I found myself dodging the lumps of mealy porridge floating down from dishwashing upstream.

Back in the UK, legislative optimism still reigned. The enormous forces of intensifying agriculture,steadily changing the land- and water-scape, were little investigated. Research groups in the universitiesconcentrated on fundamental work; there was little realization, that I recall, of systematic problemsdeveloping in fresh waters. The major concern was the poor performance of many small sewage treatmentworks, the upshot of which was to be a sensible 1974 reorganization, on catchment lines, of the waterindustry in England and Wales with the Water Act of 1973.

I benefited from travel; a move to the USA was a revelation. I saw near-pristine lakes and rivers in itsNational Parks and came across the ideas of Leopold (1949)—his concept was that land should be used,indeed had to be used, by a human population that was not going to go away, but that the land had aright to be used wisely: a land ethic. I returned from the USA with an image of what untrammelledlandscapes could be like and the inkling that severe environmental problems were developing, forAmerican ecologists had become widely concerned about these. I also had a broader view of freshwaterecosystems and how they worked, but this was not paralleled in British legislation to protect fresh waters.It remained isolated and parochial.

THE 1970s AND 1980s

‘Then a soldier,/Full of strange oaths,/and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,/Seeking the bubble reputation/Even in the cannon’s mouth’,William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii.

Back in the UK, I met the Norfolk Broadland. Once one of the most diverse wetland systems in the UK,its clear water and macrophytes had been replaced by dense phytoplankton. There was severeeutrophication and sewage effluent dominated the phosphorus budgets (Moss, 1989), but local opinionblamed hire-boat activity. I had difficulty in simply being heard at a public meeting in 1975 when thechairman, a yachtsman clearly out to victimize motorboats, studiously ignored my raised hand.Fortunately, the press turned out to be more open than the local vested interests. Conservation was asmuch politics as ecology.

The development of legislation was also struthious. The setting-up of Water Authorities in 1974 wasprogress as the authorities, although too large for any sensitivity, were at least based on catchments, eventhough the legislation with which they had to work was not. The Control of Pollution Act (1974) allowedthe setting of consents to discharge but could not control discharges arising from ‘good agriculturalpractice’, defined, by the agricultural ministry, to the advantage of production not environment. The Actsalso gave no hint that nutrient-rich effluents from water treatment works could be environmentallydamaging, even though this was widely realized internationally and by the scientific community.

The Anglian Water Authority was persuaded to install phosphate removal treatment at some works inBroadland in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was not enough to restore the Broadland, but was an


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essential first step. However, it was not until the mid-1990s that control of nutrients in effluents in the UKwas carried out on anything more than a very restricted ‘experimental’ scale.

The water industry in England and Wales was reorganized through the Water Act of 1989, whichestablished the National Rivers Authority (NRA) and separated off, to private companies, the provisionof drinking water and the disposal of sewage. This was sensible because the water authorities, in bothpolicing water quality and often polluting it with their effluents, had suffered internal conflicts. Thepowers of the NRA were trumpeted as considerable, but were little altered and still did not include theability to control agricultural activity and, therefore, to manage catchments. Nor can its latermanifestation, the Environment Agency, in the 1990s.

The end of the 1980s saw more legislation relevant to water management, but it was legislation toprotect commercial interests and to avoid radical reform. It shielded the water companies from muchexpenditure in improving effluents and it failed to protect even SSSI areas that were aquatic because therewas no control on the quality or quantity of water reaching them. Conservation legislation, primarilythrough the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981), had also done little to defend the SSSIs set-up, withrose-tinted spectacles, from the 1950s onwards. Indeed, all of the legislation, in its emphasis on speciesrather than systems, and on fortress rather than countryside conservation, may even have worsened theprognosis for fresh waters. The history of conservation in the UK has been revealed, from governmentpapers, as one of continual undermining by mostly unsympathetic ministers (Sheail, 1999).

I left Norfolk in 1989 with most of the Broads little improved. A handful of sites had been significantlyrehabilitated, but aspirations for restoration to anything like the pre-war state of the system werefrustrated by the inadequacy of the legislation, which effectively hamstrung anything but local and modestobjectives. The Broads Authority, a welcome new national park authority, talked of ‘a place for the cureof souls’. Perhaps.

THE 1990s

‘And then the justice, /In fair round belly with good capon lined,/eyes severe and beard of formal cut,/Full of wise saws and moral instances,/And so he plays his part’,William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii.

In the 1990s, European Directives had the potential for the salvation of UK freshwater habitats. TheUrban Waste Water Treatment Directive (91/271/EEC) allows the entire landscape to be declaredsensitive to eutrophication, which indeed it is, and could be used to enforce phosphorus and nitrogenremoval from the effluents of many of the country’s wastewater treatment works. Alas, the principle ofsubsidiarity allowed the UK Government to define ‘sensitive areas’ as those already suffering severeeutrophication and a mere 80 or so, mainly river lengths used for supplying drinking waters, have beenscheduled. This is inconsistent with the posting of notices warning of potentially toxic cyanophyte bloomsat more than 650 standing waters every summer (Environment Agency, 1999). Huge areas at risk are notprotected at all.

Likewise, the Nitrates Directive (91/676/EEC) provides for the setting up of ‘nitrate vulnerable zones’to protect both drinking water and sites of conservation value, but the UK Government has failed to usethe latter provision. The forthcoming ‘Water Framework Directive’ looks, at first, like manna (Pollardand Huxham, 1998). But despite its emphasis on catchments it contains no provisions for catchmentmanagement, and although it requires all habitats to be restored to ‘good’ status compared with ‘highstatus’ examples, the scope for derogations is so wide that a government can escape almost everything interms of fundamental habitat restoration.

