In the summer of 2020, the River Wye made national headlines when it turned green. Algal blooms were depriving the river of light and oxygen, smothering the life within. The algae wasn’t the only sign something was wrong. There was a terrible vanishing too. The Wye has long brimmed with water-crowfoot, a beautiful plant. It’s the keystone species of the river, providing habitat and food for others. You used to be able to look over almost any bridge on the Wye in springtime and see a sea of white flowers. Not any more. It’s virtually disappeared.

We’re seeing the Wye change before our eyes. Places that used to be inviting swimming spots are becoming marred. Where once clear water revealed colourful stones on the riverbed, now those rocks and pebbles are covered in slime. Visibility underwater is poorer. People report seeing fewer fish and fewer birds. The Wye’s decline is happening so fast, some have likened it to watching a close relative dying.

In an attempt to understand what was driving this demise, a cinematographer in Hay-on-Wye invited concerned local people to meet online to discuss the problem. In the midst of lockdown, over a flurry of Zoom meetings, a group of near-strangers divvied up research tasks and consulted experts. I was one of them. We came from all backgrounds, combining artists and scientists. We called ourselves ‘Friends’ of the river.

We quickly discovered that due to reduced government funding for the environment agencies in England and Wales there was a critical lack of monitoring data. In 2021, we set up a citizen science project to address this, co-designed with experts at Cardiff University. Whilst the statutory agencies were monitoring water quality in just a few locations only a few times a year, we wanted to harness people power to monitor far more locations far more frequently. Our mission was to fill in the data gaps in the official record and get better coverage across the catchment, particularly on smaller tributaries which often went neglected. We wanted to discover where pollution was coming from. We put out a call for volunteers and were overwhelmed by the response.

We’ve now trained hundreds of volunteer citizen scientists who serve as guardians of their local waterways. As well as capturing valuable data, they take photographs, notice subtle changes and report pollution incidents.

Other groups in the Wye catchment have citizen scientists too, including the Wye Salmon Association and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. We’ve all collaborated to make our data freely available for anyone to view via a groundbreaking bespoke platform called WyeViz, designed by one of our core team. You can access it from our website.

Data from our environmental agencies shows that nearly three-quarters of the phosphorus pollution in the Wye catchment comes from rural land use. In other words, farming is responsible for the majority of pollution in the Wye. We have over 20 million chickens in the catchment which, together with other livestock, produce more manure than the land can absorb. As well as the over-application of fertiliser, we suffer from huge amounts of topsoil washing into the river. This soil carries nutrients into the Wye, whilst silting up the riverbed and depriving fish of their spawning grounds. The key to river health is soil health.

Ultimately restoring the river means restoring the land. We need to move away from intensive livestock farming and towards regenerative, mixed farming systems which treasure the soil and steward clean water. We also need the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales to enforce the law against polluters to protect our precious river and provide farmers with a fair playing field, because at present good farmers get undercut by less scrupulous actors. We want to see farmers properly paid and rewarded to farm well.

We’ve come a long way in just a few years for a grassroots community group. We’re now a registered charity – Friends of the River Wye – and we employ a manager part-time to run our citizen science project. Everything else we do is powered by passionate volunteers.

We’ve put on events to educate the public about the state of the river and brought together people with the power to change things – farmers, supermarkets, food companies, water companies, regulators and politicians. We’ve put on exhibitions in cafes, castles and at the Hay Festival. We’ve worked with singers, artists and poets to lift the river’s place in our culture and imagination. We’re regularly featured in the press, TV and radio, speaking up for the Wye.

You might recognise our Chair and his red hat, Artistraw’s own Tom Tibbits.

We can’t tolerate living with a river in decline. We’re fighting for clean water which can teem with life once more.

You can follow our work via our website. Please sign up to our mailing list. We’re always grateful for donations too.

www.friendsoftheriverwye.org.uk