But the seals are all right...
Maybe the glass is falling hour by hour, etc, but there is some evidence that just because the waste remains and kills, it does not, actually, Professor Empson, need to keep on doing so, and in modestly cheering news of the day:
River Thames home to 138 seal pups, finds annual count. English river’s ecosystem is thriving, 62 years after being declared biologically dead. The Thames is home to both grey seals and harbour seals, although only the latter breed there. The seals can feed on more than 120 species of fish in the river, including two species of shark, short-snouted seahorses and the European eel, which is critically endangered. Marine mammals spotted in the Thames include porpoises, dolphins and “Benny” the beluga whale. The river’s seal population has risen steadily since ZSL began its annual count in 2013. The most recent results, from 2017, recorded 1,104 harbour seals and 2,406 grey seals across the estuary.
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While the harbour seals breed in the outer estuary, a swath of low-lying coastline between Felixstowe to the north and Goodwin Sands, off Kent, to the south, they forage right through London to Richmond, and can move beyond weirs in pursuit of food.
Cucknell added: “The Thames is home to more than 20 fish species that use the Thames as a nursery habitat. Marine species such as sea bass and flounder use it right in the city - past the Houses of Parliament and up to Putney, before they head out to sea. Having a robust and healthy food web plays a huge part in supporting top predators such as seals.”
And it has come back within living memory: Sixty years ago, however, the Thames was toxic. “The tidal reaches of the Thames constitute a badly managed open sewer,” the Guardian reported in 1959. “No oxygen is to be found in it for several miles above and below London Bridge.”
In 1957 the Natural History Museum declared the Thames to be biologically dead. The Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette’s brilliant sewer system, which saved London from the “great stink” of 1858, had been damaged during the second world war. Parts had fallen into disrepair. Heavy industry used the Thames as its free waste disposal service.
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Repairs to the sewers and tighter regulations, including to reduce fertilisers and pesticides from farmland draining into rivers, gradually cleaned up the Thames, as did broader economic changes. The decline of Thames-side industry removed pollution; toxic metals have reduced since 2000, helped by the switch to digital photography, which has reduced the photographic industry’s silver pollution.
A time-traveller from the 1950s visiting the hides at the London Wetland Centre (created from disused reservoirs in Barnes) would scarcely believe the great white egrets, kingfishers, hobbies and dragonflies that are testimony to a new, enriched urban ecosystem.
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