INTERVIEW: Jeremy Wade travels deeper into the river on new series
Photo: Jeremy Wade fishes on the Danube River outside Kelheim, Germany, on the new TV series Mighty Rivers. Photo courtesy of Animal Planet / Provided by Animal Planet with permission.
TV host Jeremy Wade is one of the most recognizable reality television stars in history, and now he’s back on television doing what he does best: navigating the rivers of the world. Wade’s successful program River Monsters finished its multi-year run last year, and this Sunday, April 8 at 9 p.m. on Animal Planet, he returns for Jeremy Wade’s Mighty Rivers.
The new series delves deeper into not only the creatures in the world’s most famous rivers but also the ecological challenges each habitat faces. Wade explores pollution, development, dams and overfishing, all while plying the waters of the Amazon, Ganges, Yangtze, Mississippi, Danube and Zambezi.
“I think the genesis really was because if you go back beyond the beginning of River Monsters, which was now sort of 10 years ago, I’ve actually spent the last 35 years traveling to different rivers around the world,” Wade said in a recent phone interview. “My interests were primarily as an angler. I just wanted to catch interesting fish, and more recently I wanted to show them on the TV. A lot of people haven’t seen these animals, but while I’m doing this, I’m not only fishing. I’m also talking to people who live beside the river. I’ll always hunt out the old fisherman wherever I go, and the picture that I’m getting very much is that the large fish are very scarce compared to what they used to be. It’s happened in the last 100 years or so.”
As Wade waded into the waters for River Monsters, the TV host would notice that he was only catching these large specimens in the tributaries and branches off the main river. Many of the catches actually came from protected areas, i.e. the main stem of the river was somewhat depleted of natural resources.
“The fish are getting very scarce,” he said. “Now the obvious follow-up question is, so what? How does this affect anybody apart from me and people who are so lucky enough to go fish in these places? My other hat is as a biologist. I used to be a biology teacher, and the thing about these big fish is they are all apex predators. They’re all right at the top of the food pyramid, and basically if you find the apex predator in a body of water, then you can sort of assume everything else is all right. All the medium-sized fish are there. The little fish, the little bugs and plankton, they’re all there as well, so they’re like an indicator of the overall health of the river. But if they’re not there, that is cause for concern. That suggests there’s a problem.”
Wade said the oceans of the world often receive the headlines for their ecological degradation. In many ways that’s because the oceans are more accessible, whereas the rivers he explores are often in faraway locales that are difficult to reach.
Stories of these river monsters and the depleting resources are essentially passed down through oral tradition, and that makes Wade’s project have a sense of urgency — to document, to believe, to show the wider world what’s happening.
“A lot of what has been going on there is very much an oral history,” he said. “It’s there in the mind of these old fishermen, but it hasn’t been documented. So in a sense it’s a fairly unique data set that I’ve picked up myself, and it’s quite fragmentary. But it’s a disturbing picture, so it was really a case of this needs looking into.”
At first, Wade thought the likely culprit for the struggles of these rivers was overfishing. That is a factor, he reported, but the engineering of the waterways, including dams, and pollution are also to blame.
Beyond pointing the fingers, Wade hopes Mighty Rivers will instill in the viewers a sense of purpose and ownership.
“What does it matter if rivers in the 21st century just basically become drains?” he asked. “What does it really matter? Again biologist hat on, we are all water-based life forms. People think in terms of the water cycle. The river runs to the sea. The water evaporates to form clouds, and it causes rains. And it goes round and round, but actually what that’s begetting is that [the] water cycle flows through every single one of us as well. So we all have a vested interest given the state of the world’s water, the world’s rivers. We’re all part of those rivers, so I think it’s time that we had a really good look at what’s happening. Is there a problem? If so, what can we do about it?”
The selection of the rivers was a careful process. Wade and his team wanted to cast a large geographical net, so most of the inhabited continents are accounted for. The U.S. has the Mississippi on the list (although the Colorado was a serious contender). Asia has the Ganges and Yangtze (although the Mekong was considered). Africa has the Zambezi (although the Nile would have been an interesting choice).
“We wanted to speak global, so we wanted to be spread around the world, all the different continents,” he said. “I was particularly keen [and] excited to go to China because that’s one place I hadn’t been to because we’d never made any River Monsters episode there because quite frankly I wasn’t go to catch anything, so I had never been to China. Now was my chance, and I think the Yangtze is the obvious river there.”
Wade was familiar with the Ganges in India, especially its upper reaches in the Himalayas, but he wanted to look at the totality of this spiritual waterway. He called that episode a “portrait” of the entire river.
“Possibly the obvious one people would choose in Africa might be the Nile, but we have a real logistics problem here,” Wade said. “Each shoot was going to be about three weeks. It was a really tough challenge to just plan this. How on earth do you cover a river with all the traveling that’s involved in the space of three weeks? It’s going to boil down to four locations or something, so we’re thinking in terms of what’s doable as well.”
The Amazon made the list because Wade could then set up camp in Brazil, and he speaks Portuguese fairly fluently.
“Where possible it’s always nice to be talking directly to people rather than having it go via an interpreter, which slows things down,” he said. “So, yeah, it was quite nice to look at a map of the world and have a bit of a discussion.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Jeremy Wades’ Mighty Rivers premieres Sunday, April 8 at 9 p.m. on Animal Planet. Click here for more information.
