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Ministers lose appeal against Yorkshire anglers’ river pollution ruling

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Wednesday, April 2, 2025

A group of anglers trying to restore the ecosystem of a river have seen off a challenge by the environment secretary, Steve Reed, who claimed that cleaning up their waterway was administratively unworkable.Reed took an appeal against a group of anglers from North Yorkshire, who had won a legal case arguing that the government and the Environment Agency’s plans to clean up the Upper Costa Beck, a former trout stream devastated by sewage pollution and runoff, were so vague they were ineffectual.The environment secretary decided, after Labour won the election last year, to continue the challenge which had begun under the previous Conservative government.On Wednesday, the appeal court found in favour of the anglers, the Pickering Fishery Association.The judges dismissed Reed’s argument that it is administratively unworkable to develop specific measures to clean up individual rivers, lakes and streams as is required by law under the Water Framework Directive – legislation which aims to improve the quality of rivers, lakes and coastal waters.Andrew Kelton, solicitor from Fish Legal which represented the anglers, said: “This case goes to the heart of why the government has failed to make progress towards improving the health of rivers and lakes in England.“Only 16% of waterbodies – 14% of rivers – are currently achieving ‘good ecological status’, with no improvement for at least a decade, which comes as no surprise to us having seen how the Environment Agency at first proposed, but then for some reason failed to follow through with, the tough action needed against polluters in this case.”He said the Upper Costa Beck was just one of 4,929 waterbodies, but was a case study in regulatory inaction in the face of evidence of declining river health.The Costa Beck is failing to achieve good ecological status under the Water Framework Directive regulations partly because of sewage pollution and runoff from farms.The anglers, who have spent more than 10 years trying to get the authorities to clean up the river, took the government and the EA to court in an attempt to force action. They successfully argued that the plan by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the EA to improve the stream lacked the legally required measures necessary to restore it – for example, it did not include the tightening of discharge permits for sewage treatment works.The judge in the high court found that the government had unlawfully failed to assess and identify specific measures to achieve the legally mandatory targets for the waterbody. That ruling was on Wednesday upheld by the appeal court.Penelope Gane, head of practice at Fish Legal, said Reed could now show a real commitment to restoring rivers and lakes.“What we need is meaningful action to clean up rivers,” she said. “Anything short of that will be a tacit admission that the government has abandoned its environmental ambitions for water.”Defra have been approached for comment.

Appeal court finds in favour of Pickering Fishery Association members who wanted river to be cleanedA group of anglers trying to restore the ecosystem of a river have seen off a challenge by the environment secretary, Steve Reed, who claimed that cleaning up their waterway was administratively unworkable.Reed took an appeal against a group of anglers from North Yorkshire, who had won a legal case arguing that the government and the Environment Agency’s plans to clean up the Upper Costa Beck, a former trout stream devastated by sewage pollution and runoff, were so vague they were ineffectual. Continue reading...

Reed took an appeal against a group of anglers from North Yorkshire, who had won a legal case arguing that the government and the Environment Agency’s plans to clean up the Upper Costa Beck, a former trout stream devastated by sewage pollution and runoff, were so vague they were ineffectual.

The environment secretary decided, after Labour won the election last year, to continue the challenge which had begun under the previous Conservative government.

On Wednesday, the appeal court found in favour of the anglers, the Pickering Fishery Association.

The judges dismissed Reed’s argument that it is administratively unworkable to develop specific measures to clean up individual rivers, lakes and streams as is required by law under the Water Framework Directive – legislation which aims to improve the quality of rivers, lakes and coastal waters.

Andrew Kelton, solicitor from Fish Legal which represented the anglers, said: “This case goes to the heart of why the government has failed to make progress towards improving the health of rivers and lakes in England.

“Only 16% of waterbodies – 14% of rivers – are currently achieving ‘good ecological status’, with no improvement for at least a decade, which comes as no surprise to us having seen how the Environment Agency at first proposed, but then for some reason failed to follow through with, the tough action needed against polluters in this case.”

He said the Upper Costa Beck was just one of 4,929 waterbodies, but was a case study in regulatory inaction in the face of evidence of declining river health.

The Costa Beck is failing to achieve good ecological status under the Water Framework Directive regulations partly because of sewage pollution and runoff from farms.

