This week sees yet another instalment in the UK water company saga. In 2023, untreated sewage was discharged for 3.6 million hours into our lakes, rivers and seas.
Only 15% of English rivers are in good ecological health. Who’s going to pay to have them run clear? To teem again with living creatures? Thames, Anglian, United, etc.? Their customers? Their shareholders? (Spoiler alert: As a veteran of a regulated industry, I’m sorry to say, it’s us, the bill-paying customers. Profiteers took advantage of a cheap sale and hands-off regulation to make super-returns. But they’re long gone, together with the cash. Poor policy and regulation time and again leaves customers to pick up the pieces.) And, moreover, what does the gospel of Jesus Christ have to say?
Clean water is home to some of the greatest beauty on earth. Whether the bright chalk streams and sticklebacks of my south London youth. Or luminous coral reefs of the tropics and their orchestra of living creatures. From leaping salmon to wading dipper, from short-snouted seahorse to ocean-going humpback whale, it teems with life. And is essential to human health and prosperity. So much so that it’s always in the news, though seldom for reasons to celebrate: intensifying storms, flooding, plastic on our beaches, melting icecaps, rising sea levels (and, if we’re attentive, drying streams, algal blooms, acidifying oceans, scoured seabeds, and marine heatwaves). Such beauty. Such brokenness. Broken indeed by God’s moral agents, the very ones mandated to guard and keep it. Truly, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
