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Paul Powlesland

@paulpowlesland

Jan 26

On Thursday night I looked out of my boat & knew immediately that something was wrong on the River Roding. The moon was glimmering off the water in a strange way I hadn’t seen before. I went outside to discover an oil slick streaked across the river & the smell of engine oil in the air.

Here’s what I did about it & what it says about regulatory failure & the role of river guardians 🧵

First, I needed to discover where the oil was coming from, as I knew the Environment Agency (EA) would do nothing otherwise. The trouble is, the oil could be from anywhere miles upstream or even from one of the many tributaries. I messaged our River Roding Trust local guardian groups upstream to see if they could see any oil: they couldn’t, which narrowed it down. By Saturday morning, the oil was still flowing on the main river, so I set off from Ilford to see where it was coming from. I investigated every outfall, until I found where it was coming from- a tributary called Loxford Water, just upstream from my boat.

I explored up Loxford Water, until I found an EA sluice where the oil was collecting. I rang it in to the EA pollution hotline, with an exact grid reference and then…

… nothing! I had heard nothing back by Sunday morning & with a big rain storm on the way threatening to wash even more oil into the Roding, I decided I needed to act.

I looked into buying a boom to hold back the oil, but decided that as time was of the essence, I needed to make do with what I had. So I put on my least fancy 80’s ski suit, cycled two 250 litre barrels to the river on my handlebars & created a boom out of an old bedsheet filled with local reeds.

Getting up close to where the oil was collecting behind debris caught in the sluice, I realised that the spill was more serious than I had thought. The oil was thick & black, & large amounts of it pooled around the sluice. Sure, it wasn’t the Exxon Valdez, but it also wasn’t good to have this much oil in a river a few hundred metres from a major urban centre.

With an hour to go til heavy rain, I got stuck in…

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Paul Powlesland

@paulpowlesland

Jan 6

Britain's Eels Need You!

The European Eel migration is one of the most incredible natural events on earth & in Britain we are lucky that our rivers, streams, lakes and ponds are some of the eels' key destinations.

However, the eel population of Britain & Europe has crashed in the last few decades & a scheme to export millions of our precious baby eels to Russia for cash threatens to make things even worse.

Please help to stop this trade by signing the petition below & if you'd like to know more about Britain's eels, why they are in trouble & what we can do to help them, please read and share this thread 🧵

change.org/p/stop-export-…

Eels are some of the most fascinating, & also under-appreciated, creatures on earth. Not only have humans never been able to successfully breed eels in captivity, but we have never actually observed their breeding in the wild.

European eels hatch in the Sargasso Sea (in the West Atlantic) and billions of tiny baby eels (called elvers) make their way across the ocean to Europe. There they make their way up estuaries across the continent, until they arrive at the upper rivers, tributaries, streams, ponds & ditches where they will spend their lives as ‘yellow eels’. After 15-20 years in these habitats, the mature eels (known as silver eels) end their life cycle by travelling all the way back down river to cross the ocean back to the Sargasso Sea, where they spawn & die.

The European Eel migration was once so huge that Eels were seen as a vast, inexhaustible resource. Eels we’re caught & eaten in massive numbers & even rents were paid in Eels in medieval times.

However, as human actions & impingement on the environment have increased, Eels have faced a perfect storm of different problems. Barriers like weirs & dams stop elvers reaching their ancestral river grounds & wetland habitats & there are now over 1 million such barriers across Europe, cutting off huge tracts of eel habitat.

Many eels live in marshes, fens & wetlands, which are particularly rich habitats for them- more than three quarters of such wetlands across Europe have now been drained. Thousands of water turbines & pumps in rivers kill & maim large amounts of eels every year. And, whilst they are more robust than other freshwater fish, water pollution & water quality issues have also contributed to eel population decline.

All of these factors have had an impact on eel populations, but there is one final factor that has contributed to their catastrophic decline…

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Paul Powlesland

@paulpowlesland

Dec 24, 2024

What can you give to a river that needs everything?

This Christmas I decided to give my river the gift of life, in the form of willows trees. I headed out on the River Roding in my canoe, from sunrise to sunset on the shortest day of the year, to see if I could hand harvest & plant 100 willows in a day. Here’s how I got on…

🧵

At 8am, as the sun rose over the towers of Barking, I pushed my canoe out into the river & paddled downstream. Even in those first few minutes, out amongst the calling of the birds & silvery reflections of the sky on the river, I knew this day was as much a gift for myself as the river.

I stopped at a group of willows that I had planted with friends 5 years ago & found a tree that had recently fallen to harvest green willow sticks to plant. The joy of willow is that you can cut branches from existing trees (ideally 1cm to 5cm diameter), push them into wet mud along the river & they will grow into new trees.

I loaded up the canoe & headed downstream with as many willows as I could carry.

Why willow? The Roding where I live suffers from highly unnatural & artificial channel & banks. This, more than almost any other human mistreatment, is incredibly damaging to the river’s ecology. In the centre of Barking where the river is completely metal sheet piled in places, I barely see any life.

Willow hosts one of the largest number of species of any native tree. With the plentiful water & mud beside the Roding, it grows very quickly. Trees I planted with friends 5 years ago are already 20cm in diameter & over 10 metres tall. As these photos show, in some parts of Barking, trees I’ve planted formed some of the only greenery or natural parts of the river channel visible in a sea of concrete, brick & steel; all from a humble stick pushed into the mud!

