Prose Pieces

The three prose pieces come from a variety of sources. The first two are records of river workshops, the third tells how a newspaper campaign eventually forced the relevant authorities to clean up Yorkshire's River Aire and the final one is an account of the relationship between places and intangible Heritage.

At the Mahi

Falguni Bharateeya

The workshop on the banks of Mahi (19-10-2008,9.30-5.30) took on its own shape. We started with some MANTRAS of the Rigveda and a song,sitting in the vicinity of the river-a temple of Lord Shiva. Having introduced the theme of Climate change and culture with reference to the rivers in Gujarat,we read some parts from a book on Mahi-available in translation-EARTHEN LAMPS-This book has some sketches on the river that facilitated the painters.We read a touching story by Sundaram which focused on a woman character and it creates an image of the river too.After the introduction the writers and artists tried to do something creative till the lunch hour. We were lucky to have some folk-singers who sang for the river. In the afternoon we went to a more beautiful,rocky spot where we had discourse on folk-literature,Mahi's several aspects and the creative writers read their compositions and the painters shared their paintings and sketches. I was the co-coordinator of this workshop and with the help of Atanu and others I could somehow manage it. I remembered you time and again while the work was in progress.If you need some more information,I'll provide it later.Please let me know how do you find this.
Remembering you
Falguni


At the Sabamarti

Jane Weatherby

At the Sabarmarti, I tried to look at the water, but the light was so bright, my camera wouldn't focus on the surface of the river. So, how was I to capture the Sabarmarti?
Walking along her banks, I feel disconnected from the water. Both the ashram and the idea of "mother river" seem at odds with the harsh industrial landscape of the riverbank.
Far below, a dog trots along the concrete, as if he has somewhere important to get to. A woman is washing clothes and laying the wet slabs of coloured cloth along a section of broken wall. Her children, two small girls and a boy, slip through the metal gates that bar the steps to the ashram and make a beeline for any passerby who looks like a tourist. Once a few rupees are grasped within their small, well-practiced fingers, they scurry back down to hand the coins to their mother, still washing clothes, far below, in the waters of the Sabamarti.
I watch from a distance. I am distanced by space, by the gates, by a million things more. My camera sees the tiny figures belo, but they are so far away they seem to scarcely move. They already look like a photograph.
Later, I tell Rachel I was sorry not to have been able to go down to the water's edge. She tells me that the gates have been closed to discourage suicides. Each week there are more and more bodies snarling the fishermen's nets. Men who face ruin, from what is called the credit crunch, drown their wives and children too, because they know there will be no-one else to care of them.


The River Aire Campaign

Peter Lazenby

The River Aire campaignran for 10 years. The YEP picked it up and continued for four years until it was won. I think it was 1990 to 1994 or thereabouts. I was the sole reporter involved. I'll try dig out the launch article but it may not be on computer file.

