environment – The Secret Angler

The Sportfish Spring Spectacular referred to in the last post finds room for a small number of videos about the environment among the tuition and tackle tartery. Not that watchers show that much interest in them: last time I looked, views for the latest gear videos outnumbered those for river quality 8 to 1. Custard pies of the environment.

I have to admit, though, that the various projects meant to undo decades of pollution in our watercourses are slow moving at best, or utterly pointless at worst, as regular readers of this blog will know. The latest is Project White Hart, a new scheme for saving the vanishing salmon population of the southern chalk streams. The founder is an actor called Jim Murray — no, I’ve never heard of him either — and the title White Hart invokes the mythological connotation of the white stag which dates back to medieval times.

Perhaps the name is not the best considering that we don’t want southern salmon to turn into a myth, although that is looking probable. The project blurb informs us that salmon numbers in the Test and Itchen are only 20% of the conservation limit, the figure below which a population cannot sustain itself. In other words, the Test & Itchen salmon is functionally extinct already — beyond the point of no return. If we could throw a switch to reverse overnight all the depredations to the catchment, it wouldn’t help. Bleak news.

Maybe populations of the neighbouring Hampshire Avon can still be saved. How, then, is the Project going to bring this about? This is where one gets the familiar sinking feeling. The Plan of (in)Action’s first step is to ‘bring stakeholders, communities . . .to the table’. Second, ‘Conduct a full “catchment audit” for the Test and Itchen watersheds . . .’ The third step, to summarise, is make everything better. You have to wonder what has been going on so far, given that the decline of salmon has been going on for years. Are all the stakeholders wandering around Hampshire gazing at the clouds? If the catchment needs ‘a complete ecological health check’, what has happened to all the surveys of the two rivers, carried out by the Environment Agency and citizen scientists, who appear to outnumber the salmon. Or is all the data collection, as I suspect, revealing nothing very useful about the state of the water or the answer to salmon declines?

Just suppose the salmon population is still saveable. How long have we got? Certainly not long enough to be arsing around bringing all and sundry to the table, picking at fingernails and writing waffle for the AST website and Sportfish videos. The three-point action plan could be reduced to one: Do an awful lot of nothing and tell everyone about it.

If you want a real action plan, consider this:

Meter all water supplies throughout the south of the country (make it the whole country) and legislate for other water conservation measures.
Clamp down on the egregious actions of the water companies and prosecute the guilty mismanagers.
Fund rapid improvement in agricultural practice.
Instigate the policing of commercial fishing in appropriate Atlantic areas to check for salmon bycatch and illegal fishing.

I don’t expect any of this to happen in time.

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In the March issue of Trout & Salmon, regular columnist Dani Morey questions the motivation behind Salmon Scotland’s Wild Fisheries Fund (WFF), a sum of money offered to salmon conservation projects. She is right to do so. The cash on offer for 2026 is £230,000, a modest figure indeed compared to the industry’s turnover of £1.2bn . Money is only granted to short-term practical projects (academics are excluded), many of which are small beer like mink traps and bank restoration, none of which will have real success in restoring salmon numbers. Some questionable projects are funded, like Bob Kindness’s stocking scheme on the Carron. He is often referred to as a biologist but he has no qualifications or expertise in salmon populations. Real biologists tell us he is doing more harm than good.

Salmon Scotland is a trade body that represents aquaculture companies. One of its roles is to defend and promote the industry, not least through using its website for propaganda, claiming sustainability and importance to ‘global food security’ when both are obviously untrue. Aquaculture has serious impacts on the environment, and farming fish is an inefficient use of the marine species that go into aquaculture feeds.

Can we believe that aquaculture feels some guilt for its environmental impact and wishes to atone by supporting work to help wild stocks? I should coco. The WFF is just another side to the industry’s propaganda, a form of greenwashing to convince the gullible that it cares for the rivers and oceans. It’s the same approach as Thames Water’s when they funded the Wild Trout Trust’s conservation awards, all the while loading the utility up with debt and distributing the cash as dividends up the complex chain of holding companies that its owners engineered. Hence the terrible state of the underfunded sewage treatment infrastructure and TW’s own finances.

Large corporations nearly always behave like psychopaths . Their first and last focus is on profit, no matter the cost to the environment or other people. History is replete with heinous examples: tobacco’s long denial of the harm caused by smoking, big oil’s deliberate obfuscation around global warming even though obvious to the bosses, and more recently, the contemptible actions of the Post Office, abetted by Fujitsu, towards its subpostmasters. Companies are without emotion or feeling, and one has to conclude that the suits who run them at the very least put such human attributes aside at work.

One has to view Scottish Salmon’s WFF in this light. The aquaculture companies’ only goal is to survive and prosper, regardless of environmental costs. Through a combination of misleading advertising, influence over regulators and economic imperatives, aided by a bit of greenwashing as a sop to those who condemn the damage they do, they are in a constant war against conservation.

Morey wonders whether what really matters is the benefit to wild salmon that could accrue from this dirty money. The amounts are a drop in the open-sea cages. Any benefits are negligible, especially measured against the harm of the aquaculture industry. More good will be done by voting with our mouths. I don’t buy any farmed fish, salmon or otherwise. If you like to eat salmon, Pacific wild salmon bearing the Marine Stewardship Council stamp is available.

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Tag: environment

Project White Elephant

The greenwashing psychopaths