Perhaps the best thing that willow does is to transform the ecology of the river around it. They catch silt & create naturalised areas in front of sheet piling. Where their branches trail into the water, they catch foliage for wildlife to eat, provide nurseries for fish & give birds like kingfishers places to perch. When I spotted the first otter seen in Barking for 50 years, it was hunting amongst the branches & roots of a willow tree, rather than the bare concrete wall that made up the riverbank nearby.

Read 7 tweets

Paul Powlesland

@paulpowlesland

Sep 8, 2024

Creating one of the most remote chapels in Britain

After my recent pilgrimage to Iona, I travelled on to the Island of Gometra just across the water.

On Gometra (which is located off the Island of Ulva, off the Island of Mull), I had the same sense as on Iona that it was a place where the veil between the worlds was thin. The landscape & geography of the island is stunningly beautiful & the most similar to Iona I had seen. The two islands were just across the water from each other & there were even legends of St Columba coming to Gometra to pray. I realised that, in a different version of events, Gometra could have been the cradle of Celtic Christianity & a holy place of pilgrimage in the modern world.

I felt that this place still deserved a sacred space for people of all faiths & none. I began to dream of creating a chapel on the island & how I could make that dream a reality.

I spoke to the owner of where I was staying & they too felt that the island had a holy feel & deserved it’s own chapel. There was also an existing building- an old stone farm building- that would be perfect for it. Luckily it wasn’t being used for anything important; unluckily that meant over the years it had become the dumping place for all manner of things that are hard to get off an isolated island over the years.

Over several days, I moved, sorted, tidied, stacked & cleaned

The building began to become visible as the rubbish pile gradually reduced & I realised that it was going to be a space of simple & rustic beauty.

One of the challenges of creating a remote chapel is logistics: the island is two ferries away from the mainland & the only way in is by boat or a long walk. This meant I could only use things that were already on the island; although I some realised this would add to the creativity & fun of the challenge. As an example, I was disappointed not to find any paint, until I stumbled across the perfect amount of white masonry paint to cover the grey part of the walls at the back of a workshop. With the basics of the room done, it was time to fit it out as best I could with what I could find…

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Paul Powlesland

@paulpowlesland

Aug 22, 2024

A pilgrimage to the edge of the world.

I had heard of the holy island of Iona as a sacred place where the veil between heaven & earth is said to be thin. On a visit to the Western Isles, I decided to see for myself this tiny island where St Columba founded a Celtic Christian Abbey on the edge on the edge of the known world in the year 563🧵

I arrived on the island on the last ferry of the day, carrying just one other person. I had a slight trepidation, as it was getting late, I didn’t have anywhere to stay & had no plans except to walk, be in nature and wallow in the mysticism & history of the place.

I was surprised by how visually prominent Iona Abbey was as we approached the island: in glorious isolation in its grassy setting between the blue bands of sea & sky.

At the quay I found a map of the island with a ‘hermit’s cell’ marked in the hills above the Abbey, which k immediately knew would be my sleeping place for the night. I found the circle of stones, where holy men would live in glorious isolation, laid out my sleeping mat & bag and went to sleep as the sun set.

I awoke in the morning, glad that the rain during the night had been light & walked back to the Abbey, arriving just in time to hear the bells summoning the faithful to prayer, as they have done on this exact spot for over 1,400 years.

Entering the Abbey, I was struck by a feeling of familiarity & awe that I couldn’t at first place. Then I realised why that was: I had been in many ruins of ancient abbeys before, but never one that had been reconstructed (as Iona was at the turn of the 20th century) & hosted an active religious community & services. It felt like steeping back in time before the abolition of the monasteries

Read 7 tweets

Paul Powlesland

@paulpowlesland

Aug 6, 2024

Why London needs a micro de-paving revolution 🧵

We need a scheme to de-pave & green small (less than 50 sq. metres) currently impermeable areas in London. This is illustrated by some of the *100’s* of such areas I saw on a 20 min cycle through one part of the city in LB Newham

One of the biggest causes of both flash flooding & sewage spills in London is the extent to which we have made the city more impermeable than it needs to be, by excessively paving & asphalting.

Much of London has combined sewers, where sewage & surface water run-off are combined together & sent to sewage treatment works. This may work ok in dry weather, but when large amounts of rainfall happens, the system can’t cope & the mixture of sewage & surface water is discharged into rivers via Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO’s).

Thames Water has failed to invest properly in infrastructure, causing these CSO’s to spill more than they should. However, climate change (causing more intense downpours) & excessive paving, are also responsible for an increase in CSO spills.

The recent London Climate Resilience Report also notes that surface water flooding is also a key risk for climate change risk for London

london.gov.uk/sites/default/…

To try & solve the problem of CSO discharges & surface water flooding solely through ‘hard’ or ‘grey’ infrastructure (eg more concrete storm tanks, expanding sewer capacity, building more drains) would not only be extremely expensive but, as climate change causes ever greater peak water flows, an exercise in futility.

We know that one of the best ways to tackle the problem is to stop the water running off into the sewers in the first place, by removing hard services & introducing trees & gardens that allow water to soak in. These also have a benefit of increasing the time that water takes to run off, reducing peak flows & thus the need for more expensive grey infrastructure. These gardens already in place in Newham show what can be achieved.

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