‘Owned by everyone’: in the words he gave an endangered salmon smolt in a fund-raising poem written in 1985, Poet Laureate Ted Hughes had no doubts about our collective responsibility for the life of our rivers. A year after the second of the Cambridge conferences those words inspired, here’s a request as eloquent as it is urgent. Poets of all ages, our chalk streams need you!

Please share this beautiful image, the song it sings, the invitation it contains, with anyone you know who loves a chalk stream, along with the details of the competition to find two Chalk Stream Laureates, which you can find at http://chalkstreampoet.net/ — the site contains information for teachers as well as individuals. The deadline for poems is Friday 31 May; medals will be presented and winners (one under 18, one over 18) announced on 18 June at the Houses of Parliament, in the week that Sarah Green, MP for Chesham and Amersham, brings her own Private Member’s Chalk Streams (Protection) Bill to the House of Commons. The initiative is the brainchild of poet and teacher Juliet Nolan, who posts on X as @MPforNature; Juliet will be joined by judges Robert Macfarlane, Linda Newbery and Mark Wormald.

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Poets and teachers will surely find further inspiration, as well as a brilliant overview of the crisis our chalk streams face in Adam Nicolson’s powerful new article in National Geographic Magazine, sumptuously illustrated with photographs by Charlie Hamilton James. It’s a compelling overview of the hydrology, natural history and recent human abuse of these astonishing and fragile ecosystems. The horrifying impact of continuing over-abstraction and pollution, permitted for too long by ‘a political system that puts cheap tap water before river health’, as Adam puts it, is set besides reasons to be cheerful: with the care, dedication, and understanding of a growing number of community groups, and the expertise of individuals such as Simon Cain and Charles Rangeley-Wilson, river restoration projects can bring new life in abundance to the chalk streams.

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A brilliant case study in the beauty and vulnerability of chalk streams, in all the complexity of their natural and human history, Tony Eva’s film ‘Pure Clean Water: the Chalk streams crisis in Greater Cambridge’, trailed last year during our conference, has now been released to deserved acclaim. It’s been screened in and around Cambridge in recent months, but the story it tells with quiet passion and precision deserves to provoke discussion and action wherever the competing needs and priorities of housing developers, water companies, town planners, conservationists and the life of a river come together. You can watch a trailer here:

Visit https://purecleanwater.film for details of screenings, local river groups, and to contact Tony.

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And why not also head for the imminent UK River Summit and Festival? After a successful This takes place at Morden Hall on the River Wandle on 21st May. Claire Zambuni, its founder, has assembled an impressive array of speakers, from CEOs of Water Companies to their scourge, Feargal Sharkey, with leading voices from the Wild Trout Trust, Activist Anglers, Surfers against Sewage, Fish Legal and more. Under the banner ‘Communication and Collaboration: the key to environmental solutions’, the River Summit and Festival has set itself an ambitious agenda. Click here for details of the programme for the day and tickets.

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Anyone who has heard Adam Nicolson describe his encounter with the marvellous, mysterious chalk stream salmon deep in the tidal river Test — a genetically distinct taxon, they have a claim to be Britain’s oldest animal — or who has been lucky enough to watch or even catch and release an Atlantic salmon, will have despaired at the confirmation provided by the IUCN at the tail end of last year that the main UK population of this extraordinary species is now officially endangered. The IUCN reassessment of the Atlantic salmon was funded thanks to our friends and partners at WildFish: you can read their press release here.

WildFish’s continuing campaigns to end open net salmon aquaculture and to take salmon off the table, as well as holding our politicians and regulators to account, continue to demonstrate the kind of determined, imaginative and resourceful activism to which despair needs to yield. We thank them for all they do.