He hasn't been charged with anything, and the issue isn't picking up trach, but dredging the river with heavy equipment and removing silt.
That can have severe unintended consequences. You're changing the speed and flow of a waterway. That's a big deal.
I don't see anything about heavy equipment. According to the article, it's a creek rather than a full river, but it does claim that the scale of the cleanup could cause a flood risk.
Either way, the real crime is that the authorities never cleaned it up. Authorities failing to do their job will eventually invite people to take matters into their own hand.
They brought in an excavator.
I know nobody ever reads the article but it still makes me despair every time.
For that transgression, the environmental regulator sent Powlesland a notice informing him that he’s been placed under investigation for “permitting and waste offences.”
He was given a notice. Not only has he NOT been sentenced to 2 years, he hasn't even been charged. He's been told he broke a law, for which the maximum penalty that a judge is permitted to give is listed as 2 years.
To further clarify: the transgression, according to the Guardian, wasn't just removing waste, but the fact that "Powesland [...] organised a team of volunteers to tackle the removal of litter, weed and silt from a section of the River Roding", and they collectively "removed 200 bags of rubbish, branches and silt", which goes beyond just picking up trash.
The EA [Environmental Agency] alleges dredging has been carried out and waste has been left on site within the flood plain, constituting a flood risk activity under the regulations that would have required an environmental permit.
Dredging is the act of removing material from the water environment, here presumably from the riverbed, which is a tad more involved than just picking up pieces of trash and might have ecological knock-on effects. I find it perfectly justified that the Environmental Agency would want to be involved in the decision to take such steps.
The only real scandal is this guy having petitioned the Agency about the trash problem for years without success. That they'd now get pissed when someone takes the matter into his own hands is understandable, but might just be the only way to get them to care about the issue.
I just watched a YouTube video showing them working. I was fine with it when they were just a group picking up litter. Then they brought in a backhoe and started digging.
Yeah, that's where you go from helpful volunteers to reckless vigilantes. Shame that they couldn't leave it at cleaning up.
Also, shame that these articles bury the lede of "dug up the riverbed" for the sake of outrage.
And of course, shame that it came to this at all.
Removing silt can be pretty bad in some cases, heavy metals sink to the bottom and will not cause problems if left undisturbed, if you start removing silt you will make those pollutants bioavailable again.
I wasn't aware of that. I suspect the guy in question didn't either. That's why experts should make those decisions who do know that stuff.
Even removing the branches and larger tree limbs can cause issues with removing habitat for aquatic critters and changes the currents and flow of the river.
Cleaning the trash by hand and hauling it away is one thing. They went beyond that.
Careful now, you are going to harsh the righteous indignation with your facts and context.
I mean, the agency doing nothing for so long does deserve some righteous indignation. Keep your pitchforks and torches, just make sure you torch for the right reasons.
The headlines should reflect that better though.
He doesn't appear to have actually been charged of anything, despite the questionable headline wording. That said, the fact that he even could be charged indicates that the law is poorly written.
Surely, any sane and reasonable person would not regard the removal of human-generated garbage from a body of water as dredging it, no matter how much of it they removed. The law's vague/poor wording, similar to the lackadaisical wording of many laws, allows bad-faith actors and nit-picking trolls to "gotcha" people like this for very pedantic technical breaches of the law's letter, despite them acting very much in the law's spirit.
If doing an objective public good is illegal, it is the law that's bad, not the lawbreaker.
He hasn’t been charged with anything, and the issue isn’t picking up trash, but dredging the river with heavy equipment and removing silt. ~ they brought in a backhoe and started digging.
I didn't see any video of it up until now, but I believe you're right that this step should not have been done without an ecological survey. Another poster noted potential concerns about altering the floodplain and damaging the microbial biome with such actions, which seems a legitimate one.
That said, we're discussing a symptom rather than its cause. I believe we should be asking ourselves why we allow our commons to go to shit to the point where unskilled vigilantism is taking the place of absent public works. these guys got so tired of their government allowing their beautiful natural environment to collect garbage that they felt the need to set up this project.
