Physics teacher’s sabbatical

As I contemplate spending next week with Peter Cunningham in Gairloch, who spends much of his time thinking about populations of wild salmon, sea trout and recently herring, I’m drawn to think about rivers and the impact we can have in ensuring a rich depth of biodiversity.

I first considered the idea of ‘rewilding‘ through contact with Pete Cairns, Executive Director of Scotland, the Big Picture. His movie Riverwoods seems like essential watching on this subject, and I must set aside time to both watch the film and get up to date on the information on his website.

Three important statements from this trailer that stuck out to me:

We really noticed a big decline, in that they’re (Salmon) hugely down and there’s no denying that. They’ve reduced by at least 70%…

The survival of salmon at sea is also linked to the conditions in fresh water. The surrounding land use has a huge effect on what happens in the river. We don’t look at the upper river catchment and think there should be trees, but there actually should be trees…

What we’ve done is turned the hills from a thatched roof into a slate roof. If we don’t get trees in the next few decades we’re going to lose salmon from over 300 km of river potentially.

It appears that Youtube has discovered my interests are spreading wider than Physics videos (though I confess I did spend too long yesterday trying to get my head around this one), as it’s algorithm has started pushing more environmental videos into my feed.

This one below particularly caught my attention. It relates to why trees are an essential part of the health of rivers.

I’ll confess, as a beginner chainsaw user, I was more inclined to watch because of the feature image. However as I watched it very much made sense that trees do naturally, over time, fall into rivers, and we should not be trying to clear them – they are essential to the process of increasing the biodiversity of the river and maintaining ecosystems.

Very recently, Scotland, the Big Picture released the film Why Not Scotland. You can watch the trailer here:

For me, the most important line from the trailer is this:

If we want to solve the climate crisis, we have also to solve the biodiversity crisis.

The climate crisis gets all the headlines. We normally think about it most in the summer, when it gets hot and when we see wildfires on the news etc., and it’s the thing we get most anxious about. But it goes hand in hand with the biodiversity crisis, which gets much less attention I think because we feel less affected by it. I’m learning that both are equally important.