It's watershed time for rivers
By Harry Eyres
Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00
Not long ago, the passing-bell tolled for the Yangtze River dolphin. In August last year, scientists announced that the baiji , or Goddess of the Yangtze, a species venerated for thousands of years in China until Mao's Great Leap Forward turned it into bushmeat, was probably extinct as a result of overfishing and pollution.
It will not be the last Yangtze species to go the way of the Great Auk and the Hawaii O'o. The giant Chinese sturgeon, which migrates from the Pacific to the Yangtze to spawn, may not last out this decade. According to Wei Qiwei of the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Insitute in Jingzhou, "there may be only 1,000 of the creatures left in the river". The valiant Mr Wei has not given up hope: "The Chinese sturgeon is very precious to us," he says: "I don't want it to disappear on my watch." The Yangtze is the fourth or fifth-longest river in the world, perhaps the greatest in terms of its impact on civilisation. But now its reputation is clouded by another statistic: the Great River is reckoned to be the largest single source of pollution entering the Pacific Ocean. Since the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, environmental degradation has increased dramatically: there is a risk of "an environmental catastrophe", according to a Chinese forum of scientists - the same forum, ironically, that recommended building the dam in the first place.
If all this makes me melancholic, that is partly because I have always had a thing about rivers. As quite a young child, I pored over encyclopedias and geography books, gobbling up statistics like jam doughnuts: was the Mississippi-Missouri really the longest river, or was it the Nile or the Amazon? Which was bigger, the Ob or the Yenisei, the Amur or the Lena? Since English rivers are little more than trickles, the first river that really impressed me was the broad and beautiful though shallow Loire. Three hundred yards across was an impressive breadth, a good drive and a pitch.
What had not yet occurred to me was that rivers might be de-rivered. Already in the 1952 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (the one I have on my shelves) there is an ominous sign: the article on rivers is entitled "River and River Engineering". Here is an illustration of the point Heidegger makes in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology". "The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power plant." Heidegger is saying that the river, Father Rhine, central thread of German culture, hymned by the poet Hölderlin, beginning and ending of Wagner's Ring cycle, is no longer a river. Technology has supplanted nature.
Is that the end of the story? Must we sit back and watch while river after river loses its immemorial "riverness" and becomes merely a drain and a water supply, for irrigation or power generation? Or is there another, more hopeful scenario: can rivers be re-rivered?
London is the city which did in its rivers first. Not only was Edmund Spenser's "sweet Thames" declared biologically dead in the 1950s, but nearly all the other London rivers were forgotten, built over or running underground like sewers. Now there is a scheme, proposed by an adviser to the Mayor of London, to revive several of London's lost streams.
"When these rivers are opened up," says Peter Bishop, director of Design for London, "I think Londoners will be absolutely amazed. [The rivers] have been there all the time but you never see them." He is talking about such rivers as the Fleet (which runs under Fleet Street, of journalistic renown); the Bourne, part of which still forms the beautiful lake in Hyde Park called the Serpentine, which includes London's first swimming lido; the Wandle, which runs from Wandsworth to Croydon; and the splendidly named River Quaggy in south-east London.
The scheme is intended not just to beautify the capital city, but to cool it: London, increasingly covered by tarmac and concrete, can get uncomfortably warm in heatwaves. Perhaps these rivers will even be clean enough to swim in, as the Thames now is quite far downstream.
Last month's devastating Mississippi floods remind us that rivers have not lost their power. The St Louis-born poet TS Eliot's lines in "The Dry Salvages" remain relevant: "I think that the river/Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable." For all our attempts to control them, rivers have a habit of striking back. Entirely understandable are the Chinese authorities' attempts to tame the Yangtze and the Yellow River, whose floods have cost millions of lives. But it seems we need a new way of living with and not denaturing our rivers, so we can say once again with the great Chinese poet Li Bai, "all I see is the long river flowing to the edge of the sky".
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