Manpreet Kaur’s Reviews > Elegy For a River: Whiskers, Claws and Conservation’s Last, Wild Hope > Status Update

“Thanks to economic realities the four-decade long ecological nightmare unleashed by one rush of enthusiastic money-making, supported by misguided governmental policy, has yielded none of its intended benefits. Because we are determinedly not catching and selling crayfish.” I am feeling so so furious at the money making pricks who hurt the Earth

“We had invested two hundred man-hours and hundreds of pounds into a detailed set of results that demonstrated that a sunny day is brighter than a cloudy day, and both are brighter than the Zoology department.” 😂😂😅

As species get rarer and more iconic, the emotiveness of the surrounding human issues also increases. By the time you’re working on big cats, for example, conservation is hugely political and opinions plentiful and polarised. … some media outlets are willing to publish those attacks rather than to represent the complexity of the debate. Not much of any of that is helpful, either to humanity or to wildlife.

So let me get this straight: American mink were brought to Britain for their fur to feed fashion mania. Some escaped and became unfamiliar predators for water voles. Otters are ferocious things that kept the mink at bay but we managed to poison them by washing off pesticides into the rivers so now the mink hunt unhindered cool cool 😠

In sixty years between 1939 and 1998, 98.7 per cent of all British water voles vanished. And most of that happened in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Our best estimate is that Britain has been continuously occupied by water voles for at least 14,700 years, whereas humans have been continuously present for only 11,600”

“Everywhere there is water in mainland Britain it is natural to find a water vole living beside it.
They are a totem of our rivers”

“Because wildlife is incredibly important to me, and to many, many of us who feel that there should be somewhere and something in the world that humans don’t own. Because I think we should always leave space for the ‘other’, the special, the breathtakingly beautiful, the complicated and intricate.” 💜🥹

“And fieldwork is a goddess with a mean streak and a sense of humour.“

“A river is not a flow of water any more than I am a circulation of blood. A river is the rush and bustle of the life that water creates.”