There is a small park near my school. When I was seven, the park had old trees and broken benches. The grass was high. Last year, the council fixed the park. There are new benches. There are flowers. There are children every day. I like the new park. But I miss the old trees. They were big. Some are still there. I sit under them when the sun is hot. The park is different. It is good.
Around three hundred people gathered at the small lake near the village of Hadley on Sunday morning, to mark the return of fish to the water. The lake had been almost empty for fifteen years, after a small factory had let chemicals into the water in the 1990s.
The factory closed in 2010. A local group started cleaning the banks in 2012. Slowly, the water became clearer. In 2023, fish appeared again. "We thought it was finished," said Mrs Lin Hassan, who started the cleaning group. "We did not stop because we had hope. We did not stop because we did not have anything else to do for the place."
A scientist from the regional university spoke at the gathering. He said the lake is healthier but still small. The fish are back, but the old kinds may not come back. The work, he said, will continue. Children played at the edge of the water.
Around two hundred people gathered at the small lake near the village of Hadley on Sunday morning, to mark the return of fish to the water. The lake had been almost empty of fish for fifteen years, after a small chemical factory had let pollutants into the water in the 1990s.
The lake is part of a system of small lakes formed at the end of the last ice age. The water is fed mainly by springs from the surrounding hills, which makes it cold and clear in normal years. The pollution from the factory had killed most of the fish population by the early 2000s, and had affected the insects and plants that depended on the cleaner water of earlier decades.
The factory closed in 2010. A local group, led by Mrs Lin Hassan, a retired primary-school teacher, began cleaning the banks in 2012 and pressing the regional environment agency to test the water annually. "We thought we had finished," Mrs Hassan said. "We had not. We did not stop because we had hope; we kept going because we had become a group of people who came to the lake in spring."
Dr Anil Park, a freshwater ecologist at the regional university, said the recovery is real but partial. "Some of the species that lived here in 1990 are not back, and probably will not return naturally. Others that were never here have arrived. It is, in technical terms, a different lake. In ordinary terms, it is the same one — and it has fish." Children stood at the edge of the water with shoes in their hands. The work, Mrs Hassan said, would continue.
When approximately three hundred people gathered at the small lake near the village of Hadley on Sunday morning, to mark the return of fish to its waters, they did so at a place that had been, for the lifetime of every child present, primarily a quiet absence. The lake had been almost empty of fish for fifteen years, since the early 2000s, after a small chemical factory upstream had let pollutants into the water for most of the 1990s. The factory closed in 2010. The cleaning began in 2012. The first fish were observed by an amateur naturalist last spring; by Sunday morning, a healthy population had been confirmed by surveys carried out under a regional protocol.
The lake is part of a small system of water bodies formed at the end of the last ice age, fed mainly by springs from the surrounding hills. The water is, in normal years, cold and clear; the system has historically supported a particular community of fish, insects, and water plants, including two species that are now uncommon in the region. The pollution from the factory had killed most of the fish population by the early 2000s. It had also affected, in ways that are still being assessed, the invertebrate community on which the fish had depended.
The campaign to recover the lake began at a meeting in the village hall in 2012, with seventeen people present. It was led, for the next twelve years, by Mrs Lin Hassan, a retired primary-school teacher who had moved to Hadley with her husband in 1978. "We thought we had finished, several times," Mrs Hassan said. "We had not. We did not stop because we had hope; we kept going because we had become a group of people who came to the lake in spring."
The factory's parent company, which closed it in 2010, contributed to the cleaning costs in 2014 under a regional remediation framework. Its head of environmental policy, Mr David Reed, attended the gathering. "My company's predecessor companies caused this damage," he said. "It is right that we have funded the cleaning. It is also right to say that we should have funded it earlier, that the damage need not have happened, and that the village has been carrying a cost that it should not have had to carry."
Dr Anil Park, a freshwater ecologist at the regional university, said the recovery is real but partial. "Some of the species that lived here in 1990 are not back, and probably will not return naturally. Others that were never here have arrived. It is, in technical terms, a different lake. In ordinary terms, it is the same one — and it has fish."
Climate change is altering the spring flow into the system. Modelling suggests the lake will, in the long run, be smaller and warmer than it was in the twentieth century. The work, as Mrs Hassan put it, will continue. Children stood at the edge of the water with their shoes in their hands. The first fish of the day, when one was finally pointed out by a small boy, was already gone.
When approximately three hundred people gathered at the small lake near the village of Hadley on Sunday morning, to mark the return of fish to its waters, they did so at a place that had been, for the lifetime of every child present, primarily a quiet absence. The lake had been almost empty of fish for fifteen years, since the early 2000s, after a small chemical factory upstream had let pollutants into the water for most of the 1990s. The factory closed in 2010. The cleaning began in 2012. The first fish were observed by an amateur naturalist last spring; by Sunday morning, a healthy population had been confirmed by surveys carried out under a regional protocol. The morning was warm and lightly overcast, and the celebration was, on the whole, quiet, in the way that celebrations of slow recoveries tend to be — partly because slow recoveries do not produce the kind of dramatic event around which loud celebrations are organised, and partly because the people who have walked alongside such recoveries tend to bring to the moment of partial success a degree of attention that is not, on inspection, well-served by noise.
The lake is part of a small system of water bodies formed at the end of the last ice age, fed mainly by springs from the surrounding hills. The water is, in normal years, cold and clear; the system has historically supported a particular community of fish, insects, and water plants, including two species that are now uncommon in the region. The pollution from the factory had killed most of the fish population by the early 2000s. It had also affected, in ways that are still being assessed, the invertebrate community on which the fish had depended.
