By Emma Thomas, Terra Glowach, Kalpa Ghelani and Dr Verity Jones
Over the coming months, we will host public workshops, school sessions, family river walks, creative encounters, and online opportunities to contribute to our river work – join us!
What have you learned from rivers?
As Channel 4’s Dirty Business casts national attention on the shocking scale of water pollution in the UK, many are asking how we arrived at a point where our rivers are now frequently unsafe to enter, fish from, or even walk beside. The documentary drama makes visible what community activists, swimmers, anglers, and ecologists have long understood: our waterways are in crisis, and the crisis is human‑made.
However, while the national conversation focuses on what we have done to rivers, we – Emma Thomas, Terra Glowach, Kalpa Ghelani and Verity Jones at UWE Bristol – are asking a different kind of question:
“What if rivers are not passive victims of mismanagement but teachers, collaborators, and agents of a shared environmental future?”
This blog launches our forthcoming public engagement work to co‑create a plurifesto- a plural manifesto – for river‑aligned action across schools, families, and communities.
Rivers are speaking – but what are they telling us?
Rivers appear to be signalling distress. Across the UK, the health of rivers has been jeopardised by intersecting pressures: sewage pollution, agricultural runoff, climate‑change‑driven storms, and increasing flood risk. Recent data paints a consistently stark picture:
- Raw sewage was discharged into England’s rivers and coastal waters for 3.62 million hours last year, according to Environment Agency data. [theguardian.com]
- 4.7 million hours of sewage were dumped into UK waters in 2024. [sas.org.uk]
- In some protected areas, pollution has been extreme. Wessex Water discharged raw sewage for 36 consecutive days at Chesil Beach, a site with multiple environmental designations. [theguardian.com]
Projects to improve the ecological health of rivers are underway. For example, in our city, the Bristol Frome Restored Project focuses on improving the ecological health of the river through farm interventions, in‑stream habitat works, and efforts to remove barriers to fish migration. The Frome Gateway Regeneration initiative treats the River Frome as a key environmental and spatial asset within a wider urban transformation aimed at providing new homes, workspaces, and improved public and green spaces shaped through community consultation.
These projects aim for compliance with frameworks, strategic coherence and alignment with planning and policy outcomes. Having watched Dirty Business, it is clear we need more than box ticking against success criteria. We need to value plural knowledge, coexisting truths and embrace ambiguity, sensory experiences and relational ethics. We need to harness opportunities for rivers to teach all of our communities about resilience and regeneration.
A different kind of response: Learning with rivers, not just about them
While monitoring data, modelling, and policy reviewns give us vital information about rivers and contribute to neighbourhood renewal – whether related to contamination, flooding or drought – they cannot answer some important questions on their own:
- How do we live with rivers in ways that honour their agency?
- How do we teach the next generation a river‑attuned ethics?
- How do we understand what rivers themselves “say” through flow, shape, silt, flood, drought, smell, and sound?
Our project begins by placing agency with the river- not as metaphor, but as a methodological and ethical commitment.
Inspired by new materialist, ecological, and pluriversal frameworks, we recognise rivers as more than resources, landscapes, or leisure sites. They are alive with histories, stories, sediments, currents, and relationships – and these can help us re‑imagine more just environmental futures.
Introducing our plurifesto for river‑led action
Over the next year, out team will work with:
- Families
- Primary and secondary schools
- Youth groups
- Community networks
- Anyone who has ever walked beside, paddled in, or worried about a river
Together, through creative, embodied, and relational methods, we’ll collect responses to a shared provocation:
What have you learned from rivers?
From these stories, drawings, encounters, sounds, and reflections, we will co‑create a plurifesto – a collective document that does not aim for consensus, but for multiplicity. A plurifesto that:
- holds children’s river truths alongside adults’
- honours scientific knowledge alongside sensory, cultural, and ancestral knowledges
- includes what rivers tell us through flood, pollution, rest, and resurgence
- supports actions at policy levels, school levels, and family practices
This plurifesto will be a guiding compass – not a static manifesto but a living, evolving expression of our shared commitments with rivers.
Why act now?
The release of Dirty Business has intensified national outrage about sewage and corporate misconduct. But outrage alone will not reshape relationships with rivers.
We want to help transform this moment of anger into a moment of attunement, collaboration, and community‑based river justice.
Rivers are not only victims of industrial malpractice. They are teachers in the climate crisis, showing us:
- how environments respond to pressure
- how ecosystems hold memory
- how water connects communities, species, and generations
- how resilience emerges from movement, not stasis
If we are willing to listen, rivers may guide us toward new forms of ecological responsibility.
Join us
Over the coming months, we will host public workshops, school sessions, family river walks, creative encounters, and online opportunities to contribute to our river work.
If you’d like to take part – or if your school, community group, or organisation would like to host a river‑listening session – please get in touch.
Let’s build a plurifesto that honours what rivers already know, and what they are asking of us now.
When rivers speak – through contamination, through flood, through flow – we must listen. Because the future we’re trying to secure is one in which rivers can thrive – and in thriving, teach us to thrive too.