It is much harder to fault them for overstepping or failure to consider these environmental details when the people who are supposed to be doing it are asleep at the switch. At its core, this is government's job and they're neglecting it. It could be argued that anything bad that happens from this is directly caused by that inaction, even though those doing it share that blame to a degree. Anything the volunteers did wrong was done out of ignorance, whereas the government's role is one of negligence, a worse and intentional offense. The solution is to replace the elected officials until you get ones that do their job.
Tl;dr: It seems the group was well intentioned but this actually could have been pretty environmentally detrimental.
According to this article, it appears the issue is the team used a digger in some capacity. Details on how are sparse.
I'm a microbiologist (environmental micro), but I studied a few things in grad school. A big chunk was hydrology and riverine engineering, more specifically erosion control and environmental remediation. I promptly went on to work in a different field, because who does what they actually study in university?
I'll spare you the details (unless you want them, I will go HAM on erosion control autistic data dumping because I rarely get to talk about this) but it's pretty easy to fuck up a river if you start digging it up. Given they mentioned flooding concerns, I checked to see if the area is in a flood plain and confirmed it is.
Humans engineer rivers in floodplains to prevent the previously cyclical flooding as well as reduce erosion. If those controls are damaged, the flooding and erosion can resume, and downstream effects (...pun?) can be pretty serious for humans and the environment.
I'd need more information to confirm exactly what happened, but there may be some merit to the complaints about their project. If they didn't have even a cursory environmental impact assessment, they could have done a lot of damage while trying to do something good.
That is good context, and I've seen first hand well-intentioned work have unintended consequences like you describe.
I guess I had assumed that they were just hauling out debris with the diggers, but if they were changing the topology of the riverbed and surrounding floodplain, I could see that causing flooding or other problems.
You mentioned microbial composition; do you think that judicious use of digging equipment like I had assumed would be damaging to the microbiome, or only if they were indeed dredging?
It really depends on a lot of factors, including water quality, substrate composition, and the extent of the digging. The majority of microbial activity in most waterways isn't in the water, but instead in a region called the hyporheic zone, a surprisingly thin layer of sediment at the interface between surface and ground water.
Digging and dredging both are fantastic ways to disrupt this layer. Microbial communities will redevelop rapidly, but their composition will be different. The makeup of the stream/riverbed will have significantly changed; different types of microbes reproduce at different rates, with fast reproducers initially crowding out slower growers; and the products of the activity of some microbes provide the conditions under which other types of microbes can flourish. The composition will change over time and may take months or even years to return to a steady state, and even then that state may be quite different than before digging or dredging.
You can’t hand out food to the homeless without getting arrested, nor can you leave water for people in the desert without facing decades in prison.
As heinous as those laws are, they're from a totally different country
they're the same flavor of bullshit which is why they draw the similarity i think. to point out that the UK saw the US doing this bullshit and said "hey, why not us too?"
Make it make sense 😢🤮
People without training and coordination with a larger system can cause problems, especially if he encourages other untrained people to do it.
It sucks but there’s billions of us so it’s gonna suck. At least that’s what my local councilman (and dad) said when I complained I needed to ask permission to change my deck.
Two years in prison is stupid though. Make him work with the groups who have approved plans.
And I hate that this is the answer I’m giving but honestly it’s the only thing keeping me from renting a bulldozer and making my neighborhood walkable.
I feel like this is only justifiable if the officials aren’t given time to act. It would be one thing if he fired off an email and ran out and did this the next day, but according to the article he spent years contacting officials before doing it himself. If they want to live by perfect world rules where stuff like this is overseen and coordinated with experts then they need to do it in a timely manner. It’s unreasonable to expect people to live in an area full of garbage for years and just do nothing about it.
I like this argument because there’s a right to petition the government, and to a timely trial.
He wasn't just picking up litter. He rented a backhoe and actually started digging in the river bed.
Working over ten days, they hired an excavator costing roughly £1,000 and cleared a heavily polluted 250 metre stretch of Alders Brook, a tributary of the River Roding in Barking, East London.