The campaign to recover the lake began at a meeting in the village hall in 2012, with seventeen people present. It was led, for the next twelve years, by Mrs Lin Hassan, a retired primary-school teacher who had moved to Hadley with her husband in 1978. "We thought we had finished, several times," Mrs Hassan said. "We had not. We did not stop because we had hope; we kept going because we had become a group of people who came to the lake in spring." The remark is honest in a way that campaigning rhetoric often is not. The campaigns that endure tend to be the ones whose participants discover, somewhere along the way, that the campaign has become the daily life of a community, and not only an instrument for changing it.
The factory's parent company, which closed it in 2010, contributed to the cleaning costs in 2014 under a regional remediation framework. Its head of environmental policy, Mr David Reed, attended the gathering. "My company's predecessor companies caused this damage," he said. "It is right that we have funded the cleaning. It is also right to say that we should have funded it earlier, that the damage need not have happened, and that the village has been carrying a cost that it should not have had to carry." The apology was, by the standards of public statements from chemical companies in this country, unusually direct. The article would prefer to register this without using the campaigners' difficulty in receiving it for narrative effect.
Dr Anil Park, a freshwater ecologist at the regional university, said the recovery is real but partial. "Some of the species that lived here in 1990 are not back, and probably will not return naturally. Others that were never here have arrived. It is, in technical terms, a different lake. In ordinary terms, it is the same one — and it has fish." The relevant literature has not, on the whole, settled on a vocabulary for distinguishing partial recovery from succession, and the absence of vocabulary is itself doing political work. Calling all such returns 'recoveries' tends to obscure what was lost; calling them 'replacements' tends to obscure what was won. The lake is, more accurately, somewhere between the two.
Climate change is altering the spring flow into the system. Modelling suggests the lake will, in the long run, be smaller and warmer than it was in the twentieth century. The work, as Mrs Hassan put it, will continue. Children stood at the edge of the water with their shoes in their hands. The first fish of the day, when one was finally pointed out by a small boy, was already gone. I am ending here, on the briefly visible fish and on the work that will continue, rather than on a more confident projection of what the next decade will produce, partly because the decade is, in the relevant respects, genuinely uncertain, and partly because the form of the news article has a long history of producing more confident projections than its underlying material supports.
What I am still working out, after twelve years of writing about ash trees in this magazine and others, is the relationship between the small piece I am about to file on the survival of a particular grove of mature ash near the village of Westwood — six trees, all over a hundred and forty years old, all of which have, against current expectations, shown only minor symptoms of the disease that has killed perhaps eighty per cent of the species in this country since 2012 — and the slow accumulation of pieces about ash dieback that my colleagues and I have produced in environmental magazines and Sunday newspapers since around the time the disease was first confirmed on these islands. The trees are still standing. The disease is still spreading. The grove may, on present indications, be a population with partial resistance; the relevant scientific assessment is conducted by a small team at the regional university and is, at the time of writing, still in progress. I will not be naming the precise location of the grove. The compromise I have arrived at with the team is sufficient for both their work and the piece; it is not, in either of our judgements, the kind of investigative reporting on the species's prospects that the species has, on the whole, not received.
The form into which the piece will be placed has been refined, over the last decade and a half, to a remarkable degree of accomplishment. There is a paragraph for the disease, a paragraph for the count of trees lost, a paragraph for the resistance hypothesis, a paragraph for the small action a reader might take, and a closing image — usually a single tree against an evening sky, sometimes a child looking up. I have produced versions of these paragraphs many times. I am producing one now, in a slightly different register, on a Thursday afternoon, in a small hotel room half a mile from the grove I will not be naming. The article will appear next month, in print and online. It will be the only piece most of its readers encounter this year about ash dieback. It will be in their picture of how the disease, the species, and the response to both are progressing, for at least the next several months. This is a serious responsibility, and the form into which the article must fit is not, on balance, designed to honour it.
The convention of the kind of essay I am writing now would produce a paragraph in which I describe what I would do differently, having recognised the limits of the form. I have one drafted. I am declining to use it, not because the limits are not real but because the redemptive paragraph is itself a recognisable feature of essays in this register. It would do its work; the reader and I would feel briefly that the essay had earned its weight; the trees would still be the trees, and the disease would still be the disease, and the team at the regional university would still be doing the slow work of looking, week by week, at six trees in a grove the magazine's readers will not be told the location of.
What the essay can do, and what I am trying to do here, is something narrower. It can hold open a question that the underlying news piece does not hold open. The question is whether the cumulative effect of fifteen years of well-intentioned ash-dieback reporting has shaped the public's expectation of what the species's recovery would look like — which is to say, whether the genre has produced a picture in which surviving stands of resistant trees are the natural ending of the story, when in fact the more accurate picture is that the species in this country will, at the population level, be reduced to a fraction of its former presence, that resistant strains are at best a partial and uncertain consolation, and that the form of the news piece has been, on the whole, less honest about this than it could have been. I think it has produced such a picture. I think the form has done its work, and that the work has not always been the work the writers thought they were doing.
A serious objection presents itself: that what I have just described is itself a sophisticated form of self-presentation, in which the writer claims credit for noticing the form's complicity while continuing, in subtly altered form, to do the form's work. I think the objection is correct. I think there is no version of this essay that escapes it. The most that can be said is that the essay that does not name the objection is doing the same work less honestly, and that the slight worsening of the writer's position relative to the reader, which the naming produces, is a price worth paying. The grove will be visited by a member of the research team next Tuesday. I will be filing the piece on Friday. The trees were already old before any of us were paying attention. They will, on present indications, be old after most of us have stopped.
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