The anglers, who have spent more than 10 years trying to get the authorities to clean up the river, took the government and the EA to court in an attempt to force action. They successfully argued that the plan by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the EA to improve the stream lacked the legally required measures necessary to restore it – for example, it did not include the tightening of discharge permits for sewage treatment works.

The judge in the high court found that the government had unlawfully failed to assess and identify specific measures to achieve the legally mandatory targets for the waterbody. That ruling was on Wednesday upheld by the appeal court.

Penelope Gane, head of practice at Fish Legal, said Reed could now show a real commitment to restoring rivers and lakes.

“What we need is meaningful action to clean up rivers,” she said. “Anything short of that will be a tacit admission that the government has abandoned its environmental ambitions for water.”

Defra have been approached for comment.

Read the full story here.

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Supreme Court justices consider reviving industry bid to ax California clean car rule

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The Environmental Protection Agency plans to fire or reassign more than 450 staffers working on environmental justice issues, it said Tuesday.Why it matters: The large-scale changes could effectively end much of the EPA's work tackling pollution in historically disadvantaged communities.It's part of the Trump administration's effort to vastly shrink the federal workforce. EPA has around 15,000 employees.Driving the news: EPA notified roughly 280 employees that they will be fired in a "reduction in force." Another 175 who perform "statutory functions" will be reassigned.The employees come from the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and EPA regional offices."EPA is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency," a spokesperson said.Between the lines: The firings will likely see challenges from congressional Democrats and the employees themselves.EPA had previously put many environmental justice staffers on administrative leave.Administrator Lee Zeldin, during a Monday news conference, defended the agency's broader efforts to cut environmental justice grant programs, arguing the money is ill-spent."The problem is that, in the name of environmental justice, a dollar will get secured and not get spent on remediating that environmental issue," he said.

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The Polluting Paper Mill That Helped Inspire the First Earth Day

Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes grew up in Camas, Washington, surrounded by natural beauty and unchecked pollution. The post The Polluting Paper Mill That Helped Inspire the First Earth Day appeared first on The Revelator.

