All we wanted was to protect the River Wye from pollution. Now we're stuck in a catch-22 | Oliver Bullough

To protect our local river we had to prove it was being used for swimming. But that, bizarrely, is the reason we were rejectedThe state of Britain's rivers is incredibly depressing: the water companies dump too much sewage, the farmers dump too much muck, and the regulators are too cowed and underfunded to do their job and stop them.It wasn't always this way. As a child I used to swim in the River Wye and I remember the clouds of mayflies in the summer, as well as huge leaping salmon. It was thanks to this wealth of wildlife that the Wye was classified as a special area of conservation along its whole length. Sadly, however, thanks to the failure of the Welsh and British governments to protect the river, much of this abundance is gone, and the Wye's official status is now "unfavourable - declining", thanks to pollution from manure and sewage.Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals Continue reading...