Ignore The Bullies, It's Time To Make Waves And Take Collective Action - Our Founder Laura Reineke in The Henley Standard

Her brilliant article is pasted below:https://www.henleystandard.co.uk/news/environment/194126/ignore-the-bullies-its-time-to-make-waves-and-take-collective-action.html

Monday, 31 March 2025

A SLIGHTLY different track this month for my river stories. Although it is still all about our very poorly, turbid, chemical-filled River Thames that runs through our town.

I have founded Friends of the Thames, a new not-for-profit body aimed at joining communities along the Thames into a network from source to sea, to include citizen scientists, sports clubs, swimmers, campaigners or simply people who love the Thames. A community for communities, a truly collaborative group. Gathering river guardians and joining together to strengthen campaigns and hold centralised data that is available for everyone to see.

In order to get a full picture of the Thames, including where the threats to her health are worst, we need to use robust data to challenge Thames Water, the regulators and government. Campaigning can feel lonely. Putting your head above the parapet often means you attract trolls and bullies (which I have had a fair amount of).

Battling against what you believe is wrong and educating people with the facts about the often illegal actions of the water companies leads to personal attacks from armchair bullies sitting behind their computers.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what these haters and deniers think, soon we will run out of water. The UK is in the top five countries most likely to run out of water first. With no water security and our freshwater biodiversity plummeting, it won’t be long until we see a totally dead river, unless we step in and make big changes now. To join forces will mean that there is not only safety in numbers but an amplified voice for our river.

It has become clear that, realistically, none of us individually can make the difference needed to restore the wellbeing of our river and her inhabitants but together we can ensure we achieve our shared wish to see her restored to health and cared for by a huge swathe of guardians of the Thames and her tributaries. We are finding that existing groups are forming networks to bolster numbers, share media requests (of which there are many) and support each other. The Henley Mermaids are part of a grassroots group of the five original clean water campaigners, the Sewage Campaign Network, which include Save Windemere, SOS Whitstable, Ilkley Clean River and Windrush Against Sewage Pollution.

All are self-funded, community driven campaigning groups, sharing information, data, ideas and events.

Friends of the Thames will have experts on hand in spearheading a legal campaign, with citizen science, education, events, comms and campaigning, enabling self-funded groups to have a louder voice, so we can be stronger together. Part of our mission will be to recruit new, diverse groups so that all communities from every walk of life feel that the Thames is part of their life. Henley is a prime example of how everything we do in and on the river is seen as a white, middle-class “thing” to do. Henley is put over to boats almost entirely, an activity that only the well-off can afford.

We need to foster a whole new thought process about how we deal with our blue spaces, laying a deep-seated love for her, so that future generations can learn to care and revere her, rather than manipulate and use her for our own gain.

The eventual aim of the group is to explore getting the river a personhood in law, meaning that she’d have the same rights as humans. This has been achieved elsewhere in the world and, in recent years, many rivers from the Magpie River, Quebec, New Zealand’s Whanganui to the United States’ Klamath River have been given personhood.

In 2018, Colombia’s Supreme Court granted the Amazon, the world’s largest river, legal rights. You can see from the list of countries already ahead of the game, that all these locations have indigenous populations that have an entirely different connection to their waterways and nature as a whole.

Although, this has no teeth legally in the UK, it is an important tool to raise awareness, and change people’s thinking towards a more spiritual approach, reconceptualising our relationship to the river, reconnecting the disconnected. Implementing such transformative legal reforms would require rethinking long-standing, deep seated principles we are used to in our economically-led, Western lives.

We need to start this radical change in thinking by helping people reconnect with nature, which in itself will make a significant difference.

Part of this process will include a document “rights of the River Thames”, a document not recognised in law as such, but one that all town councils up and downstream can adopt, and work to.

We know that Henley Town Council is supportive of the campaign to clean up our river having unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in Thames Water, which has now been adopted by Wallingford Town Council and Witney, as well as South Oxfordshire District Council. It is also funding fluidion E. coli monitors to test in Henley throughout the year, over and above what the Environment Agency currently offers. Henley residents should be proud that we are driving force for change.

Still in it’s early stages, Friends of the Thames has already attracted an amazing ambassador in Steve Backshall, British naturalist, explorer, presenter and writer, who is best-known for the Deadly 60 TV programmes for the BBC.

Along with an impressive advisory board, which includes Steve O’Connor, the director of the River & Rowing Museum, Rachel Dulai, of British Rowing, Dr Sasha Woods, director of science and policy at Earthwatch Europe, James Wallace, chief executive of River Action UK (which has seed-funded our group) and Paul Powlesland, of Lawyers for Nature.

How we look after our river belongs to all of us, we have a duty to her, a moral and legal obligation to take action on her behalf and the wildlife that call her home.

If you’d like to support the Friends of the Thames, get involved, donate at www.friendsofthethames.org/donate or to know more, please email me at friendsofthethames@gmail.com or visit www.friendsofthethames.org