Chalk streams are among the world’s most remarkable ecosystems. They’re rare as rhinos, but much more English: 85% of the world’s supply are distributed between Dorset and East Yorkshire. Their mineral rich water is famously clear, and supports remarkable flora and fauna, including England’s oldest animal. But they are in trouble, thanks to decades of mismanagement, over-abstraction and pollution.

In March 2023, a conference in Cambridge, inspired by poet and environmentalist Ted Hughes, explored the culture and crisis of these beautiful rivers, and resolved to build the most inclusive possible coalition of care in their defence and protection.

We recorded its eight sessions, each ninety minutes in length, with most consisting of three twenty-minute presentations and half an hour of questions. (Session 4 included four fifteen-minute case studies from around England.) These built towards an open discussion chaired by Tony Juniper of Natural England looking forward to the urgent changes needed to reverse the abuse inflicted on our chalk streams since the Second World War, to address the failures of water companies, regulators and Government in not enforcing existing statutory regulations and in seeking to remove those that remain. These discussions all mix wonder at natural beauty, horror at what we’ve done to it and hope at how to fix the mess we’ve all been complicit in.

Subscribe to access all eight ninety-minute podcasts, and download the conference programme, and the presentations’ slides as you listen along at our partner website https://ownedbyeveryone.org, where you can also read the statement issued on behalf of the attendees at the end of the conference, share stories from your own community action group, learn how you can make a difference yourself, and access a growing range of resources from our ever growing community of those who believe that a culture is no better than its rivers. You can also comment or get in touch with your ideas.