The campaign was called Eye on the Aire, the name of the campaign group which brought together 30-plus organisations. 
We started it something like this:
The River Aire starts its life as a healthy Dales river flowing from beneath the limestone cliffs of Malham Tarn. 
It supports sensitive wildlife including grayling, mayfly and dragonfly. 
But by the time it has passed through industrial West Yorkshire it is little more than an open sewer. The river is dead. The cause of its death is the sewage effluent dumped into the river from sewage treatment works along its length by Yorkshire Water. At times of low rainfall as it flows through Leeds the river comprises just 30 per cent own water and 70 per cent sewage effluent. And on hot days it stinks.
The sewage effluent destroys the river's oxygen content. Without oxygen river life cannot survive. 
The first dose of poison flows into the Aire from Marley sewage treatment plant at Keighley. The plant deals with the waste of the wool scouring industry, which produces some of the filthiest by-products of any industry in the region.
Despite the Keighley pollution the river recovers as it passes down the Aire valley, re-oxygenating itself as it passes over weirs and shallow shoals.
Then it reaches Esholt, which processes the industrial and domestic waste of the textile city of Bradford. Esholt is one of the biggest sewage treatment plants in Europe. Millions of gallons of effluent are dumped into the river daily.
Below Esholt's outfalls no wildlife can survive. But the resilient Aire recovers again, at least partially, from this massive dose of pollution. It flows over more weirs, such as that at Kirkstall Abbey.
But then it hits Leeds. Knostrop sewage works handles the domestic and industrial waste of Yorkshire's biggest industrial city. Among its industries are chemicals and textile. Industrial waste is added to the human waste of a city of 650,000 people, every day, day in, day out.
The river is now dead, and continues its journey lifeless towards the North Sea. 
We visited the river in Leeds city centre with a technician from Leeds University. He donned sturdy rubber gloves before throwing a bucket attached to a rope into the river to take a sample. He didn't want a single drop of Aire water to touch his skin. And swimming in the river? "Don't even think about it," he said. As if to emphasise the point, as we spoke a number of dead fish floated past.
Downstream from Knostrop only one strange form of wildlife can survive. The ring-tailed maggot breathes through its anus, which it sticks through the surface of the water to take in oxygen, because there is none in the river.
Remarkably it is not the quantity of the effluent pumped into the river which does the damage. It is the quality. 
Campaigners say the treatment given by Yorkshire Water to the sewage it dumps in the river is insufficient. Basically it involves two levels of filtration to remove or break down solids.
What the campaigners want is a third form of treatment at the bigger sewage works, a system known as tertiary treatment. This involves filtering the effluent through layers of different pebbles and sand. They say this process would remove most of the damaging materials, the ones which kill the river.
Brian, I assume Yorkshire Water's abuse of the river continued at that time as it passed further south through your neck of the woods. The polluted contents of the Calder would also be added. I did have figures on the number of cubic metres of effluent going to the Aire from the different sewage works. If I find the original article I'll give you them.
We continued the campaign on the YEP for four years, after which the Environment Agency, with Government support, ordered Yorkshire Water to spend over half pf the cash it had earmarked for environmental work for the region for one year solely on the river Aire. It amounted to tens of millions of pounds.
Yorkshire Water installed a tertiary treatment plant at Esholt. I think at the same time the Marley effluent was improving because of a reduction in the wool scouring industry. Improvements were also already under way at Knostrop. From Leeds' point of view the Esholt work was most important. Yorkshire Water had to go to the US to find the right treatment system - one developed to deal with the waste from the steel industry. When completed it worked a treat. In fact the quality of the effluent produced was sometimes better than the Aire's own water. The plant manager had an aquarium through which samples of the cleaned effluent flowed. He kept goldfish in it.
The effect was not just a rapid improvement in the river's health and a return of wildlife. Leeds city centre had a vast and mainly derelict waterfront - warehouses and office buildings dating from pre-railway times when the river and its linked canals were the main form of industrial transportation for the city.
They were crumbling and badly in need of investment and change of purpopse. But who would invest with a stinking open sewer flowing past the window? Well the improvement in the river coincided (if it was a coincidence) with a heap of investment. The riverside buildings have since been restored into offices and houses. New flats have been built on derelict land. There are riverside pubs, restaurants and markets in the city centre. There is even an annual river festival. Ironically the Yorkshire Post building is likely to disappear in a couple of years time, and its riverside site sold off for development of some sort.
Eye on the Aire involved leisure groups such as canoeists and anglers, conservation and wildlife organisations, local community groups, riverside employers, Leeds City Council and individuals. Tetley's brewery was among them.
After winning the battle of the Aire the group turned its attention to tributaries and storm overflows which continued to cause occasional problems. The group wound itself up two or three years ago, its job done.
There are now herons and otters in the river Aire, even in the city centre. Coarse fish are of course abundant. Salmon are trying to get back up too, but work is needed to create fish passes on a number of weirs which they cannot negotiate. Once that is done - and there is a campaign going on - salmon could once again reach their former breeding grounds below Malham Cove.
The river is now at its most healthy state since the Industrial Revolution.