salmon – 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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Just over ten years ago, David Graeber, an anthropologist, wrote an article about ‘bullshit jobs’, which he defines as those which are engaged in unproductive work — clerical, administrative, advertising and the like. My favourite candidate for a bullshit job is PR or, as it’s more often called these days, communication. Just about every organisation seems to have someone in a job of this kind, including those to do with fishing, the Atlantic Salmon Trust for example, whose Head of Communications is Jonathon Muir. This is part of how he describes his job

Key to restoring the species [salmon] at scale and pace is by delivering landscape-scale solutions to land managers and policymakers, in addition to harnessing nature-positive finance and philanthropic funding within the corporate sector, using wild salmon as a keystone focus species within efforts to tackle the wider twin crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Heads of communication clearly have a different way of communicating than the rest of us. ‘Landscape-scale solutions’? ‘Nature-positive finance’? Muir must spend much of his time weaving meaningless phrases from a dictionary of corporate gobbledygook. But he’s also written a piece for the Soapbox section in the September issue of Trout & Salmon, a rather Pollyannaish plea for ‘positivity’. Of course the words positive and negative are much bandied about these days, especially by lovers of obtuse language: negative is frequently used to describe someone who holds a different point of view, positive for those who have the same. According to Muir ‘We owe it to future generations of wild salmon lovers . . . to be relentlessly positive . . .’. When you consider that the Atlantic salmon population has crashed in most rivers either side of the Ocean, never mind the rapid disappearance of numerous other animal and plant species worldwide, the sixth mass extinction, it is hard to know what he means. Certainly lapsing into despair will not get us out of the environmental mess of our own making, but frittering away time on fruitless projects, as I believe the Atlantic Salmon Trust is doing, is not cause for optimism. Jonathon Muir seems to personify that foot-dragging.

To give him his due, he does refer to illegal exploitation in the T&S article, which is the first mention I’ve seen from anyone in the AST. The trouble is he is part of the ‘slow pace of action’ and telling us all to cheer up will do nothing to help. Indeed it may even give anglers an excuse to carry on with their own polluting ways — driving high-emission 4 by 4s (does JM own one?), flying around the world for fishing jollies, as encouraged by the magazines Trout & Salmon and Fly Culture among others. Anglers have a nasty habit of laying the blame anywhere but their own doorstep.

In the interests of giving the AST impetus, perhaps I can help Jonny redraft his job description, and that of all the AST employees:

Find out what’s killing the salmon. Take action to prevent it. And be quick about it.

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Tag: salmon

Project White Elephant

The AST’s Head of Waffle