The petty and the pitiful

Search ‘fishing’ on YouTube and you’ll get something like 75 million results, last time I checked. How many wasted lives would it take to watch that lot? The swivel-chair fisherman may find enough gigabytes to turn swivel-eyed in whatever time it takes, and my limited perusal of the mind-numbing YT stuff suggests that would be quite short. Young people’s mental health problems from looking at too much online garbage are well documented now but the damage can be done at any age. Enshittification applies to internet fishing material as much as the dancing dog videos, rabid misinformation and all the rest of the dumb stuff filling up the data centres.

Amongst the dross there are some more watchable videos as I mentioned a while ago. But the interest wanes with most. McPhail’s fishing trip films I find too tedious to watch now, although his fly tying demos can be useful, even if better are available, Barry Ord Clarke’s methodical instructions, for example. Yet to read the comments below them, you’d think they were all masterpieces of film-making; all have lots of ‘like’ votes, none have any thumbs-down. The reason has nothing to do with the perceived quality; it’s because the posters of videos disable down-votes, thereby promoting the illusion that everybody loves the output. To ensure there are no dissenters to upset the Eisenstein fantasy, comments are moderated too. Anything beyond ‘what a fantastic video’ are unlikely to appear. There is one excitable chap who posts himself with a poacher’s rod spinning in all kinds of waters, some very remote, accompanied by ‘awesomes’, ‘wows’, ‘come ons’ and ‘get ins’. In one he was almost certainly fishing for trout out of season. I pointed this out in a comment. It did not appear.

Why are there uncountable numbers of fishing videos? Some are part of commercial activity — tackle company advertising, shop windows selling guiding services, for which there is rising demand as a pandemic of chronic fishing incompetence spreads nationwide. Even the pants-wetting blokey mentioned above flogs kit on his website. For many it’s a boastful or attention-seeking vehicle for showing everyone the fish they catch. Some are both. A Yorkshire guide, whom I’m too polite to name, treats viewers to serial trout-catching (using the catch-all-you-can-net method of Euronymphing), highlighting the difference between poor saps elsewhere who’d caught nothing and his couple of dozen so far. His unabashed screen persona, according to those who know him, is a fair reflection of the man. There is another YT poster, also from Yorkshire but strictly amateur, who posts videos of his bending fishing rod. After tipping each fish from the net, the video cuts straight away to another view of ‘fish on’. I only watched to begin with because it was a river I knew a little. I soon hit the back button.

Then there are the techie vids, instructions and discourses on the bits and pieces that go on your line between rod and hook, all contradicting each other to an extent. No matter how banal the information or how bad the presentation, it’s free to post on YouTube, which is the problem: anyone can do it now the digital kit is cheap. The online world is full of junk — present blog excepted of course — and absorbs more and more of people’s time and attention. This is time away from the worthwhile things in life — time with friends, time spent reading a book, going fishing and daydreaming about fishing.

There is something of a backlash developing, other than among those who’ve realised they’re frittering their lives away. I have heard of some clubs who are banning guides from their waters, or introducing rules against filming. On the chalk streams this is not such a problem: access has never been easy for the amateur film maker. It’s different on other waters and the publicity attracted by YT videos and showoff snaps on social media is not welcome.

There’s probably no going back, not at least until the electricity generation capacity is exceeded by the slop’s power demand. Despite my criticisms of fishing magazines, a return to print media might be a good thing. At least there is some filter against the drivel, even if the remaining magazines still love to pretend that all is well in our imperfect world.

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Dirty money in The Rivers Trust

The Rivers Trust has just released its State of Our Rivers Report 2026. One longs to read something concrete in these reports, something new, the sense that progress is happening. We don’t usually get much of any. The report opens with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, author of several wandering-through-nature books. Being a poetic sort, he reflects that rivers are ‘life-forces’ and ‘run through people’. He seems optimistic that the deterioration of watercourses can be reversed.

What optimism can we take from this report? Nothing that we don’t have already. It points out that certain pollutants, heavy metals, ammonia and acids, are now in lower concentration. Maybe this is due partly to remedial steps but I suspect it’s mainly a consequence of lost manufacturing industry. Otherwise not much has changed. Nitrates and assorted chemicals, including pharmaceuticals, are still present in dangerous amounts. We are told yet again that none of the nation’s rivers is in good overall health thanks to these, although some rivers make it into the good category for ecological health. As usual, the definition of ecological health is not referenced, although presumably derives from the EU WFD, which encompasses diversity and quantity of aquatic life. As ever, the question of data validity hangs over all these definitions.

Here the Rivers Trust says something obvious but new for them. Data on fish populations, aquatic flies and so on (mostly collected by citizen science) are sparse and no attempt at a national analysis has ever been undertaken. Whether there is enough data to make such a study worthwhile is questionable. The report suggests the data may offer too rosy a picture on some rivers, a conclusion implicit in the simplistic numerical methods of assessment. That at least is some progress.

The usual pollution culprits are listed — water companies that spill sewage into rivers in enormous quantity and abstract chalk streams to their limit and beyond; climate change bringing alternate drought and floods as well as intolerable heat; agriculture’s fertiliser and cattle slurry; modern industry, notably the datacentres, factories for AI slop and social media shite, that demand reservoirfuls of water to function.

More detail of the analyses frequently referred to throughout would be helpful, even just a link to more data. We get a few GIS graphs on which you can click to see some basic information, which is better than nothing. But I’m always left with the feeling these reports are a bit of publicity and a forlorn call to action. The report concludes with a list of what governments, businesses, landowners, journalists and the rest of us can do. These recommendations are all very well but the doing is always the sticking point. The Government is the big player here: without national action, regulation, control of the water companies and so on and so on, river and environmental decline in general will continue. But what appears to exercise politicians the most? The ‘cost of living crisis’ if you listen to them hot-airing on the TV. People’s main concern is to carry on consuming at the lowest possible cost — which got us into this mess in the first place.

The goal of business is to help us do that. Their PR departments brush the environmental fallout under a carpet of misdirection. A recent corporate phenomenon is to inveigle itself into environmental organisations — Thames Water, to use my favourite example, chucking a few quid at the Wild Trout Trust. I took a look at the Rivers Trust’s ‘corporate partners’. First on the list is Amazon Web Services, operator of hundreds of data centres worldwide, its big overall boss Jeff Bezos, climate change denier. Coca Cola also appears, the worst plastic polluter in the world. And Meta, 61 datacentres under construction, purveyor of content harmful to children.

No conflict there.

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