On the 10th October 2026 I gave the James Roose-Evans Memorial Lecture at St Mary Magdaelene’s Church in Bleddfa. This is a transcript of what I said

Thank you so much for being here today, in this beautiful Church.

I was very honoured to be asked to deliver the James Roose-Evans memorial lecture. And also slightly intimidated when I saw who’d come before me. There is a great history of remarkable people giving talks here. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The former director of the British Museum, Neil McGregor. Composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. And I was aware that I was being asked because the poet Gwyneth Lewis was no longer available. (Sorry for anyone still hoping to see Gwyneth today).

Why me?

I didn’t know James Roose-Evans, so when I was deciding whether to take this on, I started reading about him. I’m aware that many people in this room will have known him personally. For those that don’t know about him, he was a theatre director, a priest, an author – he wrote lots of books, including children’s books – and he founded the Bleddfa Centre. I liked what I read of his writing and his ideas really resonated with me.

Crucially, he said “life itself is the ultimate art”. He said we have to realise that “every aspect of life, from washing dishes, preparing a meal, digging in the garden or allotment, collecting a child from school, or helping a neighbour, is an opportunity for being creative: for the making of something with love.”

James knew that creativity is in each of us and wanted us to use it to live life richly.

And for me, that was permission. I can give this lecture, in the same way that any of you here could give this lecture. Because we all have stories worth telling, experiences worth sharing, and lessons worth remembering.

We all have one wild and precious life. There’s a Mary Oliver poem called The Summer Day, which ends with her question:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?

Those lines have reverberated around my head for years, becoming a touchstone.

It feels good to say them aloud in a Church. I often feel emotional in Churches. They connect me to a deep well of what’s most meaningful in life. They’re where people through time have gathered in community, to ask moral questions of how to live. Where people pray, expressing their deepest wishes – for peace, or love, or forgiveness or grace. They’re where we celebrate and commemorate the big moments of life – births, loving unions and deaths.

My granddad was a priest. But his son, my dad, was a staunch atheist. My grandad was always happy for my dad to take his own path, and decide what to believe for himself, he only asked that he do one thing: Pursue Truth.

My dad passed that on to me. He told me to always pursue truth – and that has really been my guiding star. I took it rather literally, becoming a journalist. He also urged me to live with moral courage, which is a value that I prize very highly in other people.

James Roose-Evans originally called this the Bleddfa Centre for Caring and the Arts. It was later renamed a Centre for the Creative Spirit. Both names are wonderful but I was glad to know that Caring was at the heart of this centre from the very start. Care is really the subject of my talk today. What it means to care for each other and the living world.

I’ve always cared about nature. I think that’s just part of being alive. We know that we are a part of nature, not separate. We’re connected to everything around us. We’re all symbiotic parts of an eco-system, interdependent in countless ways beyond our knowledge or understanding. Nature gives us the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat.

When I was a child in primary school, people knew me as ‘worm girl’ or ‘ant girl’, because I went mad if anyone deliberately stamped on ants - I got into real fights about it, tears streaming from my eyes. I also used to go to the playground early, if it had been raining, and rescue worms from the concrete – moving them onto the grass – to save them from being trampled in a football match. I even had a little worm hospital to try to help the injured ones recover. When I saw an animal suffer, I felt it too. I felt kinship.

I cared and I felt very deeply about it.

And like anyone who cares and notices, I’ve long been aware that nature is in trouble. Which is to say, we’re in trouble.

We’re living through an age of nature loss and climate breakdown. Sometimes this is called ‘the sixth mass extinction’, because we’re losing species as such an accelerated rate. We’re losing a stable climate. This is also known as the Anthropocene – an age where human activity is driving changes to our atmosphere and ecosystems. That’s an awesome power and an awesome responsibility.

As a journalist, I feel the inadequacy of merely reporting on this.

I have made television documentaries for the BBC about environmental issues. I’ve written for national newspapers and magazines.

Plants and animals are vanishing all over the world. The rich tapestry of life, in all its incredible diversity, is being eroded.

Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

How many of us really feel it? Sometimes we notice that there are fewer bugs splattered on our car windscreen. Or that the garden is quieter than it used to be, with less birdsong… but often these things are disappearing without us paying attention.