The main issue is that he used heavy machinery for cleanup. If it was by hand it probably wouldn't have resulted in any legal matter
Is 2 years ridiculous? Probably. But using an excavator for cleaning is definitely not a smart move for someone who's a lawyer
For reference an excavator is one of the construction machine with the hydraulic hand that is used to dig or grab stuff
The main issue is that he used heavy machinery for cleanup. If it was by hand it probably wouldn't have resulted in any legal matter
Yeah, he went way beyond simply removing trash:
The team removed more than 200 bags of rubbish along with branches, thick layers of silt, weeds, discarded household appliances, used needles and even abandoned weapons. Their goal was to restore the natural flow of the water and remove years of accumulated waste.
He basically dug up the entire riverbed. That isn’t something people should just be doing ad-hoc.
He basically dug up the entire riverbed. That isn’t something people should just be doing ad-hoc.
Fully agree, but there seems to be no better alternative.
Powlesland told the Guardian he’s asked the agency numerous times to clean the river, but it’s been ignoring him for years.
I think the some countries may be under the control of the Smoggies.
hey UK, statesian here. We're supposed to learn our bullshit from you, not you from us. Please keep it that way.
Wow, this is a weird one. I thought for sure this was going to be someone being charged with mudlarking without a license (still outrageous but justifiable if they were also scooping up historical artifacts), but apparently it’s for creating a flood risk?? Brother, your flood protection shouldn’t be a mass of garbage. Someone make this charge make sense.
I'm gonna lean on another commenter who made me realise the legitimate reasoning behind something like this (disregarding the fact that two years is absurdly high): If we permit anyone to do whatever "cleaning" they themselves deem reasonable without approval, we risk that unknowledgable people with good intentions cause serious damage. One reason could be that they create an acute flood risk (you're right: garbage shouldn't be flood protection, but the actual flood protection is built around existing circumstances, and if removing the garbage causes a major risk to people losing their homes, the correct approach is to first prepare the flood protection, then remove the garbage). Another is that people can unknowingly or unintentionally destroy habitats or otherwise damage the environment.
The point is: We have some very competent people that are capable of assessing the impact of various cleaning operations. We need to let those people do their job. There can be very complex interactions in play, that turn your good intentions into catastrophic consequences. Therefore, we cannot allow laymen to judge how large cleaning operations should be conducted.
Full disclaimer: While I think the above reasoning is sound, I think we should be very careful regarding how unauthorised cleaning operations are punished. For example, it seems absurd to me to give jail time for it. When the person in question is obviously acting with good intentions, it's much more reasonable to sentence them to take some course where they can learn about why what they were doing was potentially harmful, and perhaps sentence them to community service working on some authorised project. That way, you help them learn, let them work on something they want to contribute to, and get more resources for the authorised projects.
If people were doing this for clout/ad revenue or on a whim without trying to engage with the proper channels first I would agree, but it just isn’t reasonable to tell people to accept living in an environment full of garbage while their local government does nothing about it for literal years. If you walked along a river in your neighborhood with your pets and/or children how long would you accept seeing it choked with trash and sewage? Would you be okay with teaching them, through inaction, that this is fine? I’m not asking for you to answer, I just think all those things deserve as much consideration as ‘could this cause a flood if XYZ happens?’ Because of this has already caused a flood we clearly would have heard about it.
To me, this was a good faith effort made in the absence of any other resources. If this was load bearing garbage (!) then that needs to be communicated in their refusals/delays, along with a specific timeline for addressing it. That’s also assuming they have detected a real risk of significant flooding, which I’m skeptical of.
I absolutely agree with your point here. I think part of the problem is probably the system/law. When you go for literal years without any action from the local government, there need to be laws/channels that you can use to escalate the issue.
Basically, a clean and safe environment should be mandated by law. If the local government doesn't uphold that law, the issue should be raised to higher levels (and the individuals responsible for the local government breaking the law should be punished accordingly). If higher levels don't resolve it, your division of power is broken, since the government is blatantly violating rulings from the judiciary. If the division of power is broken.... revolt?
Powlesland and his team pulled 200 bags of garbage and organic debris out of a creek
Emphasis mine. I feel like that’s at the crux of the whole issue and the article doesn’t attempt to dig in.
What did they remove? I find it hard to believe that even the pettiest of bureaucrats would take issue with someone picking up actual trash.
Strange that the article didnt mention that Paul Powlesland the man accused is an environmental lawyer.
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