Despicable Powlesland and his evil volunteers evicted tonnes of rubbish without its consent.
The Environment Agency has told RollOnFriday it is receiving death threats after a barrister went public with its warning that he must stop cleaning up a polluted river.
Paul Powlesland of Garden Court Chambers led a team of volunteers to detoxify a stretch of the Aldersbrook in East London. The tributary feeds the River Roding and has long delighted the residents of Ilford with its bounty of trolleys, plastic bags, takeaway cartons and deflated footballs.
The barrister’s band worked for ten days and used a digger to remove sludge and rubbish from the waterway to unblock it, but he was sent a letter by the EA telling him to stop as he had no permit.
Powlesland responded on X that after “decades of ignoring rampant environmental crime” on the Roding, the EA had “finally decided to act”, though not against “Thames Water for illegally dumping billions of litres of sewage in the Roding, or the waste criminals who have dumped thousands of tonnes of rubbish on its banks, but against myself & a small volunteer charity for… restoring a river without a permit!”
The environmentalist barrister specialises in protest rights and climate change. He is also the founder of the River Roding Trust and the legal campaign group Lawyers for Nature.
Powlesland previously said he had been threatened with arrest for protesting King Charles with a blank piece of paper.
The barrister accused the EA of “malevolent uselessness” and said that when he asked it to clear the river, he was told it was “too dangerous”.
“We had to trespass, climb fences & scale ladders to remove the rubbish ourselves”, he said.
Powlesland’s crusade won over the Daily Mail, which amended its headline to refer to him as “well-meaning” instead of a “do-gooder” – but the EA has told RollOnFriday its staff have received death threats as a result of the publicity.
A spokesperson for the EA told ROF, “We never threatened to prosecute Powlesland or the River Roding Trust. We have told him we want to work with him. But the simple fact is you cannot simply turn up and start work without checks and balances, however well-meant the intention”.
They said EA staff have been sent “intimidating and abusive messages as a result of Powlesland’s media campaign and wider coverage”, including:
- “Why are you such dirty c***s that you’d go after a man for cleaning up a river? Kill yourselves. You all deserve death.”
- “Are you lot really that incompetent, or are you just stupid?”
- “What the flip are you doing trying to jail a man for cleaning up a river. You absolutely c***s”
- “You people are f**king disgusting. A man volunteers his time to clean his country and you f**king punish him. What a f**king joke you are.”
The EA said it had already warned the River Roding Trust about damage it caused to a flood defence in the area, and that its investigation found that the group’s direct action had damaged wildlife habitats and led to the spread of invasive species Japanese knotweed due to a failure to follow biosecurity protocols.
The EA spokesperson told ROF, “All these reasons are why permits are necessary. It’s not, as some would have you believe, about faceless jobsworths, red tape and process, but like the trust, we want to protect the environment as well”.