Gerard Manley-Hopkins has a line in his poem Binsey Poplars about the felling of some aspen trees, which says:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been

We lack awareness of how much we’ve lost.

I’ve been worried about this since childhood and I’ve written to my MPs, and I’ve marched, and I’ve supported environmental charities, and I’ve given out leaflets, and I’ve attended talks and meetings.

I was very attracted to Extinction Rebellion when it first formed because I liked the clarity of its foundational principle:

Tell the truth and act as if its real

That’s another touchstone.

If we know that species are dying all around us and our climate is changing as a result of our lifestyles, what are we going to do about it?

In the summer of 2020, the River Wye turned pea green. It was hit by the largest algal bloom the river had ever seen - making national news.

The head of the Wye and Usk Foundation, which is the local branch of the Rivers Trust, said there had been algal blooms on the river before, but none this big. Now algae was forming much higher up the river, in the Welsh hills, giving the algae longer to multiply, compounding the problem.

Algal blooms smother rivers. depriving the life within of light and oxygen, which can destroy habitat and kill fish.

This happened during the Covid pandemic, when the country was in lockdown. Someone in Hay-on-Wye, a retired cinematographer called Richard Greatrex, sent an email to a list of environmentally-concerned locals asking if anyone would like to join an online meeting to discuss the state of the river.

I joined that zoom call. And I never imagined how that would change the course of my life over the next few years.

An amazing collection of people gathered on that call, nearly all strangers to me at the time, to discuss what to do. We started off simply asking questions. We wanted to discover the health of the Wye. We wanted to learn. We divvied up research tasks.

During this early period of research, there was a major pollution incident on the River Llynfi, a tributary of the Wye which joins the Wye at Glasbury. A local resident reported seeing fish jumping out of the polluted river and gasping for air. In the end, Natural Resources Wales reported that over 45,000 fish were killed over the course of a few miles. Our newly-convened group was shocked. The regulators didn’t attend that pollution incident until the day after it was reported. Nobody was ever prosecuted for causing that pollution, even though there had been another fish kill at the exact same location 4 years earlier.

This terrible pollution incident, on top of the Wye itself turning green, made us determined to take action.

Being in lockdown, we couldn’t go to London to protest about the nature and climate emergency, but perhaps here was something that we could do on our doorstep. Perhaps we could play an active role in protecting our local rivers.

I think James Roose-Evans would have approved. He’s written that he was deeply influenced by the Buddhist saying:

Look at the ground on which your own feet stand

And the Zen saying:

A journey of a thousand miles begins on your own doorstep

This journey began with an eclectic bunch of people of all ages living near Hay-on-Wye. We had one thing in common – we loved our river and we were worried about it. Amongst us were scientists, artists, journalists, filmmakers, software developers, data experts, teachers, accountants, booksellers… everyone brought their skills forward to help. Together, we were a bit like the Avengers. We were a super group.

First, we wanted to see the data on the health of the river and we discovered that the official monitoring done by the regulators had been massively stripped back. They were only testing water quality at a few points on the Wye a few times a year. We thought this was lamentable and that we could do better. We thought lots of local people care about their river and would be willing to test their patch on a weekly basis. If the agencies weren’t doing it and didn’t have the funds or manpower, then we’d step in and fill the gap with people power!

So we set up our own citizen science project. This involved lots of research as we learned from other groups around the country, particularly the Westcountry Rivers Trust who had a brilliant one. We worked with academics at Cardiff University to decide what to test and the best equipment and methodology to use. This was all done online, over many evenings, and I felt like I was taking an evening course. It was a steep learning experience.

At around the same time, in my work as a journalist, I interviewed a very inspiring barrister and nature guardian called Paul Powlesland, who had set up Friends of the River Roding in East London. He talked to me about the power of Friends groups forming for rivers. When we talked about the Wye, he urged me to call our group ‘Friends of the River Wye’. We actually started off as Friends of the Upper Wye, as covering the whole length of the river seemed like too much of a tall order. But then another group mirrored ours on the Lower Wye, so we’ve since joined together and we are now Friends of the River Wye.

