From Sunday 24 August to the 24 September, Extinction Rebellion’s Dirty Water campaign is launching the World Water Wedding, with a range of actions for people to pledge their troth to protect rivers and water bodies across the country.
World Water Wedding: campaigners to pledge to protect UK rivers
Actions will range from hand-fastings and other commitment ceremonies on riverbanks, to direct action against water companies, other polluters, and authorities.
The campaign will build up into next year to a global day of action on World Water Day, 22 March 2026. People around the world will marry their local water sources in mass weddings and commit to their care for life.
Writer and campaigner Meg Avon from Bristol inspired the campaign. In 2023, she married the River Avon and took their name to raise awareness of the gruesome condition of the rivers. Like most water bodies in the UK, sewage, chemicals, and other pollution, is choking the Avon. This pollution is making water bodies unsafe for swimmers, watersports, and wildlife.
England has some of the filthiest rivers in Europe. Since Meg’s wedding, the state of the UK’s waterways has remained dire. Companies made an estimated 994,499 sewage discharges into rivers and other water bodies in 2024 – almost one discharge every 30 seconds. The amount of sewage entering the water has been increasing year after year. It rose to 60% in 2024, intensifying an ecological crisis that has been mounting for decades.
Water companies pumping out pollution and PR disinformation
The government and regulators legally allow water companies to discharge untreated wastewater through sewer overflows during periods of heavy rain. However, they have started to do so with alarming frequency and not only when raining. A 2025 study found that England’s major water and sewage companies have been misleading the public and government. Notably, the companies use duplicitous greenwashing and disinformation strategies which mirror those of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries.
Thousands of people fall sick in the UK each year after swimming, watersports, or other contact with polluted water. The broken water system has also resulted in contaminated drinking water. Moreover, polluted and ecologically barren water bodies are a significant cause of the biodiversity crisis, failing to provide a healthy habitat for plants, invertebrates, fish, birds, and mammals.
World water weddings symbolise peoples’ love for and lifelong commitment to protect their local water. They can be seen as part of the wider movement of campaigning for the rights of nature and shifting the dial towards a more equal partnership with and integration in our ecosystems.
Rights of the river
The River Ouse made history this year as the first river in the UK to be granted legal rights as a living entity with an intrinsic right to exist. In 2024, co-founder of Lawyers for Nature, Paul Powlesland, became the first juror to swear an oath on a vial of river water in court, declaring the river to be sacred.
On the first day of the World Water Weddings campaign, activists will get engaged to their chosen water, be it rain, river, lake, sea, or puddle. They will commit to marry it on World Water Day on the 22 March 2026. In Worthing, this will take the form of a water commitment ceremony on the beach. Campaigners will carry out similar events at waterside locations up and down the country.
At the end of August, the Red Rebel Brigade will gather on Westminster Bridge in London for a 21 metre banner drop over the Thames. The banner will carry the message “Stop polluting our rivers”. Bands will march from Tower Bridge to Thames Beach on the Southbank, drumming alongside a boat that will journey from Limehouse to parliament. On the beach, Sacred Earth will perform a ceremony of dedication to the river.
On World Rivers Day, the 28 September, campaigners will mark the end of the month of actions. They will come together for funerals, grieving, recommitment ceremonies, and non-violent direct actions.
Relationships with rivers: campaigners gear up for ‘unconventional wedding bliss’
Meg Avon, who married the River Avon in 2023, said:
As the UK’s first known river bride, I am so excited to no longer be alone in my role of unconventional wedding bliss! Having a wedding and becoming married to water is such a beautiful way of stepping forward as a guardian – it can be as public or personal as you want it to be. I believe that every ceremony is a story, and many ceremonies of similar intention have the power to change the law. We are becoming kin with our landscape and natural entities once again and the timing has never been more perfect.
61-year-old Denise Ashurst, from Cwmcarn in the Welsh Valleys, said:
I am regularly charmed by rain and dew, whenever walking with my dog in local woods. My face brushing dew from leaves, or listening to rain drumming my body as I walk below the trees make me feel open-hearted and full of love, so I’m committing to learning more about what makes this relationship work.
Ned Evans, a 60 year-old teacher from Holmfirth, said:
I have the most beautiful reservoirs near me in West Yorkshire which serve as vital water sources and are important for overwintering bird populations, including the protected red kite species. The reservoir levels are at a historic low for August, standing at 42.2% capacity, significantly below the usual range of 65% to 80% for this time of year, due to a prolonged drought and the driest spring and summer on record. As far as I know, this recent lack of rainfall is due to the climate emergency and increasing temperatures disrupting weather patterns, which likely means the levels will get lower each year and that leads to higher concentrations of impurities as the volume of water decreases. Water for me means life and I find it heartbreaking to see how much our pollution is damaging water and wildlife so I’ve decided to join the World Water Wedding campaign and commit to protect water. I’m going to hold a quiet personal ceremony by the edge of my nearest local reservoir, Winscar, on the 24th August and then send out my wedding invites to everyone I know to get dressed up and join me on World Water Day, Sunday 22nd March 2026, for a fun and joyous celebration of water.
Steve Conlon, 70, a retired IT Manager from Twickenham, said:
I have lived in a boat on the tidal Thames for nearly thirty years now and I love it, but discovering sewage pollution locally was very distressing. Becoming aware of the real scale of what was happening was heart-breaking. I have learned that critical water issues, from conservation, ecology, pollution, flooding and drought as well as corrupt utilities and ideology-fixated politicians, are interlinked. We need to pay attention to all of them together. This interdependence was addressed by Mark Lloyd, the chief executive of the Rivers Trust, who was quoted in the Guardian this week about our current water shortages, ‘We need to build more resilience into our rivers and their catchment areas with nature-based solutions at scale, such as healthy soils that allow water to filter into the ground and not rush off taking the soil with it; riverside tree planting to provide shade and further slow the flow of water; wetlands to store and slowly release water, and rewiggling streams to raise the water table and purify pollutants.’ If we attend properly to water throughout our environment, that is a true collective act of love, and an affirmation of life.
Featured image supplied