The 1990s saw some further consolidation of English and Welsh legislation in the Water Resources Act(1991). It allows statutory water quality objectives to be established, but this provision has been littleused. The Act says nothing about catchment management but promotes the concept of a Code of Good


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Agricultural Practice, through which guidance is given about manuring of the land, fertilization and slurrydisposal. Its strictures are mildly inconvenient for landowners.

Legislation for conservation was weakened in the 1990s. What was a duty to promote conservation inthe Water Resources Act was reduced to ‘ha6e a regard to the desirability ’ in the 1995 Environment Act.EC Directives were used grudgingly. The spirit was mocked and in place was palliative marketing. Unableto conserve habitats through tough legislation, the conservation agencies resorted to exhortation in oftenglossy booklets (English Nature, 1997; Environment Agency, 1999) containing strategies doing little butencouraging degraders to be less destructive. The medium indeed became the massage (McLuhan andFiore, 1967). Responsibility for change became entombed in those with the fair round bellies. There werelots of wise saws and moral instances, but the jealous honour, the strange oaths of the late 1980s Europeanlegislators have been muffled. It is not only the capon that is cut. With age, both institutional andpersonal, what are lauded as reasonableness and balance take over, but these are weasel words to therescue of those worn down by, or colluding with, the immensity of opposing, well-heeled interests. Thedegradation of our freshwater habitats goes on apace, each successive generation able to compare thepresent only with its own youth and, therefore, compounding underestimation of the totality of the loss.

2000+

‘The sixth age shifts/Into the lean and slippered pantaloon/With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,/Hisyouthful hose well saved a world too wide/For his shrunk shank;/and his big manly voice/Turning again towardschildish treble, pipes/And whistles in his sound’, William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii.

Age encourages reflection. We see the turning points where, if one had done this not that, the outcomemight have been better. This is true personally and collectively. The difference is that individually we mustdie but as a society we are potentially immortal. We cannot change our past but we can change the waysthat we run society. But what should we do?

UK organizations concerned with the environment have been fleeting. They are frequently reorganizedand they have been defensive of sectional interests—agriculture, conservation and water resources. Itseems ludicrous to have combative management to support a holistic system, nonsensical for oneorganization, such as English Nature, to be compensating farmers for not doing what another, theagriculture ministry, will subsidize them to do. It is also foolish to think that we can have a land- andwater-scape as diverse and wild as that before settled agriculture. Yet it is infinitely more foolish to thinkthat we have to tolerate a degraded land, sacrificed to an economic and agricultural philosophydiscredited by all but those who profit hugely from it, and a set of waterways managed by such cynicalconcepts as ‘best available technology not entailing excessive cost’.

The future must be to create organizations which manage catchments wisely and this must be achievedby making the catchment itself, not some sectional interest, the focus of management. It needsunambiguous legislation to guarantee sustainable use of all land and water—voluntary principles failwhen human beings contain selfish genes—and we all do. It also needs catchment organizations, notseparate ministries of agriculture and agencies for the environment. It needs such organizations to besmall enough for their leaders to know them at wellington boot-, and not pinstriped suit-, level yetpowerful enough to do the job. And there lies the rub.

THE MID-2000s

‘Last scene of all,/That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’,William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii.

Sans teeth condemns the present state of our tools to manage our environment sustainably in the next


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millennium. We could have a better alternative tomorrow, almost. We do not because we have allowedour society to become dominated by individuals and organizations who run it in their interests and notin ours, the majority. Ten companies are said to control virtually every aspect of global food (Vidal,1997). We have abandoned locally responsive democracy for trade baubles. We have allowed lobbies tocorrode every piece of environmental legislation to near uselessness in maintaining a sustainableenvironment. We can change it all through the ballot box if enough of us stand up and be counted; if wedo not collude with wealth for temporary comfort; if we do not prostitute our values for pats from thepowerful. We live in a tiny slice of human history; there is no reason to think that our present structuresare superior, inevitable, or permanent. The sixth age has been fool’s gold; the seventh age could be thereal stuff.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Mrs L.J. Moss and Drs Debby Stephen, John Eaton and Andy Gill for commenting on earlier drafts.

REFERENCES

Adams, J.S. and McShane, T.O. 1996. The Myth of Wild Africa. Conser6ation Without Illusion, University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley.

English Nature 1997. Wildlife and Fresh Water—An Agenda for Sustainable Management, English Nature,Peterborough.

Environment Agency 1999. ‘Aquatic eutrophication in England and Wales’, Consultative Report, EnvironmentAgency, Wallingford.

Green, B. 1997. Countryside Conser6ation, Spon, London.Hutchinson, G.E. 1965. The Ecological Theatre and the E6olutionary Play, Yale University Press, New Haven.Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford University Press, Oxford.McLuhan, M. and Fiore, Q. 1967. The Medium is the Massage, Penguin, Harmondsworth.Moss, B. 1989. ‘Water pollution and the management of ecosystems: a case study of science and scientist’, in Grubb,

P.J. and Whittaker, J.H. (Eds), Towards a More Exact Ecology, Blackwell Scientific, Oxford, 401–422.Pollard, P. and Huxham, M. 1998. ‘The European Water Framework Directive: a new era in the management of

aquatic ecosystem health?’, Aquatic Conser6ation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, 8, 773–792.Sheail, J. 1999. Nature Conser6ation in Britain. The Formati6e Years, The Stationery Office, London.Vidal, J. (1997). ‘The corporate planet’, BBC Wildlife, July, 30–31.


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The seventh age of freshwater conservation—a triumph of hope over experience?