Not one clean river in England. Here is why we give back to the water.

New figures out this week make for hard reading for anyone who loves being on the water. The Environment Agency has published its first full health check of England''s rivers, lakes and coastal waters in six years, and the picture is bleak. Not a single body of water in the country is free of chemical pollution. Only 14 percent earned a good rating for ecological health.

If you spend your weekends on a river, or you live aboard, or you hire a boat once a year and remember it for the other fifty-one weeks, those numbers will sit with you. This is not an abstract environmental statistic. It is the water under your boat.

What the figures actually say

Two things are being measured, and it helps to separate them.

Chemical status looks for pollutants, including 'forever chemicals' and mercury, that spread through the atmosphere and settle everywhere. Because those substances are effectively everywhere, no water body in England passes. That is the headline, and it is true, but it is also a measure of a problem that no single river can escape on its own.

Ecological status is the more local picture: the fish, the invertebrates, the plant life, the flow and the physical condition of the channel. Here, 14 percent of waters rated good or better. The remaining 86 percent are held back by a mix of sewage discharge, agricultural run-off, road and urban drainage, and physical changes to rivers made long ago.

Why boaters notice first

People on the water see the changes before anyone else. The algal blooms and the smell after heavy rain when a storm overflow has been running. The stretches where the reeds and the fish have quietly gone. Boaters, anglers, paddlers and swimmers have been the ones reporting this for years, long before it became a national story.

That closeness is a kind of responsibility. If you take pleasure from a place, you have a stake in its condition.

What we do about it at BoatStays

We are a small business and we are not going to pretend this platform alone can fix England''s rivers. But we did decide, from day one, that we would not simply take from the waterways without putting something back.

Three percent of every booking on BoatStays goes to The Rivers Trust, the charity that does the catchment work: restoring habitat, monitoring water quality, and holding polluters to account with evidence. It is not a line we add at checkout and guests are not asked to opt in. It comes out of every single booking, whether the trip was two nights or two weeks. We are also grateful to the navigation authorities who do the unglamorous, essential work of locks, dredging, banks and towpaths on budgets that have been squeezed hard.

What you can do

• Report what you see. The Environment Agency incident hotline is 0800 80 70 60, and your local rivers trust will want to know too.
• Use pump-out and elsan facilities properly, every time. It matters more than it feels like it does.
• Support your local rivers trust or canal charity, with money or with time on a work party.
• Keep talking about it. Public attention is the reason this report exists at all.

Rivers recover. It has happened before, in this country, when enough people decided it mattered. It will take water companies, farmers, government and regulators all doing their part. It will also take the rest of us caring enough to keep asking.

BoatStays is a small business with a simple belief. If the waterways give us so much, the least we can do is give something back. That is why a share of every booking goes to protecting them, and why we will keep talking about it, this week and long after the headlines move on.