We started recruiting citizen scientists. We put a call out for volunteers and were overwhelmed by the response. In a short time, hundreds of people were waiting to be trained. I was manning our email mailbox at the time and spent many an evening replying to tens of people whilst breastfeeding my second child. It was heartening to see how many people cared and wanted to do something.

Years on, we now have hundreds of volunteers monitoring water quality on a weekly basis, on small rivers and streams feeding into the Wye, as well as the Wye itself. In January this year we surpassed 50,000 samples. It’s one of the biggest and best known citizen science projects in the country. It won a major award for public impact. The regulators have access to all our data, which is also openly accessible to anyone on our website, updated weekly, and there’s a table which we call the ‘leaderboard of shame’ which highlights the most polluted areas. We have meetings with the regulators to push them to take action to clean up the worst sites.

As well as collecting the data itself, I think the transformational thing is having so many people paying close attention to their river.

Paul Powlesland says:

The key to restoring a river is restoring our relationship with a river

Our citizen scientists are really guardians of their local waterway. They’re monitoring the water quality, but they’re also connecting with the river more deeply, noticing changes more closely.

Mary Oliver said observing nature closely is the first step to protecting and conserving it. She said, “attention is the beginning of devotion”.

Just having the eyes of citizen scientists on the river sends a powerful signal to those around us – that we’re watching. It has a ripple effect as neighbours notice the water testing and ask what’s happening. This attention can help change behaviour and even deter polluters.

This idea of guardianship has become central to my thinking over the last few years.

I’ve been very influenced by the book WILD SERVICE, which is a collection of essays seeking to reconnect us with the more-than-human world and to encourage us to take up an active role in protecting and restoring it. It’s easy to feel disempowered by the scale of the nature crisis, but we can take responsibility for our surroundings. Guy Shrubsole makes the argument that you don’t need to own land, or indeed a river, to care for it. Rather than rely on the stewardship of landowners, or the efforts of nature charities, we can all play a role in connecting with nature where we live and working to restore it back to health. We can all be what Shrubsole calls “nature’s whistleblowers”, its last line of defence.

Every one of us can step into a relationship of guardianship with the natural world.

It was this idea which led me to produce The Riverside Code with Friends of the River Wye. I wanted to inspire and empower other river guardians. I wanted to make a booklet that was both beautiful and useful, so people would want to keep it and refer back to it. It’s full of ideas for things that people can do: in their homes, in community with others and when by the river – everything from avoiding using harmful flea treatments for pets (which can be highly toxic to aquatic life) to how to report pollution.

This is it.

It has a beautiful catchment map in the centre, painted by local artist Jessie Watkins, which illustrates how everything that happens in this landed area will affect the health of the river.

It begins with a beautiful poem by Owen Sheers, written specially:

Show me a river

and I’ll show you a mirror

Because the river is us

And we are the river

A polluted river is a pretty ugly reflection of ourselves. It’s a sign that something is going very wrong.

When we care for a river, we care for ourselves.

It’s interesting – thanks in part to the efforts of our group, and many similar groups which have sprung up across the country – river pollution is on the national agenda and gets lots of media coverage. There’s also a burgeoning movement of Rights for Rivers and this year saw the Charter for the River Wye, signed by all the local authorities, cross-border in both England and Wales, recognising the river’s inherent rights, including the right to flow, the right to biodiversity, and the right to be free of pollution.

I met the nature writer Mark Cocker recently and he seemed baffled by this level of attention on rivers. He asked, “Why are we fetishising rivers?” It’s a fair question. What about all the other habitats? But I think that rivers are great unifiers. Everybody wants to see clean water, and nobody wants a polluted river. That cuts across all political groups, and in a divided and polarised time, that’s major.

Rivers are also an excellent gateway to everything else. To heal a river, you have to heal the surrounding land, and to heal the surrounding land, you have to heal us and how we live. Everything is connected.

A friend told me the saying:

If you tug at something in nature, you’ll find its connected to everything else

And that brings me to connection. And to community. One of the most rewarding aspects of caring for the Wye has been all the wonderful people that I’ve met along the way. I’ve made great friends through this effort.

