Runaway AI poses a threat to us all. How humanity stays in control should be a priority for everyone. Projection location: Slough, UK (Narrated by Gavin Esler)

The photos of desert-like parks & dried up rivers are some of the more obvious signs of drought, but there’s more subtle ones too. On tidal rivers across the South & East of England, as the flows down the river slow to a trickle, tides can push further & further up the estuary & the river itself. This can lead to significant changes to the natural ecosystem. On the Roding, as the salt concentrations increase, freshwater ecosystems are changing to saltwater ones this summer. Some willow & alder trees I’ve planted have died & the leaves on others are turning brown from salt poisoning. The change in salt will of course affect fish, invertebrates & other aquatic life, although this is harder to observe. Another curious change is that the river has gone muddy & turbid. This normally happens after heavy rain which carries mud from the fields surrounding the river; as no mud is washed in, the river water usually goes clear in the summer. During the drought, however, it appears that the lack of downriver flow is allowing tides to carry sediment from the estuary further up the river. In less than a week it has deposited a centimetre of fresh mud on my steps, so is potentially adding huge amounts of mud to the Thames estuary as a whole. These important changes are not even being monitored by any of the multi million pound budget agencies in charge of the Thames Estuary & it’s left to those who live on the river to observe & note the rapidly altering ecosystem of the river & how we might respond to it.

Good news! After decades of ignoring rampant environmental crime on the Roding, @EnvAgency has finally decided to act. Bad news! It’s not against Thames Water for illegally dumping billions of litres of sewage in the Roding, or the waste criminals who have dumped thousands of tonnes of rubbish on its banks, but against myself & a small volunteer charity for… restoring a river without a permit! Within a week of the magnificent work of River Roding Trust volunteers completing the arduous work of restoring 250 metres of the Aldersbrook this winter, EA investigators had been down to the site and rattled off a letter threatening us with prosecution for doing the work without a permit. This is despite the fact that the Trust have repeatedly asked the EA to do this vital work on the Aldersbrook themselves & they have refused. It is also despite the fact that they have not investigated the huge illegal sewage outlet on the Cranbrook a few hundred metres away, which illegally discharges 750,000,000 litres of raw sewage straight into the River Roding every year.

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It’s interesting that the Environment Agency are apparently interested in ‘nature recovery’, as on my river they are threatening to prosecute me for building a pond without a permit, whilst not prosecuting a single one of the serious illegal sewage spills that have been going on for decades. It’s all about priorities I guess?