Lunchtime Talk: Rewilding the River Don - From an Open Sewer to a New Ecology?

A painting of a wooden bridge over water, with building and chimneys in the background. The sky is a yellowy blue, with smoke billowing from the chimneys.

Early morning on the River Don, Sheffield by Hayward Young in the early 1900s

Hear Professor Ian D. Rotherham discuss the tremendous changes he has witnessed in Sheffield’s rivers, in particular the Don, from nearly fifty years of study.

In various books and papers, Ian has described how the river Don has self-cleansed and undergone what he describes as ‘self-rewilding’, essentially changing from a dirty, polluted biologically dead sewer with raw sewage, mutant sticklebacks, and non-degradable detergent foam. This short presentation will look at the processes and aspects of the remarkable recovery.

Ian will explain how this is not merely a case of a recovery and the return to a past, sometimes mythical, ecology, but the emergence of a new ‘recombinant’ ecological system of native and non-native nature side-by-side; ideas formed with the late Dr Oliver Gilbert, a pioneer of urban ecology.

This talk forms part of the programme of events complementing the exhibition City of Rivers, which runs at Weston Park Museum until 3 November 2024.

For more information about Ian’s work please visit:

Blog https://ianswalkonthewildside.wordpress.com

Twitter @IanThewildside

Research website: https://www.ukeconet.org/