One of them being filmmaker Eamon Bourke. You might have seen the famous image of a crowd of people on the banks of the Wye spelling out SOS – that was Eamon’s idea. Together we made campaigning films about the plight of the Wye and put on exhibitions at the Hay Festival communicating the state of the river.

Slowly over the years, I came to know Eamon as a friend and he told me that he was working on a film about something deeply personal.

Eamon’s mum, Sue, died when he was three and he’s always longed to remember her – especially after becoming a parent himself. He’d look at his own small children and wonder, knowing how formative parents are, how can I not remember anything of my mum? Then his dad announced that he wanted to sell their family home in Cumbria, where Eamon had grown up, and he felt a pang of grief. He didn’t want to let the house go. So he went to help his Dad clear the house, took his cameras and filmed the whole thing. He wanted to capture it all. And in the process he discovered all sorts of things that belonged to his mum – including her diaries, slides, and clothes – but most precious of all were some cassette tapes that she had recorded.

With three young children – aged 5, 3 and 1 – Sue was too busy and preoccupied to write to friends, so she recorded tapes to tell them how she was and give them a sense of her life. The tapes bring her back to life in luminous detail. They capture intimate family moments. They’re the memories that Eamon had been missing all his life. The last thing his mum recorded was her and Eamon singing together.

As Eamon shared his story with me and invited me to watch the footage he’d filmed and listen to his mum’s tapes – I knew I wanted to help him to finish his documentary. It’s called The Solway, after the Solway Firth, a body of water between England and Scotland, near where he grew up.

I’ve devoted much time over the last two years to supporting Eamon with this film. I sat with him in the edit for months, a process which he describes as putting together the pieces of his broken heart.

For Eamon, the project was about going towards the loss, reaching back to his heartbroken 3 year old self and trying to understand why his grief was still so raw after 40 years. He never went to his mum’s funeral, so he needed his own way to say goodbye.

Making the film was painful but also life-affirming. It has changed me at a soul level. When I asked Eamon if making the film was painful, he said:

Painful things make you feel, they let you know that you’re alive… It’s the numbness you need to be scared of, not the pain.

Many people who face the depths of grief say that the experience can make life richer too. Whilst you may feel sadder than you ever thought possible, you may feel joy more intensely too. You appreciate the preciousness of life. We’re all here for a moment. All we have is love and one another.

One of the greatest gifts of making The Solway has been becoming more able to talk to people about death and loss.

One of my friends lost her baby at a very late stage in pregnancy, so she had to give birth to her deceased child. She was able to hold her son for a while and gaze at him and tell him that she loved him. She said afterwards nobody knew what to say to her. Everyone expected to see her around town with a baby, and didn’t know what to do when she emerged from hospital bereft. But one lady, who was a priest, asked: ‘What was he like?’ And my friend said that was the best question. Because she wanted to talk about how beautiful he was.

We need to be better at sharing our grief. Better at talking about how it feels to live without people that we love. And better at facing our ecological grief too.

Because many of us feel a profound sense of loss, that too often goes unacknowledged.

Look at the summer we’ve just had – the UK’s hottest on record. As smoke from wildfires filled the sky and the river dropped to its lowest level and crops perished in parched fields, did you lament?

One of the most visible losses on the River Wye is Water Crowfoot, part of the Ranunculus family. This plant, with white daisy-like flowers, used to carpet the river. It grew in such thick clumps that people said it was as if you could walk on water. Apparently, if you looked over nearly any bridge in summer, you’d see the fronds and flowers stretching from bank to bank. Rowers had to cut through the weed, it was so thick. Swimmers had to be careful not to get tangled up in it. But over the last decade, it’s largely vanished. Experts estimate well over 90% of it has gone.

That plant is one of the main reasons that the River Wye was designated as a Special Area of Conservation, for its beds of Ranunculus. The plant helps to purify the water, it’s a habitat for lots of other creatures and provides food for swans and others.

Friends of the River Wye currently has a project investigating why this precious plant has largely disappeared – and to find out what we can do to help it recover.

We’re gathering photos through our Big Ranunculus Watch. If you see Water Crowfoot in the Wye, please send us a photo so we can track where its coming back. We also want old photos – you might find a snapshot of a summer picnic or kayak trip or fishing outing which shows a river sparkling with white flowers. Please send us your pictures. It’s not just to show people what we’ve lost, it’s to offer a vision of what we could have again.

