River Roding Trust
It is early spring and the years’ warmest day. I had signed up for a cleanup event organised by the River Roding Trust and the Right To Roam campaign. I had no idea what to expect and while following Google Maps through Barking housing estates I wondered what lay ahead.
And then there it was, the River Roding, the third largest river in London. It was a river I had never heard of until very recently.
That changed when Paul Powlesland became the barrister for the Haringey Tree Protectors in their fight with Haringey Council to try and stop the felling of the Oakfield Road plane tree in North London. Paul founded both the River Roding Trust and Lawyers for Nature. He is a lawyer who not only fights for nature through the courts but also takes action. As in; direct action. He helped occupy the Happy Man Tree in Hackney and trees in Wellingborough that were threatened with felling, which for the moment, now remain.
Paul lives with the river. His boat is moored on the Roding, so he wakes and sleeps with the rising tide. He has battled to keep public footpaths along the river open, and organises volunteer days to help clear rubbish from its’ banks.
As I descend a few steps alongside a reed bed taller than me, the clear blue March sky stretches high above. A massive apple tree in full blossom towers over me. Along the wooden walkway over the river is a circle of sofas, where some of the other members of todays’ volunteer crew drink tea ahead of the days’ coming labour.
Nadia and Jon from Right to Roam have organised the day with Paul. There is discussion about the book ‘Wild Service’, a collaborative work whose publication is imminent, and of whom some of today’s participants have contributed. It seems that the guiding principle in the book is that restoring nature and our own well being are inextricably bound. We do not need permission to take action to restore the harm that humans have done, we can help serve nature here and now.
I am very comfortable in the sofa and I would happily spend the day here on the hand built deck above the river, watching herons and coots going about their daily business. However there is work to be done, and the first task of the day is rubbish collection. It is already warm, and we walk along the river and climb down onto its’ muddy banks. I have not experienced mud quite like this since I was a child exploring abandoned farms in Cornwall. Thick and gluey, it absorbs my boots which are enveloped by its’ cool embrace.
We fill industrial builders sacks with strewn rubbish; plastic and glass which are eventually hauled up to the path to be sorted into their respective types. We have uncovered a taxonomy of waste, ready to be sorted and returned. Each object is a single momentary decision to cast aside, yet the accumulation of it all is a mountainous hoard of single use plastic and abandoned glass.
In the small area that we try to clear, six or seven shopping trolleys lay buried in the thick mud. For the people who dumped them there, it must have taken quite an effort to haul each one over the fence between the path and the river. After profound efforts of digging and heaving, two are finally released from the rivers’ silty grip. Below the bridge lies a mattress which nature is already reclaiming. Attempting to lift it, the cloth shears and crumbles as its’ daily tidal immersion has began the process of decay and decomposition.
After lunch we return to the river bank with cuttings of willow that Paul has taken. The tide is turning and there is little time to plant these in the fertile bank. We must work quickly to plant each one along as the water is rapidly advancing. Once they are in, nature will take over and some of them will hopefully take hold and become new trees.
On the way back to the deck where we gather for a well deserved rest, Paul tells me that the apple tree I passed in the morning probably grew from an apple core discarded from the path. Now it is a fully mature tree that is covered in fruit each autumn.
Every part of me is covered in mud. I am exhausted. I know that on the train home people will look at me strangely, as I look like I have emerged from a swamp. However, I shall wear the river proudly, feeling that I have made a tiny contribution to the restoration from the harm that our human lives cause daily to nature.
I am grateful to Paul for the work that he does every day. I am greatly looking forward to reading Wild Service and am grateful for the thinking that has gone into this book. I am grateful to the Roding, that endlessly returns water from the sky to the sea.
Wild Service is now available from your local independent bookstore.
River Roding Trust in the Guardian
Jo Syz is an independent filmmaker and photographer.
Cover photo: Right To Roam