There are certain things that we shouldn’t do. Things that grown adults in a civilized society shouldn’t partake in.
We shouldn’t drive recklessly through school zones and residential neighborhoods. We shouldn’t wake the neighbors with loud music at three in the morning. We shouldn’t loot and pillage small business owners.
And, according to the United Kingdom Environment Agency, we should absolutely, without a doubt, never, ever clean out polluted rivers.
This last one requires a little explaining, I think.
According to the British newspaper, The Guardian, environmental lawyer Paul Powelsland organized a team of volunteers to spend ten days in February cleaning up the garbage and waste in a section of the River Roding in rural Essex, England.
All told, they removed 200 bags of garbage, branches, weeds, and silt. That’s the runny, muddy stuff at the bottom of a river or lake that you step in and hope it’s not hiding anything icky.
The Environment Agency (EA) was so impressed that regular citizens would use their own time and money to do this, they thanked Powelsland and his volunteers for making their little corner of the world a better place, and gave them each a free Starbucks gift card.
I’m kidding. They sent Powlesland a letter that said he was being investigated for illegally intervening without a permit.
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In other words, "You did our job for us, and that’s against the rules. We have more rules about removing garbage, and you’re in trouble for breaking them as well."
According to the EA, Powelsland has dredged silt with a heavy digger and left waste within the floodplain, which creates a further flood risk. And worst of all, he did it without a permit.
Meanwhile, Powelsland says this is all so much bull silt. He lives on a boat on the river and has asked the EA many times to clean up the river, but they have done nothing about it. So he took matters into his own hands, and this is what they’ve gotten upset about.
"After decades of ignoring rampant environmental crime on the Roding, the Environment Agency has finally decided to act," he told the Guardian. However, they’re not taking any action against Thames Water "for dumping billions of litres of sewage" or any of the "waste criminals who have dumped thousands of tonnes of rubbish on its banks."
"Waste criminal" sounds like what they charged Arlo Guthrie with in "Alice’s Restaurant."
So, EA says they have rules protecting their garbage, but Powelsland broke those rules by stealing their garbage that was supposed to stay in place until EA decided to do something, which was apparently never. Powelsland said that since the cleanup wasn’t going to happen any time soon, he took matters into his own hands, and now the Environment Agency is upset that someone did the right thing without a permit.
EA also said in their letter that, "The site is currently under investigation for permitting and waste offenses." I don’t know if that’s typical government passive voice writing, where they say they’re doing something without actually saying it. Or were they already carrying out their own investigations, and Powelsland just screwed it all up?
Like, did Powelsland jump the gun on a months-long undercover sting and cause more harm than good? Like those cop movies where one set of cops accidentally stumbles into an undercover operation and blows hundreds of hours of solid police work and puts lives at risk?
You’re a loose cannon, Powelsland, and I’m taking you off the case!
Also, says The Guardian, organized crime likes to dump waste illegally along the Roding — not like disorganized, messy crime, which can’t even clean up its own house — where it flows into a tributary of the river. So the EA has supposedly been investigating the dumping nearby.
But along comes Powelsland and his volunteers, like a bunch of garbage rookies, and they wreck the investigation, blow hundreds of hours of solid bureaucrat work, putting years of inaction at risk. Then, the EA took a swig of cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup and said they were getting too old for this silt.
Despite their best efforts to do nothing, EA hasn’t put Powlesland off doing good work. He has said he would be happy to work with the agency and to let it know their plans so the EA could alert them to things like water mains or rare habitats.
"We have asked them repeatedly to do this clearance work," Powlesland said. "This ten days was part of our volunteer work over the last five years cleaning up the river, which is the EA’s job."
Powlesland announced at the end of June that EA had dropped all its charges, probably because they realized it was a bad idea to prosecute someone who was actually doing more good than they were.
Now the rest of the government is worried. If people realize they don’t actually need the more useless parts of the government, they’re going to take all kinds of problems into their own hands, and then where would we be?
Photo credit: Thewub (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 4.0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.