Because unlike people, rivers don’t die. Certainly, we can abuse our rivers so badly that we kill much of the life within them. I’ve heard anglers and others who know the river well tell me that they feel grief for the river. That they feel like they’re watching a relative dying, they find the decline of the Wye that painful. They feel the loss of species they used to love and they lament the cloudier water and the slimy stones. In some places, they say the river feels dead, compared to what it was like years ago. They experience this as a bereavement.

But all is not lost. I marvelled at Kingfishers on the river this summer. Rivers are flow and change. If we stop polluting them and allow nature to recover around them, they can bounce back. There were rivers in Wales that used to run black from industry but today they’re clean. The fate of the Wye is in our hands.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, Robin Wall-Kimmerer said that everyone has a gift and we “have a responsibility to use it, not just for ourselves, but for all of creation”.

That’s why I’m putting myself in service to the river. I’m putting my energies as a journalist into investigating the many and varied threats to the Wye and writing about them. I want to help to tell the river’s story and give it a voice.

Being in service is such a powerful idea because it’s not about you or me, its about serving something bigger. We can escape our ego. Rachel Naomi Remen said:

When you help, you see life as weak; when you fix, you see life as broken; and when you serve, you see life as whole

We all have a role that we can play in protecting and defending the living world. Humans are not only forces of destruction. We’re forces of creation. We’re growers and gardeners and tenders and nurturers and carers and guardians.

Together, we can restore the River Wye. If we bring about enough change, we could see clean gravels, clear water and a river teeming with life once more.

Hope is a verb. It’s something that only exists by doing.

Reading James Roose-Evans’ meditations, he said he wanted the following phrase carved on his grave stone:

Hope for all things, expect nothing.

I’ve been discussing that phrase with my husband. I think both parts are equally important - hope for all things & expect nothing. He thinks the main thing is to expect nothing. He’s very zen like that.

I think hope is essential. I have no time for cynicism. Another touchstone in my life is the line from the song Greenwood by Peter, Paul and Mary:

The Killer and the Cynic Waltz Together

How can we be bystanders to the destruction of the living world?

Nobody else is coming to save the Wye. Certainly not the government. At least not without more pressure from below. We are the people we’re waiting for.

The barrister Paul Powlesland tells a brilliant story. As a lawyer and nature guardian, he offered up his skills to serve anyone trying to defend trees. One day he was contacted by a group in Wellingborough who were seeking to prevent a magnificent row of lime trees from being chopped down. He agreed to help and was delighted to discover that the trees in question already had a Tree Preservation Order to protect them so couldn’t legally be felled. He issued his advice to the activists concerned, job done. But then they called him the next day to say the private developer was continuing to chop the trees down regardless, and the police were on the scene to remove the tree defenders so the felling could commence - despite the activists sharing Paul’s legal guidance and the Tree Preservation Orders. Paul dashed to the scene. He tried to reason with the authorities but nobody was listening. He wondered what to do. He knew that the law was on his side, so he could bring a legal case in months to come, proving that the trees should’t be felled, but that would be too late to save the trees, as they’d be gone. So he climbed into a tree himself and he filmed himself doing it and posted it on social media, showing the Tree Preservation Orders and explaining the situation. The developer suspended the felling and the trees were saved.

Paul’s point? The law itself is not enough. Paul says if he had to choose between more laws to protect nature, or more people willing to defend nature, he’d take the latter every time. It’s why his example of guardianship is so powerful and persuasive to me.

I recently sat with a man who is dying. I met him through the river too. He’s an angler who helped me to investigate the first pollution incident I told you about, on the Llynfi. He’s a tremendous river guardian. His favourite poem is The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson. He told me that every line of that poem conjures a memory for him of times by the river - some of his happiest memories being amongst his beloved grayling with their iridescent fins. He told me the poem will be read at his funeral, but he couldn’t read a line without welling up. Each verse ends with a couplet, always with the same final line, such as:

I chatter, chatter, as I flow to join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.

He shook his head with astonishment, looked at me and said “look after it”.