In his talk for Friends of the Cam, Professor Steve Ormerod considered some of the pressures on rivers, from climate change, legacy pollutants to microplastics, and some of the consequences for river organisms. The talk also considered some of the benefits of actions that can be taken to reduce impacts, for example through regulation or sensitive catchment management.
14 the August 2021
The Environment Agency is asked to clarify their position on the viability of supplying further growth from the Cam chalk aquifer following latest response from Stephen Kelly, writes Monica Bijok Hone
August 1st 2021
As the anniversary of 'that letter' from the Environment Agency approaches, we still have no answers to questions about how growth in Cambridge and South Cambs can be sustainably supplied with water, writes Monica Bijok Hone
The age of extinction
'Laws of nature: could UK rivers be given the same rights as people?
As more and more countries grant natural features or ecosystems legal personhood, the UK’s fight to pass nature rights laws is quietly gaining pace.' Guardian Saturday 17th July 2021
Environmentalists George Monbiot and Fanny Armstrong expose the slow death our rivers by pollution.
Kay Goodridge has made a beautiful and moving film of the declaration of the rights of the River Cam and our celebrations of it.
Antony Carpen, community historian has dug up a poem about the Cam from the late 18th Century. Antony says: "A very old poem published in one of Cambridge’s earliest newspapers, the Cambridge Intelligencer was a short-lived radical newspaper active at the very end of the 18th Century. I spotted this poem about the River Cam in it, which will be of interest to today’s generation of residents and campaigners who very recently gathered to declare the Rights of the River Cam in June 2021."
Hannah Charlotte Copley is a local doctor, climate activist, poet and Green Party City Councillor, who recognises the climate and ecological emergencies as the greatest impending threat to human health the world faces today. She wrote this spoken word poem for the Friends of the Cam Declaration of the Rights of the River Cam to express her feelings about inaction in the face of climate breakdown.
A collection of photographs, courtesy of Jane Williams, commemorating our Declaration of the Rights of the River Cam, the first river in the UK to have its rights declared.