Every day drivers head north on Route 205 out of Portland, Oregon, cross the mighty Columbia River and the state line, and arrive in Washington. Many of them will immediately head east, where on a clear day they’ll soon see snow-capped Mt. Hood looming over Highway 14. Also known as the Lewis & Clark Highway, this busy road will take them toward the suburban cities of Camas and Washougal. But as they arrive in Camas and cross a narrow bridge, something else will loom over the scenic view: an enormous paper mill on the river’s edge. That paper mill, which at one point processed hundreds of tons a day, has been a defining element of Camas for more than a century. The town grew up around it. Residents walked down the hill to work there and sent their kids up the hill to go to school, where the local basketball team is still called the Papermakers (complete with a mascot, the Mean Machine, that looks like an anthropomorphic paper press). A portion of the mill in downtown Camas. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator Today the mill, now owned by Koch Industries, is a shadow of its former self. Relatively few people still work there. Much of the 660-acre property lies fallow. But its legacy lives on — in the history and pride of Camas, in the minds of its residents, and in the soil and water, which many people worry carry the burden of generations of pollution. And although few realize it, the paper mill’s legacy also exists on the national stage. In many ways it inspired the first Earth Day. Famed environmental advocate Denis Hayes coordinated the first national Earth Day in 1970. He later founded the Earth Day Network and became a leader in solar power and energy policy. But before that he grew up in Camas, which at the time had an occasionally noxious reputation. “If you talked to someone in Portland and mentioned Camas, universally the response was, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where the stink comes from,’ ” Hayes, now 80, recalled during a recent Zoom presentation to an in-person audience at the Camas Public Library. “The whole region was known for the stink of this uncontrolled paper mill.” The stink came from “vast quantities of uncontrolled sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide” emitted by the mill. Those pollutants came back down in the form of acid rain — and as Hayes noted, it rains quite a bit in the Pacific Northwest. Hayes speaking to Camas residents over Zoom. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator The effect was immediately visible in town, where the roofs of cars corroded under the acidic onslaught. “People began to ask, well, if it’s doing that to my car, what’s it doing to me,” Hayes said. “The answer, with regards to the automobiles, was that instead of reducing the pollution, they put a shower at the end of the parking lot” to rinse cars before they drove home. Wildlife was affected, too. “Every now and then you’d go down to the Columbia River slough and find scores of dead fish, in some cases hundreds of dead fish, just floating there,” Hayes said. Camas had its good sides, of course. “What I did have growing up was the ability to walk through some of the most magnificent forests on Earth and to ride my bicycle down through the Columbia River Gorge and the spectacular scenery,” Hayes recalled. But even there the paper mill took a toll. “You’d go out in the forest and go hiking in the summer, in these astonishingly beautiful Douglas fir forests, and then two years later you go back there and it is almost clearcut. There was this catastrophic approach to clearing out natural resources.” The beauty and the destruction “came together and sort of made me think, not too profoundly, that it must be possible to make paper without destroying the planet,” he said. Camas was just one of Hayes’ influences, and Hayes was one of many people behind the first Earth Day and the environmental successes that followed. But what followed remains significant. “The context then was one where we were pretty highly motivated to try to get some kinds of regulations someplace,” Hayes recalled. “This is not a personal accomplishment. There were a huge number of things that were involved in this, including the presidential aspirations of a senator named Ed Muskie.” Posters about Hayes and the first Earth Day at Camas Public Library. Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator After the first Earth Day, the organizers — who had formed a nonprofit called Environmental Action — launched what they called “the Dirty Dozen” campaign targeting congressional representatives with bad records on environmental issues. “We tried to take out several of the worst members of Congress, and we successfully defeated seven of 12 incumbents,” Hayes said. “It is really, really hard to beat an incumbent member of Congress. And we managed to take out seven of 12. And it was clear that we were the margin of a victory in each of those cases.” Among the defeated politicians was Rep. George Fallon. “At that time Fallon was the chairman of the House Public Works Committee. If you wanted to have a federal building, you wanted to have a prison, a courthouse, a dam, any kind of public work in your district anywhere across the country, you had to have the permission of the guy who chaired that committee. When we took out George Fallon, clearly with an environmental campaign, that absolutely transformed the House of Representatives.” One month after that election, Muskie helped introduce what would become the Clean Air Act. “And the Clean Air Act passed the Senate on a voice vote and passed the House of Representatives 434 to 1. There was one member of both Houses of the American Congress that voted against the Clean Air Act. Something that would have been inconceivable in 1969 became unstoppable in 1970,” Hayes said. “Those are the kinds of magic moments that can happen in a democracy where everything, just like a school of fish is going in this direction and suddenly it goes in a different direction,” he continued. “It was my thrill to have been part of a handful of those occasions.” A new generation of Camas residents — in fact, multiple generations — has taken the lesson of the first Earth Day to heart. Several residents recently came together to form the Camas Earth Day Society, which organized Hayes’ talk at the local library and is working toward a sustainable future in their home town. They’ve worked with local students, many of whom asked Hayes questions during the event. The organization has also held an art show, organized a native pollinator display, and raised awareness of clean air and water issues in Camas. They have ambitious dreams that boil down to a simple truth, both in Camas and around the world: Everyone can make a difference. Fifty-five years after the first Earth Day, the future of environmental protection has darkened once again. The Trump administration has enabled corporate polluters, slashed climate programs and budgets, and seeks to slash and burn practically all environmental regulations. But the crowd that gathered earlier this month at the Camas library — people young and old — came together despite those threats, ready to talk about solar power, protecting native plants, improving water quality, reducing pollution, and mobilizing for the future. More than one T-shirt that night read “Earth Day Is Every Day” — a sign that the seeds of that first day continue to sprout. Previously in The Revelator: Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife The post The Polluting Paper Mill That Helped Inspire the First Earth Day appeared first on The Revelator.

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Ministers lose appeal against Yorkshire anglers’ river pollution ruling

Related News

Supreme Court justices consider reviving industry bid to ax California clean car rule

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sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

Ministers lose appeal against Yorkshire anglers’ river pollution ruling

Related News

Supreme Court justices consider reviving industry bid to ax California clean car rule

EPA fires or reassigns hundreds of staffers

EPA firing 280 staffers who fought pollution in overburdened neighborhoods

The Polluting Paper Mill That Helped Inspire the First Earth Day

New Clues From Penguins Warn of a Global Mercury Crisis

Suggested Viewing

This Mortal Plastik

Precarious

Waters of the U.S.

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Join us to forgea sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Join us to forge
a sustainable future