In this International Year of the Salmon, Salmon and Trout Conservation asked Sir David Attenborough for his views on the need to protect all populations of wild salmon. The following video gives a very clear message to Governments across the Northern Hemisphere that they need to act now if we are not going to lose the ‘King of Fish’ forever!
Sadly, the member-dinosaurs of some of those Northern Hemisphere Goverments are much too busy arguing the finer points of nothing important except to the ego-lardy selves, ultimately fail dismally, then retire to a seat on some worthy fishy organization’s Committee, Steering Group or Board of Trustees, there to make to make noises like “It’s terrible, isn’t it? … Something just has to be done…”.
A great pity you that some of these high-profile, huge with words – tiny on deeds, ever-politicking fishing world people didn’t do that something in the very early 1990s, when the signs of decline were staring some very experienced salmon-fishers in the face but YOU ignored them (together with your formerly always dependable domestic waters), as your were too busy hitting the new Destination Trail to suddenly coming on-stream, far more prolific waters overseas. A little under thirty years of looking on and doing nothing and ignoring others’ quiet warning at home, that’s all it took to (largely) see off sub-Arctic latitudes Atlantic salmon.
What to do?
First, realise this: that no amount of “putting out more and more, bigger and bigger, more famous face- fronted, public PR flags” and holding swish fundraising dinners and auctions is going to change a thing – on the VITAL home turf ground, with its vital, know nothing and care less, non-Salmon Scene people, well away from the ailing rivers and failing seas. You have to remember that you, like everybody else in the non-Salmon Aware are very much part of the problem, that you have – as that old moaner and groaner Leonard Cohen once sang – “to change the system from within” – move away from crazy, your turn next, sub-Feydeau Farce, tribal warfare politics; go-for-growth-and-let-the-environment-tank coked-up Posh Boy economics, the way we all live on and treat a planet that we have given a terrible hammering in the past century or so, yet now still have the temerity to chorus (in our own case) “Where have all the salmon gone?”.
Physician, heal thyself.
Britain might finally be coming out of its long dream of “All is well with the world – on my little patch” but is “Completely going to the to hell in a handcart – just over THERE…”.
The great Sir David Attenborough is currently much in demand, it seems. Here he is voicing a new, short, campaigning cartoon for The Wildlife Trusts that employs the much-loved characters in a book known around the world, The Wind in Willows, written by Kenneth Grahame and first published in 1908, ostensibly about some bucolic, furry, little, Thames riverbank (I know them well) creatures and their problems with the ravening, modern world and future in the form of the suspected but unknown horror that lay just beyond the never-visited, dark and threatening Wild Wood just back from The River Bank and the irrepressible, new must-do thing / mania a minute, moneyed , monstrous yet still lovable Mr Toad who had just begun living in a Great Gatsby pile beside it.
We can only hope that the cartoon wakes more of the ancient from their long-held dreams of “All is well HERE, but over THERE!” and teach children to value and protect the wild world rather better than their recent ancestors did.
From the Wild Trusts YouTube page –
https://youtu.be/JZYcoeqzxVI
“…huge with words – tiny on deeds, ever-politicking fishing world people didn’t do that something in the very early 1990s, …”
So, what exactly did you do / are doing?